February is Maya’s month, at least for us. And this year marks the third year of her birth. To mark the occasion, we’re celebrating her birthday here in the US for the first time with a few close friends. I wanted to do something more to mark the occasion. So, I put together this video that captures some of the highlights of the past year of her life.
Happy Birthday sunshine, the song in our hearts and the smile on our faces. Happy Birthday Maya.
If its November, this must be Hawaii. Like whales and swallows migrating south in winter, we seem to head to Hawaii, come November, at least the past few years. This is certainly not consciously premeditated.
The last time we visited Hawaii, it was to the island of O’ahu, “The Gathering Place”. This year too, we’ve come to O’ahu. After years of skipping O’ahu if only because it was home to Waikiki and Honolulu, we finally came two years ago because it was the only island we could visit without changing planes or paying a king’s ransom. Maya was nine months old then and on her first plane ride. By making a long journey even longer with connecting flights and a layover, we didn’t want to risk starting our journeys with her on a discordant note. We discovered Kailua then and fell in love with the island. When Shanthala wanted to come to Hawaii with her brother, who was visiting us for a couple of weeks, we naturally chose O’ahu again. The backdrop of Ko’olau mountains with their serrated Pali and the long, uncrowded Kailua Beach with its gentle waters and shallow shoreline make for some remarkable memories.
Maya is two years older now than when we came last. What a story the pictures tell, of now and then.
And here is a video of Maya thoroughly enjoying herself at Kailua Beach.
This entry also marks my 250th posting on this blog. I started blogging to keep distant family and friends abreast of events in our life and only distantly as a way to practise writing. Since then, the blog has evolved into primarily a venue for my writing and less about the events of our life. It is therefore an interesting coincidence that this 250th post harks back to the original intent. I hope my readers have had some measure of the satisfaction that I’ve had in writing.
P.S: I rewrote this posting because I found the original too hackneyed and pretentious. I have had little undisturbed time these past few weeks, for some reason, and so my writing has suffered, I fear. This last post was the pits. I had to rewrite it. It couldn’t be the one to mark my 250th post.
P.P.S: When Shanthala and I were making up a list of ten movies we wanted to see, a movie that didn’t make the list but whose title stayed in my mind for some unknown reason was “If its Tuesday, This Must be Belgium”. I also strangely and for some unknown reason remember the heroine’s name, Suzanne Pleshette. I still haven’t seen the movie. I don’t even know what its about. I haven’t seen a picture of Suzanne Pleshette either.
My father asked me to host some recent videos of Maya, especially after I told him of some new adventure of hers. The ask then turned to demand, and then to plead, to beg. Finally, he gave up and stopped asking, probably chalking my response as one more in a long line of civil disobedience. But disobedience is just another term for doing things at your pace than at someone else’s. So, dear dad, here is a trifecta of videos of Maya from the past few months. I know that this is too small to satisfy your hunger to see Maya in action. To satiate you, nay to make a glutton out of you, we’ll see you soon.
This first one is the oldest, taken a few months back. Maya and I would go to a local pool every Tuesday with another friend and his daughter who was roughly the same age as Maya. Maya discovered the fun of the pool slide on the very first day and couldn’t get enough of it. She didn’t get scared even when she ended up completely underwater.
This one is taken a few days back, when Shanthala got Maya a scooter. Maya and I went to a nearby park the next day and this is a video of her on the way.
This final one is of Maya reading Old McDonald Had a Farm wearing her ladybug Halloween costume.
Billy Joel’s Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel) was one of Maya’s favorites even when she was just a few weeks old. When she was hardly three months old, she hummed the entire song, accompanying me as I sang to her (the video is about three minutes long).
As she started to speak, she has developed a rather mellifluous, sing song voice that sounds delightful (at least to her family and friends). And of late, she’s resumed her accompaniment to songs. One jetlagged night in India, Maya was listening to Genesis’ “Hold On My Heart” playing on my laptop while I was occupied in another room. At 4 am in the morning, I heard her suddenly go “Ahhh be they” in synchronicity to Phil Collins’ singing “I will be there”. Since that night, she’s started humming to other songs, her favorite being “Soul Meets Body” by that strangely named group, Death Cab For Cutie. She loves to lip synch the “Para Para Pa Pa” piece of the song as well as the repetition of the chorus of the title, “Where soul meets body”.
Among the many children’s books that one of our close friends gave us (books their kids had grown past) was a nursery rhyme book. Maya loved hearing us recite the rhymes, demanding us to do so endlessly. Last October, she christened the book, “Baa, Baa, Bashee” in honor of the first poem “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”.
In the last couple of weeks, she has started to recite most of the rhymes in the book in her own funny way. As we recite each rhyme, she recites the rhyme with us, speaking the first and last word of each line clearly and filling in the space between them with sounds that she passes off as words. Very particular about the order in which the rhymes are recited – they must be recited in the order they’re in the book – she protests if we mixup the order and frowns if we refer to the book to correct the order. Here is a video that I took about two weeks ago of her reciting a few of the rhymes with her mother.
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Maya cruised past her 19th month birthday last week. She is 34.5 inches tall and weighs 27.25 lbs, numbers that put her in the 97-98th percentile for height and 75-80th percentile for weight. The smile that lit up her face when she was a month old continues to be one of her prominent characteristics. She’s still an exuberant child, delighting herself with the wonders that surround her and delighting us with her ebullience.
She was quite a talker, even as a two month old baby. Now, she is a riot. She speaks complete sentences, with intonations and pauses, question marks, commas and full stops. All in a language all her own. She has a vocabulary of about 10-13 words that we can understand. Words such as mama, papa, nana (for the nanny and banana), ajji, akka, ka ka (for crow), ana (for ane, elephant), ami (for turtle), anna (rice), bow-wow (for dog), car, amma, mum-mum (for food) and kaka (for poop). As a true Californian, the very first legible word she spoke which she used precisely and every time was agua (Spanish for water). It was not Kannada (our mother tongue) or English, but a Spanish word that she spoke first and no, it was not mama or papa.
But she doesn’t let her limited vocabulary of the adult world limit her from expressing herself with words from her baby world. As someone who enjoys her silence, Shanthala is partly terrified that as Maya gets older, Maya and I will be talking so much that she will have to seek asylum from the constant chatter that will be a hallmark of this household.
A small taste of what our daily world is like with Maya is shown in this video where Maya proceeds to talk on the phone, sing a ditty, applauds her own efforts and say a few of the words that we understand such as ajji, nana and akka.
