Seeing her turn one, her movements were very clumsy but you could already tell she is trying her best to move her hands functionally. She was learning a lot of gross motor skills such as pulling herself, cruising along the furniture and finally taking little steps on her own. Now in her third year, she loves running, hops like a kangaroo. Her fine motor skills have improved a lot too. Back then she used to fumble building blocks but now she can even hold crayons, turn pages while story time and hold apple slices. It amazes me and Khushi all the time how these little hands are continuing to grow at that fast of a pace.

My favorite stage in the last 2 years was watching her babble. After she hit her first year she almost started babbling words like “mum mum mum” or “dada dada dada”. The second year, she started turning these short words into small phrases such as “bye mama”, “more milk”. But now she can name colors, asks “what”, “where” and tells me cute stories about her day. Me and her mom love hearing those cute stories.

The parenthood book I read talked about those big emotions which are hard to understand in tiny bodies so I took Ms Howlett’s Psyc 30 class and I learnt, According to Freud, this is the ‘anal stage’ where babies like Kiana learn how to control their bodies and their environment. Such as potty training, probably the biggest milestone me and Kiana achieved. Some days we made huge progress but some days extra laundry was involved. It was a prideful moment for me but for her it was a mix of emotions. She was always so curious about flushing the toilet by herself. It’s so interesting to see her do things “all by herself”, through which tantrums happen. Now I know it's a part of her growing up and learning about her emotions and the world around her so I let her do things by herself but always supervise her. I always see her having fights with her cousins because she doesn't like to share her toys where she goes like “this is mine” kind of behaviour which I am pretty concerned about as it shows the quality of selfishness but after some research I found out that it is a part of Kiana’s preoperational stage where she is supposed to have this me centric point of view.

I feel like everyday I look at her she is developing new actions and surprising us with new things she is learning. These few years with her have been a great part of my life where we got lots of Kiana’s childhood stories to tell her when she grows up. I strongly believe that the next few years of her childhood will be even more exciting. Till my next blog, Stay posted guy!!!!!!!!!