Family Visit

This weekend was a great combination of fantastic weather and visitors, as Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Kevin made the trek down to Palo Alto to visit us. Sonia for the most part was far friendlier than she was at Christmas, blowing kisses, bestowing hugs, and feeding people Cheerios, whether they asked for them or not.

On Saturday we had a very Stanford-focused day, with a visit to the bookstore in the morning, the Stanford Museum around lunchtime, and finally to the Sunken Diamond for the afternoon baseball game. By this time it was so hot, and there is literally no shade in the stadium, that "the girls" ended up bailing in the 2nd inning to return to our air-conditioned condo (not before seeing one guy collapse on the stairs from heat stroke). Since Stanford ultimately won the game 26 to 5, needless to say we did not miss a great contest. On Sunday we collectively had a very lazy day, with a trip to the park, the traditional basketball contest between "the boys," and brunch at the Peninsula Creamery. We were so lazy we somehow managed to not even cook dinner, thus completing our 100% take-out / restaurant food visit. Actually, we did grill pre-made hamburgers once...does that count as providing a home-cooked meal? :-)

Sonia did manage to learn to say "please" (or, as she puts it, "peez") just in time to impress her grandparents . She also wowed everyone with her ability to spot cars (the word "cah" must have been uttered 100's of times), and was deemed to be a genius for saying "mama" instead of "car" everytime she sees a Prius (admittedly by a pretty biased audience). Perhaps the most exciting moment of the weekend was when Sonia, while playing with my locked cell phone, managed to execute its "emergency call" function and dialed 911. It's not every day that I have to sheepishly explain to the Palo Alto police department that my 17-month old has called them in error, and no they do not need to rush over to the house.

Here are a few pics from the weekend...

And here are our pictures for all of April...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Sonia's current age (17 months) seems like such a great age, and there are definitely days that I just want to hit "freeze" and have her always be her cute little smiling self. So, before I forget what these days were like, I wanted to take the time to note a few small things that are just too fun to forget. This has become our defacto baby record, so of course they get noted here. Unfortunately, this is also starting to be a bit of a tougher age as Sonia develops a (strong) will of her own, so there are some not-so-fun things to make sure I don't forget too. :-)

A few "best" things I want to remember...

• Sonia has her little nighttime ritual established, which ends with her going to the crib where she lays her head down on her doggy blanket (this sort of half stuffed animal / half blanket thing that looks like a golden retriever) and we start the 5 minute countdown of "Baby Tad" playing lullabies. Like her father, she loves to sleep, so she is usually really happy to go to bed. In the last week or she has started waving goodbye and blowing us kisses after we lay her down in her crib. And every single night I am struck that it is the cutest thing ever (slightly biased opinion, perhaps).
• Sonia is starting to imitate us more and more. Lately she is obsessed with locks. Obviously she has seen us put our keys into locks countless times, and she has finally found a lock on her level (a filing cabinet in our closet). Whenever she can get a hold of our keys, she immediately runs to the closet and attempts to put the keys into the lock on the filing cabinet. I'm tempted to actually give her the keys to the filing cabinet, but I'm afraid she would actually succeed in locking it, and then no doubt lose the keys immediately. She also intently watches Sameer put on deodorant, and has now taken to getting his deodorant out of the drawer, lifting up her own shirt, and rubbing it all over her stomach (thankfully with the lid on). Good hygiene starts early!
• She has figured out what to call the moon (thanks to Chuki) and whenever she sees it during the daytime she points to it and yells "moo!" She never tires of this, so she will walk 15 feet, see the moon again, and yell again like it's the first time. Similarly she yells "cah!" nearly everytime she sees a car, which given where we live (in a condo that faces the Whole Foods parking lot) is pretty often. It's like she has figured out she knows what a few things are called, and she is really excited about it. Either that, or she has no short-term memory. :-)
• Sometimes when we hug Sonia we pat her on the back, and she has now adopted this herself. It was so cute when she first did it that we started to say, "oh that's nice, you're giving us 'pats.'" Now sometimes she skips the hugging all together and just walks up to us and pats us on the back. It's like having a tiny little child come up to you and say, "there, there...you'll be fine."
• Sonia has figured out how to open the doors in our house. What little privacy we had left is officially gone. This morning Sameer got up with her (saint-like behavior given she decided 5:30am was a good wake-up time). I could hear her running around and saying "mama", but was doing my best imitation of someone still sleeping. Then I hear the door open (after a number of failed attempts to get the handle to turn), and sure enough tiny little feet scamper over to my side of the bed. I open my eyes and there is her smiling face about 2 inches from mine. The fact I thought this was adorable at 6am is pretty amazing.
• Finally, Sonia is also a big kisser, having been taught by Sameer from early on to give lots of kisses. She knows the routine now (if she gives me a kiss, she immediately goes and finds Sameer and gives him one too, since she knows she's supposed to give one to each of us). This plan of Sameer's may have backfired, though, as our nanny recently showed us a picture of Sonia kissing her little "boyfriend" Jay (her playmate from the park). So, I guess let the record stand that the first time Sonia kissed a boy was at 17 months. Sameer is already looking into convents.

Some "worst" things to note so that when Sonia is older we can tease her mercilessly about it...

• Sonia absolutely loses it if she sees something she wants and doesn't get it. This typically involves the camera, the laptop, or some kind of inappropriate snack item. If she sees one of these things and then we say no, the crying and whining start almost immediately. I realize that this is partly our fault for sometimes letting her have these things, and partly just a function of the age, but still a very bad sign if this is what it's like and we haven't even made it to the "terrible twos" yet.
• The flip side of knowing what she wants is knowing what she doesn't want. She remains an incredibly picky eater (yes to spaghetti, but no penne...yes to cereal, but must be Daddy's cereal...will eat yogurt, but only the small drinkable kind, etc.). Her new MO is to shake her head and yell "no" if you try and give her something new. I'm sure we are to blame for this behavior and that we missed some important window of getting her to like new things, but needless to say this is not in the "cute" category.
• Sonia is a binky addict. There, I said it. We have limited the use of the pacifier to only when she is sleeping, and in fact when she gets up in the morning she hands me the pacifier because she knows that it "lives in the crib." We half-heartedly tried to break her of the habit about a week ago. We put her in the crib at night without the pacifier, at which point she looked at us and said, "uh oh." Uh oh, indeed. After 30+ minutes of non-stop crying (which we are so not used to given we typically have no crying), we (really, Sameer) caved and gave it back to her. It doesn't help that she is teething a bit, so that when we didn't give it to her she started to suck on her fingers, which seemed potentially a case of going from bad to worse. Now our logic is to wait until we can actually discuss that the pacifier is going away, since we are at sort of an awkward age where she can really remember it and wants it, but is not yet capable of conversation. Yes, I realize this is a justification of ignoring the problem, but I'm okay with it.

[One note related to the title of this post...for those of you anti-public education folks, I would like the record to show that having been required to memorize the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities in the 8th grade, I can still remember it 21 (!) years later. Of course, I can remember exactly nothing about the plot itself or any of the major themes of the book, so maybe that whole rote memorization thing wasn't too effective after all.]

Eating it up

One more quick post to note a couple of milestones of late. First off, Sonia is making good progress on learning how to eat using utensils. 80% of her attempts result in a mess, but 20% of the time she actually manages to get food into her mouth. As you can see in the video below, cereal is her specialty, although she also attempts rice (a clean-up disaster) and any fruit she can spear with a fork. Of course, she lacks the dexterity to actually get anything onto the fork, which makes for very long mealtimes.



The other cute milestone is that Sonia is starting to actually do "pretend" play. Today she was sitting in the living room playing with one of her 3 toy phones (no joke) and staring at her reflection in the fireplace. After a while of watching her, I realized she was pretending to talk to the little girl in the reflection (she would pick up the phone like she had received a call, jabber for a while into it while gesturing to her reflection in the fireplace, hang up the phone, then repeat). I've seen her "pretend" to talk to the phone a million times, but it was the first time I had seen her pretend to have a conversation with someone else. Kind of a sad only child moment that it was her reflection in the fireplace glass, but still very cute. As I write this I realize that it doesn't sound that amazing once I described it, so perhaps this falls into the category of "only impressive to people related to Sonia." :-)

Testing the Waters

Sameer and I have been talking about taking Sonia to swimming lessons for literally months, but it wasn't until last weekend that we finally motivated to do it. (Note: "swimming lessons" at this age is basically just organized fun in the pool, but since we have a trip to Hawaii in June, we wanted to make sure that Sonia was used to the pool by then.) First, I did a bunch of homework online to figure out the best place to go, and finally settled on an indoor pool in Palo Alto that has a parent / tot class on Saturdays and is heated extra-warm. Next we had to assemble all of the paraphernalia (in this case, a new swimsuit, and two different kinds of swim diapers since the pool requires triple layering of diapered swimmers). And then we had to procrastinate for another month or so just because we are lazy.

But, in the end, last Saturday we went. I was feeling pretty optimistic because Sonia is a big fan of bathtime, and I was convinced that she would love the pool. Boy was I wrong. To say it went poorly would be a huge understatement.

Standing on the side of the pool looking in, she was mostly just making small sad noises, but once Sameer took her in the water the real wailing began. Serious, wide open mouth, almost "silent scream" style crying. Except not silent, more like reverberating off of the walls loud. Needless to say, the other parents were not too psyched that Sonia had joined the class. She lasted about 4 minutes in the pool before we finally decided she was being too disruptive, and it was so obvious she was not going to stop and start having fun, that Sameer got out of the water. Sonia continued to shriek while we stood on the deck of the pool, at which point Sameer and I had to just start laughing. It was so ridiculous and embarrassing that it was hilarious. A couple of the parents offered helpful "advice" such as, "isn't she used to the bathtub?" (no, she's 17 months old and we've never bathed her), and "my son was in the ocean at 4 months" (not sure how that helps me, but good for you lady). The people at the pool took such pity on us that they actually refunded our money (which somehow seemed to contradict their statement of "don't worry...this happens all the time").


Our failure at the pool last weekend somehow kicked in Sameer's competitive instincts, so he was determined that we were going back this weekend to conquer Sonia's fears. This time we decided that success was just getting Sonia to stay in the pool (we didn't even dream of actually joining the class). Sonia started by crying just like last time, but Sameer "I can't stand losing" Dholakia stuck it out in the pool, playing with her in the super shallow area. Sonia finally realized that this was kind of like the bathtub, and even relaxed and smiled for a picture. We got a bit brave and let her walk around a bit (it was seriously 1-foot deep), at which point she slipped and fell into the water. Of course she was fine, but that shattered our hard-earned calm and the crying began again. We decided to declare success (15 minutes in the pool!) and packed up our stuff and left.

On our way out, we signed up for a 10-class pass. At this pace of progress, that's about how long it will take for us to actually get to participate in the class we are paying for, rather than just watching it from the side of the pool.

March Photos

Here's a quick post with a link to our pictures from the month of March. We didn't manage to get the camera out as often as we should have (and when we did, we had to fight Sonia for it), so there are not as many pictures as we would like.



One quick anecdote -- Sonia continues to expand her vocabulary (her latest is almost shouting "no!" if we try to give her food she doesn't like...lovely). But, despite adding a bunch of new words, lately she has been sticking with her old favorite "mama" like she is a broken record. She seriously says it over and over again ("mama, mama, mama, mama...") like it is her meditation mantra or something. I said to Sameer at dinner last night that she was saying it so much that there was no way that she meant me, at which point she continued to say it, but added pointing at me to the mix as if to say, "yes, silly, I mean you." So, I was kind of touched by that and thought that she was maybe becoming a mama's girl afterall. But, this morning when I was holding her and Chuki walked in the door, she reached out for Chuki, happily settled in Chuki's arms, and then turned to me and waved and said "bye bye." Yes, as in, "You can leave now, Chuki is here." I would like to attribute this to the fact that Chuki has a much better track record of quickly making Sonia breakfast in the morning, but it is clear that at best all I have done is pull ahead of Sameer in the stack rank. :-)