When my wife was expecting our second child, one of our prime concerns was how will the existing apple of our eye deal with having another apple to share the eyes with.
All through my wife's pregnancy things progressed smoothly, thankfully, except the boy who was mystified by his now unwieldy mother. Gone was the person who would conduct pursue and capture operations vaulting over the sofa, gliding under the dining table and who upon securing her quarry would hoist him up to take him to his room. Now these were more instruct and delegate operations "No, Tiger, no scooter in the house. PJ catch him and make him stop before he breaks the TV." (Wives and mothers are eerily prescient - they know exactly what the kid will destroy).
A few weeks before our bundle of joy was to arrive, we started preparing ourselves and Tiger. "Talk to him" was a common refrain. We thought of telling him that he was going to get a little baby soon. This posed a problem, since till that point of time, we were both in the habit of referring to him as our little baby. Now overnight, he would need to become our 'big boy'.
"You are a big boy now" I told him. I thought about telling him that there was a little baby inside mama's tummy. I remember when my nephew told his younger sister that she came from mummy's tummy, she went over and asked her mother in shock "Mommy you ate me!"
Tiger takes most news stoically, maybe his experience says that the information we feed him from time to time doesn't always measure up in his experience, take "spinach and cheese is yummy," for example. He has never indicated that he has discovered any truth in the statement.
Till then, for him the most interesting thing about babies was that they came in prams. He loved to push the strollers around, navigate them about the playground and have fun. It did not necessarily require a baby to actually be present in the pram. He was happier with an empty pram since we allowed him freer rein with it.
We were pleasantly surprised to see Tiger genuinely excited when we told him that he would be soon getting a little sister of his own. We also told him Little Sister was in Ma's tummy. He liked that too. So he would spend a bit of time every day talking to Little Sister, saying hello in the morning, saying bye when he left for his playschool. Sometimes he would get a bit impatient and ask us when Little Sister would put in an appearance (I want Little Sister to come out now!). Soon was an answer that doesn't satisfy most three year olds. Their concept of time seems to have only two phases: Now and God-knows-when. We told him Little Sister would come and play with him and talk to him and lots of other things that would happen once she came involving ice-cream, biscuits, picnics and train rides.
Tiger has a fondness of running full tilt and launching himself at you, expecting to be caught, cups of tea or half-full wine glasses that you might be holding notwithstanding. He calls this game Boom. "I want Boom" is generally the only warning you get before the missile is on it's way. The imminent coming of Little Sister precluded his mother from this activity, so I took over slack. He didn't seem to mind.
Finally the day came when we were able to tell him that Mama needed to go to hospital to get Little Sister. Our daughter, Tiger's Little Sister was delivered and my wife and she were to stay in hospital for three days. Ana was small compared to her brother, about three-quarters of his birth weight - and she looked much more delicate than he did when he was born. Tiger was a bigger, robust baby, but Ana had a bigger voice...she could really put her lungs to good use.
That evening I went to fetch Big Brother Tiger to see Little Sister Ana. There was a box of chocolates in her crib when Tiger came to see her - a present she had brought for him. He was thrilled to say the least - both to see her and the chocolates.
"Hello Little Sister!" Little Sister did not respond.
"Little Sister is sleeping!" He seemed a trifle disappointed, but the chocolates proved to be a handy distraction.
The next day brought a similar story.
"Little Sister is sleeping."
In fact the first few weeks, Little Sister was hardly ever awake - sleeping about eighteen hours a day. We heard "Little Sister is sleeping" and also "Little Sister is still sleeping" a few times a day as Tiger went to see his hyped up sibling. The disappointment was higher when she was awake and it was all our fault since we had oversold Little Sister: will play with you, have so much fun, will go on picnics... and so on. The first few weeks were summed up by "Little Sister is sleeping" or "Little Sister is crying" and once, when he walked in to find Ana being breastfed, "No, no Ana, don't eat Mama!" he was genuinely concerned. It took a while before it became "Little Sister is having milk".
He seemed to think we got a raw deal, we should have got a better, working model, one that could at least talk and walk and sleep less, but he was still very fond of her.
He took all of it in his stride - and in his inimitable way he took upon himself her instruction in the way of humans.
"Good morning, Little Sister!" He'd come over first thing in the morning to see her. Silence, she looks at him in the curious unwavering way that babies have. "Must say Good Morning, Ana." When she cries, he tells her, "Must not cry, Ana, must speak." and "Why Ana, why are you crying?"
As time goes by, he gets more and more used to dealing with her. His pats on her head to get her to sleep have become gentler. He is generally the first one on the scene if she is crying. Earlier he didn't know what to do, but now he pats her and speaks to her and coos to her, just like he sees us do. She, for her part gets a lot more animated when she sees him - smiling, arms and legs flailing furiously trying to get her four month old body into the air somehow. Her excitement is infectious.
They get along well, both of them. I am glad.
1 comment:
I want boom..i am sure you had fun !
very nice !!
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