Happy Birthday Neel.....

Happy Birthday my little boy Neel. Someday when you read this you won’t be so little and you will be embarrassed by this writing, at least until you have children of your own, and then you won’t think it so maudlin’.

You joined us 365 days ago, on a Saturday. It was very kind of you to be born on a Saturday so that Daddy didn’t have to take too many days off, and Mommy could pack Daddy off to work on Tuesday. You also decided to come around the day after your uncle Vipul was born, so you and him now share adjacent birthdays. Yay!

There have been so many precious moments with you. I can hardly remember the first few months, things just mash into each other. Thank god for the Flip camcorder and our workhorse DSLR camera. We have taken literally thousands of pictures of you and we enjoy looking at all of them.

These days you toddle around. You started to go bipedal about a month ago, but you started hesitatingly. You would take two steps and then sit down, and then do you funny crab-crawl the rest of the way. It is only recently that you have started to walk everywhere. We have nicknamed (well, I did) you ‘Toddle’ because you toddle everywhere. You are insanely curious. You will walk everywhere and open doors and start pulling things out. We have had to block off access to the kitchen.

You are also insanely strong. When you grab something we literally have to exert force to get it out of your hands. It is really funny going mano a mano with you, to get you to let go of something. It is frequently wiser to offer you another toy or something else to hold.

You have absolutely no attention span, which works great for us. If we need to distract you, it’s easy. If we need to make you look somewhere else, or calm you down, it’s easy.

One of the things we have to constantly guard against is your tendency to stick your hand in the toilet. You love to play with water-and you love to toddle into the bathroom and start splashing around in the toilet. It is funny and disgusting at the same time. Little Toddle!

You have developed the most amazing smile and we love to look at it. You are such a happy little boy, that you flash your smile all throughout the day. Between your smile, your gorgeous curls and your four teeth, you are the handsomest little boy for miles around.

We are fortunate that you have developed a little bag of tricks to keep yourself occupied. When we put your mouth to a glass of water, you start gurgling it instead of drinking it. We have to give you water using a spoon or a baby bottle. You have also learnt to carry a tune by tapping your palm against your mouth while you say ‘ahhhh’.

Getting you to sleep is accomplished in one of two ways. Up until recently we would take you into a dark bathroom, and softly sing to you. But lately that has not worked. So we just let you putter around until you sit down and start rubbing your eyes, then I take you to bed and lay you down so your face is lying on my chest, and start caressing you. You protest one or two times and then you fall asleep.
You have also found a favorite book, the Numbers book from the Baby Einstein series. You take that book, and you flip through the pages. At night you love it when we read a book to you. The rule of thumb is that your sister gets 3 books and however many stories she can cajole out of us and you get one book.

You follow your sister everywhere. Lately, you have been climbing up on the stepladder right along with your sister, a practice that scared us at first but now we are used to me. Actually, you love to climb. You are able to climb one or two flights of stairs but are not able to come down, so we have to follow you and bring you back down. That follows what your sister used to do-she loved to climb stairs.