Hello Again

Hi Everyone,

First of all let me apologize to all those who may have attempted to peep into the blog from time to time.

The absence of any writing on the blog in the last month and a half doesn’t at all mean that we have solved all the perplexing questions we face while raising our daughter. Nooo!!, in fact as anyone can imagine, there are new ones and recurring old ones that we thought we had solved. Well, more about that later.

As mentioned earlier, the family and I had been on a 3 week vacation to India, our homeland. We had a really enjoyable time there. Thankfully all three of us (my wife, daughter and I) kept good health during this time.

I enjoyed it especially because we could again be with our families for one, but also because of the fact that we took our daughter to all the parks and beaches that I used to visit when I was a kid, and new ones as well.

My daughter and her two cousin brothers, both elder to her in age, had a ball and I could see their influence grow on her as time went by.

She became more open with people rather than being shy, started speaking more words and some sentences that we could understand, started becoming more independent and stubborn in her behavior which is always a challenge as a parent to handle, and fearless as far as trying to swim (scary thought!).

We got back from India during the first week of June. Things have been a bit busy and combined with some laziness on our part has resulted in no blog updates.

A couple of weeks ago we had been to Lake Welch Beach (http://nysparks.state.ny.us/parks/info.asp?parkID=74) at the Harriman State Park (http://nysparks.state.ny.us/parks/info.asp?parkId=143) in NY. It’s the largest man made beach in that park, and although very crowded, was a good place to be on a hot summer day. Entry per vehicle is $7. I would request readers who may be aware of good beaches to recommend them in the blog, that way we can be aware of more places to take our kids to during summer.

We also visited Sesame Place last weekend. I shall be writing on that and posting in the near future with some nice pictures that I took while we were there.

Till then,
Sriram

Back in the US!

Hi all,
My family and I had been away for a long vacation to India and we just got back a couple of weeks ago.

I couldn't get back to blogging cause we were having way too much fun after coming back visiting the beach, attending some birthday parties, etc. I will fill in soon enough. Until then!
Sri

At Long Last!

It has been busy the last few weeks making it a little difficult for us to update the blog. In terms of an outing, we did manage to take our daughter to the annual Lego show in Tarrytown NY that I wrote about 2 weeks ago in our blog.

Other than the few times my wife took our daughter for some play dates with her friends, to the park etc., combined with work and other commitments, the time went by very quickly. I am going to try my best to be as up-to-date as possible.

I also wanted to share that we finally hit upon a way to reduce my daughter's dependency on TV as a means to get her to eat her dinner or lunch. Instead of this forming habit which was on the verge of escalating, we decided to have our dinner/lunch together as a family on the dining table, daughter included. We hoist her up on her small cushion chair placed on top of the dining chair, and not on her high-chair, no straps, nothing so as to give her that freedom while sitting. She fits in nicely except that she slips down her chair from time to time :-).

Maybe its this practice of 'sitting together as a family' or sitting at the same level as her parents, that has brought out some positive results. Our daughter has not only started eating really well in terms of the food portions but is also experimenting a little bit on different foods. We involve her in our dinner conversations and she loves that.

Although she is still coming to terms with the different kinds of food we cook, and scrutinizes the food very closely before eating anything. I think observing what we eat on a regular basis is also making her familiar to the different foods, their color, look and feel, etc.

So far, so good!

- Sriram