Puddi's Report Card

I realise a lot of recent posts have been about Chubbocks so I want to redress the balance a little bit. She's been doing a lot of growing up too in the past few weeks. Actually, every minute spent with her is such a delight that it always feels like weekends and evenings are too short.

She has been learning to speak at an amazing pace. I was trying to remember when she actually started talking. I guess she has been communicating through a single word for quite some time now, but she is now at the sentence forming stage. She absorbs everything we tell her, and we can see the little microprocessor chip working at warp speed each time she sees or does something new.

At mom's house last week, she spotted a bowl of flower petals and leapt to the conclusion that it must be a religious object, since we usually keep flower petals ready next to the mandir. Having bowed and genuflected several times in 'Jota', she then grabbed at the bowl, "Gimme this". Last week she had trotted out one of Chubbocks's story books in the morning when we were all riding the early-morning-get-ready rollercoaster. "Kahani Shunai" ( tell me a story), she asks plaintively. Then, on getting no attention from anyone, she flips open the first page and starts off, "One day..." In the evenings, she too has started demanding her share of stories at bedtime. She always wants Kannada stories then, "Ondooyalli...in a town".

She has passed the toddler stage of falling about when she walks and now can never just walk from one place to the other. She either runs at top speed, blindly dashing into multifarious objects enroute, or walks swaying from side to side, for the sheer fun of it.

She has developed a sense of humour and has learned to tease. She loves water and grabs any glass of water she can lay her hands on. Then she'll sidle up to me and threaten to spill it on the sofa, watching me from the side of her eyes to see if I react. She makes potty faces - you know, face tight and straining, reddening. Then when I ask her, "Have you done potty?" since we're trying to toilet-train her, she says with an earsplitting grin, "Nahi, gas choda!"

She has finally agreed and deigned to kiss me and A too, not just Chubbocks. She lands a big, wet smackeroo but only on demand and then too, only when Her Imperiousness feels like it.

In imitation of Chubbocks, her other passion apart from reading is drawing. She catches hold of any pen, pencil, sketch pen or crayon, God knows from where, picks out pieces of paper from the stash I bring home for Chubs, and spends ages poring over it, holding her pencil correctly between index finger and thumb, sticking her tongue out, doing her 'drawing'. As yet she doesn't understand how to put pressure on the pen so all we see are faint marks on the paper, but she's as proud as a peacock, and insistently tells us, "See this. Mamma see me."

Honestly, I would never have understood how these simple things make us feel and how the littlest thing kids do can add magic to an ordinary day if I hadn't had kids of my own. Thank you God for giving me kids, and for giving me Chubs and Puddi as my kids!