When that little heart is bigger than the whole wide world.

There are some moments where children make adults feel less wise. As a family, we faced such a moment during the first week of my niece's play school. She's an energetic and will powered go-getter kid. She made it through first week of play school without a tear and we were all so thrilled. She had this classmate of hers who kept crying all the time. Whenever we went to pick her up and drop her at school he would be crying or wanting to play on the swings and slides. We just took notice of the boy.


After a few days when her mother went to pick her from school, her teacher told my co- sister that my niece sits only next to that crying boy. Everyone at home was curious about why she sat only with him out of concern as to why she had trouble making friends in school. She then answered very casually that the boy's mother tongue was Hindi and had trouble learning the Tamil rhymes so she would sit and teach him to sing it.

*ya, you should have imagined the look on our faces*

Children are a surprise. In a household with 3 children just months apart, baby G has no trouble mingling with peers. He loves his cousins too much. Yes, they fidget and fight over toys - but when calm is restored they are a team that can outplay all 6 adults in the house. Any one can take the lead and the other two will follow - be it climbing the stairs, or walking out of the door to the gates. At home, there is always a designated baby sitter to keep the peace. Chasing is a main requirement in the resume. Baby G mutters their names when he is sleepy or sometimes half asleep. When we are at my parents, he never fails to mention their names to his Daddy G. He makes sure he gets two biscuits, one for him and one for Gokul. They are to me the G boys. (Both of them never finish a biscuit. Something is already catching their attention before they get to the third bite, so they drop the biscuits and run)

So many things to learn from the little naive and pleasant hearts. Nothing as pure and natural as a child's heart.

Guilty.

I read this quote on a friends facebook page 'Kids these days know hot to open close their fav apps by the age of two. When I was two I was eating dirt.' I felt proud at that moment because baby G can do all those things with my iPad and much more. He knows the playlists to the rhymes and bedtime songs. He opens them and claps and nods and baby sings along.

I do have a certain set of rules for iPad time. Most of the time the two of us are left alone and we have no choice but to play with each other. He gets bored of hearing rhymes, reading his baby books and elephant back rides. Sometimes it's exhausting because all I'm doing is trying to entertain him and keep him occupied. There are time when I need to leave the room - go to the bathroom, arrange clothes in the cupboard and petty things that he doesn't need to follow me for. For those times I initially made him sit in his crib and watch rhymes. This went on for a bit and when I saw that he got hooked to it, I started reducing his iPad time and hiding it. He then started to want to go out on drives whenever Padhu left for office. His favourite things to do were watch rhymes or go out. Slowly, I began to give him other activities to do.

His routine is wake up - potty - bath - breakfast - play - sleep - lunch - play - sleep - bath - evening walk - play - dinner - sleep. He loves his evening walks. But when indoors he prefers to play with the various apps on the iPad than with his toys or me. I may have started it but I'm so guilty that I'm slowly trying to stop now. He doesn't like TV. Screen time for a baby this age is so bad for development. I've tried hard to stop this habit of his. I'm getting there slowly.

Although, I'm guilty about this - one part of me thinks that a child today needs the access to technology. The earlier they learn, the easier it is for them to adapt. I see my neighbours complaining about how their kids are loaded with projects that is not meant for their age and I wonder, why not. Let the kid search online, learn about it, understand the topic and produce whatever he wants on paper. We do not live in a town with a library. There is no other kind of access to information for families like ours except the internet. A baby in Gnan's age needn't know to search on Google, but if he knows how to operate an iPad, so what. As long as the time they spend with the gadget is limited, I think the baby is safe.

I've opted for a list of reasons on when he can use his iPad. Travel time when he gets cranky, when I'm in the bath and when he is learning how to pronounce words and sing rhymes.

With so much said and done, the baby toy market is clever, they know just how to make a mother lazy and spoil a baby. Check out what fisher price came up with.