Ranjit's first play date!

What's this? Does 4 month old Ranjit have a girlfriend? Kids these days, they're dating at younger and younger ages! Ha ha, just kidding- no dating for Ranjit until he is 3! The girl is my friend Chiragi's little baby, 10 month old Anokhi. They came to visit all the way from the far away land of St. Louis. It was their first time meeting little Ranjit!
At first things didn't go quite as well as planned. When Ranjit and I went down to meet Chiragi and Anokhi in the lobby of our building, I expected Ranjit to give Anokhi a curious look or two, then turn his attention to himself. However something very odd happened. When Chiragi and I brought the two together, they looked at eachother for a split second before Ranjit started pouting. In response, Anokhi started whimpering... to which Ranjit replied with a resounding "WAHHHH!!"... Anokhi, not wanting to be outdone started crying too, which caused Ranjit to scream at the top of his lungs. It was quite the scene; pretty much everybody in the lobby stopped what they were doing to stare at the mayhem. Soooo Mansi and I decided to take Ranjit and head back upstairs and calm him down before Chiragi, Devang (her husband) and Anokhi joined us.
After that things went better. Ranjit took a nap and woke up in a much better mood. Anokhi and he started sizing eachother up again, but then pretty much ignored eachother and played with the adults in the room for the rest of the day. Ranjit had lots of fun watching his Devang uncle make funny faces at him and talking with his Chiragi auntie; and I think that there was an unspoken agreement between him and Anokhi that they were cool too.
Tomorrow Ranjit has his 4 month old shots, poor baby! Wish him luck!

Ranjit keeps his mommy busy

Since the last posting 2 weeks ago, so much has happened that I don't know where to begin! We spent another week in Ohio where Ranjit had fun meeting all of his Dadu (a.k.a. Gulula) and Aaji's friends and seeing the sights in Beavercreek Ohio. He visited the temple, a nearby pond (where he saw some duckies) and learned how to play the piano and tabla.

After coming back, we decided to put him in his new crib in his own room. He seemed a bit disoriented at first and refused to go to sleep- in anything! Not his crib, not his old bassinet, not in his bouncy, not anything! Finally he went to sleep in bed with us, but woke up every hour and a half or so (I loved that, you can probably tell), and kept on kicking me in the bladder. I realized later that he was probably waking up so often because of his eczema, poor kid. We also realized that he couldn't sleep in his crib because we didn't put a bumper in; Ranjit (who break dances in his crib, no joke) would hurt himself on the crib slats everytime he moved! So his Dadi and Dada brought a bumper, we put a humidifier in his room and swaddled him so that he couldn't scratch himself -and this worked wonders! He goes to sleep so easily now; we put his classical lullaby cd on for naps and bedtime and he goes to sleep within minutes!! And he loves his new room; it's still in the making so I won't show a picture just yet; I'm waiting for our Scooby Doo Safari wall decals to come in the mail before unveiling his nursery to the world.

As for Ranjit's sleeping patterns, he still wakes up more often than he used to (every 3 hours instead of every 3.5-4 hours), which I think might be because he is teething, I think.

Yes my little pooky bear is going to get his first tooth soon! It's a bit early, but he's showing all the symptoms; he has a slight loss in appetite once in a while (he tries to eat but then he pulls away as if in pain), he's drooling buckets, he gets fussy every once in a while, then grabs my finger and starts gnawing on it and yesterday when I gave him a frozen teething ring he started going to town on it! Poor guy- so much to deal with for an almost 4-month old.

Nevertheless, he has been in a generally happy mood; he went to the Shedd aquarium this past Saturday and seemed to enjoy watching all the fishies swim too and fro; I think he smiled at a Piranah! He also went to eat at Subway with his Dada, Dadi and parents for the first time; he seemed to like it for the most part; it should have been his first restaurant experience since Subway veggie patties are all I ate for the first 2 months of his life.

Finally, in the last week, my baby has hit a couple of milestones! He has rolled over a couple of times, laughed a couple times (this is the most precious to me, I hope he starts laughing even more!) and started making all of these wonderful noises that keeps us entertained for hours... I'll try to get a little video of it up in my next posting. Next week he'll turn 4 months old, which is supposed to be even more amazing! Hopefully I'll be able to video tape more. More later!

Ranjit's first Out-of-State trip

Ajit and I decided that before we took Ranjit to see the Taj Mahal, Macchu Pichu, Angkor Wat, the Acropolis and the Egyptian pyramids, we needed to perhaps take him on a couple short trips to get him warmed up. Where else to begin Ranjit's travels but Beavercreek, Ohio, home of his Aaji and Dadu? We set out on Saturday, September 1st morning to beat traffic but alas found that there was no way to beat Chicago traffic unless we left at 3 in the morning. Ranjit was especially unfond of the parking lot that the Dan Ryan had become and cried the whole half hour that we were inching along 5 miles an hour. However once we got on the expressway, he fell asleep and was pretty calm during the rest of the trip (aside from the usual "i'm hungry" and "i'm sleepy" cries).

Ranjit Discovers That We are a Fast Food Nation
Along the way Ranjit went to his first fast food restaurant, a plain-jane little Burger King in some podunk town outside of Indianapolis. He seemed unimpressed. While we were eating our veggie burgers and milk shake a friendly but strange looking man approached us and started chatting with Ranjit, which he and I were fine with. That all changed when he raised his hand to shake hands with my baby... I watched in horror as his potential petri dish of a hand as if in slow motion grabbed Ranjit's little fingers and shook them while Ranjit, who had decided that he did not like this man, began to curl his lips into a pout. Luckily that pout turned into a cry and so we apologetically excused ourselves from the strange man's presence and carried Ranjit back to the car where I quickly wiped his hands down with a wet cloth before he could put whatever germs that had been transferred into his hands into his mouth. (Ladies and gentlemen, if there is anything that I've learned in my 3 months of motherhood is that moms do NOT like strangers touching their babies, especially their hands! My advice to you is if you see a cute little baby that you don't know, talk to him, smile at him, sing to him, do the hokey pokey in front of him, anything, just do NOT touch him, especially his hands!)

Ranjit's fun weekend
Ranjit's first visit to Ohio has so far been filled with new sights and sounds; he went to the Spicer Heights play ground and swung on a swing while strapped to his dad, saw goats bleating and cows mooing at Young's Dairy farm (they have ice cream there too, but he had to pass - maybe next year?), went for a hike in Glen Helen forest in Yellow Springs (home of Dave Chapelle!), went for long walks with Grandma and listened to his Dadu sing Bengali songs at Mr. and Mrs. Bhattacharya's house. He also spent hours mastering the art of thumbsucking, after a month of trying to suck on different fingers and not finding any satisfaction in any of them. About a week ago he settled on the thumb, but couldn't quite figure out the technique (on one of his tries he almost poked an eye out). But now he knows to curl the rest of his fingers in while inserting the thumb facing up...so we possibly have a thumb sucker on our hands!


Anyway, today Ajit left back for Chicago while Ranjit and I stayed on to have more adventures in Ohio... stay tuned!