Niece

N just turned one on Dec. 9. She toddles around a lot now. She mimics sounds and simple actions like clapping and putting a cell phone to the ear (and so it begins..). She’s grown so much from when I last saw her at 3 months, but isn’t at all as big as she seems in pictures. She is the splitting image of R and M.

 I cannot help but sound matter-of-fact when discussing N because I am unable to find a way to adequately describe the presence of a child. See, I’m not one of those people whose ovaries flutter at the mention of say, baby lotion. My ovaries, in fact, are unusually impervious to baby talk of any kind, and I almost never get the urge to procreate. Baby pictures do not move this stone heart of mine, nor do videos of babies bobbing wildly to the theme song of Jack’s Big Music Show. But there is something about actually having a baby around (and also, perhaps not being the one who has to do all the feeding, bottle-sterilizing and diaper-changing) that has made me vaguely fantasize about my own spawn.

 It might be her voice as she coos in excitement at the discovery of her belly-button. Her giggling at her mother’s exaggerated laughter. Her wobbly gait from room to room as she explores the home in which she’s growing up so quickly. But I think the thing that gets you most of all is when a child comes up to you and looks at you imploringly with her arms outstretched, wanting you to pick her up. This total dependence, while probably very hard on the parent that has to devote every hour of the day attending to the child’s every need at the expense of his or her own, can be intoxicating to visitors like me. This child actually needs and wants my attention! I don’t really have to do much but I am needed and my attention is wanted. I want to attribute some of this to how much of a lonely pathetic loser I am sometimes, but I think most of us have a primal urge to be needed.

 N needs to be engaged. Every. Waking. Minute. At any given point in time, N has at least one adult reducing his or herself to a human generator of animal sounds. The animal sound generator stops only to tell N to take a potentially lethal object from the crevices of the sofa out of her mouth. And then gets right back to squawking like Bongo bird next second. 

 But how will I squawk, breast-feed, lull to sleep, pull the loaded guns out of my child’s mouth and manage to dress myself and shower all at the same time?

 

Winter Trip to Colorado

We spent the winter break at M’s sister R’s place in Louisville, CO. The original plan last December was for all of us (M and I, our parents, R and family, my brother and Peter Pettigrew (he invited himself so it was awkward to refuse)) to fly to Chennai last December. That way we would get away from it all (i.e. winter) and conduct M’s father’s 60^th Birthday celebrations with the requisite Hindu rituals. For the uninitiated, (I belonged to this category till right before M’s dad turned 60) the 60^th birthday is kind of a big deal in Hindu culture, what with your life presumably having been all fruitfully-lived and and your marriage having yielded offspring who are now old enough to throw you your 60^th birthday well, rituals. The ceremony involves the presence of all those who are near and dear and everything, so at the heart of it, it’s really just a big family re-union.

 

But you know how the economy is bad and times are bad and everything is bad and so it was decided that we’d just have a low-key get-together at R’s place for around a couple of weeks.

 

Those ten days at R’s were as close to an idyllic vacation as we could probably have had, in our current state of joblessness and apartmentlessness. We spent a lot of our time with R’s one year old N, sipping wine (not always at the same time), playing scrabble. On one isolated occasion, I puffed my first ever cigar while discussing the nuances of female masturbation with R and her best friend V. We puffed and nuanced away till the wee hours of the morning. That was something.

 

What else? We had our parenting skills scrutinized by the manager of Med, but you already know about that (see post below). Oh and we went snowmobiling one day in Winter Park, CO and I spent a week after picking icicles from the roof of my mouth.