Fifteen Months

I haven't given you Puttachi updates in a while, and since some of you reminded me to, here they are. I seem to have forgotten how to write interesting updates - either because her progress is so overwhelming or that I have so much to say that I don't know where to start!

Anyway here it is in "short".

Puttachi is a very spirited child. Very active and restless, she is nearly always a blur of movement. Even if she is sitting in one place, her hands and feet are blurs. Her curiosity is endless. No object around the house is safe from her scrutiny. She wants to go everywhere, see everything, and test it for taste, breakage, and even for ergonomics! She continues to be very friendly, dazzling everybody with her smile.

She has a vocabulary of more than 130-140 words as I write this. And I am not counting the words that she repeats immediately after us, because that is plain imitation. These 140 words are those that she actually knows.

And when she wants something, she doesn't stop saying the word until she gets it. For example, if she wants a spoon, which btw, is her favourite object now, she goes on saying "phoonphoonphoonphoon...." with her hands and legs dancing to the rhythm, until she gets the spoon in her hand. Only then does she stop. It can get quite maddening - a little hurricane dancing around your legs, chanting loudly, something like "aacheaacheaacheaacheaache..."[Aache - outside] - sometimes your brain just refuses to work until the hurricane is catered to.

Her dance when she wants something is such a unique movement that everybody who sees it comments about it and has a hearty laugh. Her two feet are stomping on the floor alternately, her hands are flapping, palms are doing a round-and-round bulb screwing-unscrewing action, her head is thrown back, her eyes are looking at the ground, her face has an expression of urgency, and she says the name of the objec trepeatedly, like I mentioned before, like a stuck gramophone record. And oh yes, her lips hardly move when she is saying whatever she is. In this state, she is in her own world - I cannot really begin to describe it to you - you have to see it to believe it!

Lately, she has started stringing words together. "Papa elli?" (where's Papa?) "Adu Elephant" (That is an elephant) "Amma taachi" (Amma is sleeping). She also communicates with sign language to get things done. She also understands a lot of what we say, and sometimes follows my instructions to the T. Sometimes her level of understanding and communication takes me totally by surprise.

She is turning out to be very independent. She wants to eat by herself, wash her feet herself, pour water over herself in the bath, she even tries to wear her clothes herself. If I put food in front of her, more often than not, she eats the entire thing herself. [Even if it is something sticky like anna-saaru, dal-rice, etc] The cleaning up is a pain, but she sometimes refuses to be fed, wanting to do it herself. So I am forced to give in. But there are times of course, when she just plays with the food and starts flinging it around, in which case I have to put my foot down.

She also communicates her needs pretty well now, which is a huge relief. She says nunu for water when thirsty, she points to a plate or at the microwave when she is hungry, and she literally drags me to bed when she is sleepy.

Which reminds me, when she is dragging you somewhere, it is just like a dog pulling at its leash. She is strong and she is fast. If she decides to drag you someplace, you have no choice but to follow her.

She is a drama queen through and through. And when she knows that she is being watched, she puts on such a performance for everybody to see. She is also an imitator of the first order. Then there are other funny things she does, like walking backwards towards a seating target, no matter how far it is. She walks backward until the back of her legs occur resistance, and then she sits down.

She loves the outdoors, and will willingly give up food and sleep to be outside.

On the whole, it is tremendous fun with such a hyper little thing around, though at times, I get so exhausted that I remember to breathe only after she falls asleep!