Saturday, October 15, 2011

Letter to My Child: Khayla (10 months)

Dear Khayla,

Today you turned 10 months old. Altogether now - yeaayy!! For that, I bought you this walker as a changing month gift or more due to the fact that you are officially over with your baby-ish walker. You know, the one that you used to spend delightful hours zooming around the house before you can actually stand up on your own. Girl, you need to learn to show some gratitude, OK?

All grin at the newly-bought toy

My dearest daughter,

As you grow up, there are a few life lessons that I want you to remember - lesson #1: when you decide to descend from the bed to the floor, please go down LEGS first. That way you'll have less risk of knocking your head on the cold, tiled floor.

Yes, hang on like that and then go down on your feet

Lesson #2: I'm always with you even though you can't see me. I know you don't believe me. Every time I put you down so I can attend to chores you start to cry. It's not just 'I don't like to be on the floor' cry, it's 'where are you going? Why are you leaving me?? Are you abandoning me? Don't go, I'll miss you!!!' kinda cry. Your little body just froze on the spot but your cry goes an octave higher with each second that I'm leaving you. By the time I was ready to get you (a minute later), there's a puddle of tears, saliva and snot on the floor, and the front of your shirt was drenched wet with all of them. Of course, if I was gone for more than 2 minutes, you will then creep to wherever I was and then grabbed my pants and never let go. Sweetie, it may be endearing to see you so attached to me, but it gets frustrating when I have to do prepare meals or do laundry or maybe just to get your drink.  Khayla, for a 10-month old baby, you are certainly a drama queen.    A cute drama queen.

See, Mommy always with you Khayla!

Ok, I think I'll just stop at two. See, too many info, it'll be information overload to you. Like for instance, the day I was trying to read a picture book to you. You look dispassionately at the black and white picture of a cat, and then you turned to another page without even hearing the story of the cat. Just looking at the cat is enough. So it is with food to you nowadays. You used to LOVE eating, darling! Now, you ate a few tiny spoonfuls of porridge and then you turned your face away or made irritating noises if I tried to make you finish your meal.

Speaking about irritating noises, this month I learnt that the meaning to the phrase 'like taking candy from a baby' is a hoax. An outright lie! Ask your Daddy who has faced shrieks, screams and tantrums every time he tried to take away the TV remote control from you. It's not easy at all! Just simply handing a substitute is not enough - we need to persuade how the substitute is wayyy better than what you are currently holding. If you are not convinced, then forget it. You are never surrendering anything that we want.

For the past two weeks, your health was a little bit on the off side. It started with a really high fever (reaching 40 degrees Celsius!) and wham! Two days later you had small, red, angry rashes all over your little body:

Sick little baby

You had measles! To make it worse, I was really busy that week, going on outstation but luckily I could bring you with me because Grandma came all the way from Bintulu to babysit you. I know I should be grateful that the nasty contagious measles had you at this small age but still, it pained me to see you so uncomfortable. Despite being sick, you stayed cheerful most of the time I was around because hey, Mommy's around :)

You also grew more teeth this month. Teeth that you found amazing to grind and it made me grimaced each time you did that. Hopefully you'll outgrow that habit of yours, Khayla.

Perhaps at this point you are wondering whether I have anything good to say about you. Of course there is, munchkin! Plenty that I can't list all of them here. But here are some of the stronger ones:

1. You easily warm up to people and once you like somebody, you show affection easily :)

2. You are quick to imitate my actions so it's easy to teach you by demonstrating to you. For example,  you can wave bye-bye at 8 months old. But only to someone you really REALLY like.

3. You love my porridge compared to instant cereal. Yeay!

4. You can reach out to the edge of anything and then stand up by pulling your body up. You can cruise as well this month.

5. You love to babble. You love striking up conversations. I'm never bored whenever I'm with you.

6. Each time you snuggle to me, you put your head on my chest adoringly. Aww...

7. You are cute with a capital 'CUTE'. Yes, even when you are losing weight from all those active moves standing up and cruising from furniture to furniture.

8. You don't complain when you eat veggie.

9. You have loads of sense of humor. Today you pushed your bottle off your tray, which Daddy deftly caught and put it back on the tray. You sneaked a quick look at Daddy, and pushed it again and each time Daddy caught the bottle, you squirmed in giggles, which set us giggling too. You repeated this as long as we laugh because you know we find it cute and funny.

10. You love me with all your heart, it shows whenever your eyes lit up at the sight of me, at the big hug you give me and the way you throw your body just to be in my arms.

And I love you too, my sugar and honey-honey.

Love,

Mak