Headbath

It’s tiring bringing up a child in Bangalore.  In my previous life, I made plans to take her to a place that mirrored “my" India. The India of malls and indoor play areas. I stopped taking her to public parks because I think they are disgusting. The way I looked at it was: I did not spend 9 months breeding a human, and x years raising it, to have her play in some rusty jungle gym, to discover a used condom, or find used syringes or get pushed around by lousy (as in, with lice) children. Yeah, the play area in my building was good enough. At least I knew that the kids who play there were clean. Sounds classist? You bet it was. Nah. I just took my kid to The Oberoi - they have a lovely lawn there, you see. Who needs jungle gyms when you’ve got bread-loving koi fish. Who needs to deal with the ill-mannered kids of people-who-can-barely-make-ends-meet when you can be sure to be in the company of people who know what a social contract is.  But on our way there...

If you've ever gone through my posts and decided that I sound like a sanctimonious mommy blogger, you're probably right. I have one daughter and I'm dispensing potty training advice? The intent isn't to dish out spoons full of self-aggrandisement. This website is one of the many ways for me to say that I was a harried mother. That I tried. And failed. Many times. But I kept trying until something worked. Can Attachment Theory Explain All Our Relationships? is writer Bethany Saltman's   essay in the New York Magazine, in which she analyses and compares her attachment to her mother with her attachment to her daughter who is now 11-years old. Ms. Saltman writes of feeling lonely and overwhelmed in the early days of motherhood and making scary faces and muttering angrily at her nonplussed baby. Words that mothers are terrified to confess to one another. The article made me think about the evolving nature of my attachment to 2-and-a-half-year old E. Before she ...

E caught her first cold on 14/09/2014. From me. I did everything I could to protect her from my illness my hands were raw from washing . Still, she woke up with a runny nose on that fateful Sunday morning. I messaged E's paediatrician who recommended that I give E half a dropperful of T-minic drops, two times a day. T-minic apparently eases symptoms such as a runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing !  Generally mistrustful of medical practitioners, I quickly Googled, 'T-minic.' Which was just as well, because  the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) advises parents to refrain from administering cold and cough medicine to infants below the age of 2 . The active ingredients in T-minic are chlorphenamine maleate makes a person sleepy and phenylephrine hydrochloride a decongestant , both of which are contraindicated by the USFDA for infants under the age of 2. After having conducted research on usage of such medication, the USFDA found that that reports of harm to ch...

The concept of babywearing is as old as babies - I have a mental image of a cavewoman foraging near her cave with dogs by her side and a baby on her back. Tribal populations in India continue this practice but for some reason, this isn't very common among us city-dwellers. I've been carrying baby E since she was 5 days old in a purple Flo soft carrier from Mamas and Papas. The Flo and other soft carriers is basically a strip of stretchy cotton jersey fabric - about 30 inches wide and 7 feet long - that you wrap around your body and then stick baby in. It took a few tries to figure out how to use it properly but my sleepy newborn was the perfect test subject - she practically lived in there the first month. There is some contention about the term "babywearing"; RIE practitioners like Janet Lansbury  hate the term because it implies that baby is an item of clothing while the Sears' consider it one of the  seven pillars of attachment parenting . I like the ter...