It is the 2nd birthday of this blog. I started this as a journal of my thoughts on parenthood. However, I am only reasonably happy by its activity. It has been a challenge writing on it and there are long gaps with a bunch of important issues being left unwritten. My new year resolution is going to be to become more regular on this blog.

Currently we are very busy preparing for our India visit. Akshra is growing fast and is learning new mischief every day.

Akshra has been giving us a lot of grief during nights for the last month or so. What is up with this kid? Just when we think that we could actually now get some rest at nights she is back to her strange ways. Mostly coming from the fact that we spoiled her by bringing her to our bed from the crib if she happened to ever wake up in the night. So, now, she wakes up in the night usually around 4am and then stands up in the crib and is very vulnerable to a terrible fall from the crib and then starts to wail. I generally bring her to out bed at this time. This would be OK if she would just go to sleep on our bed. No. She wants to toss and turn and somersault and twist and turn ad kick us in our ribs and faces and God knows what else. She is like a little animal thrashing around neither falling asleep nor letting us sleep. It is just awful. Then around 5am I generally give up and walk out of the room and she generally falls a sleep at that point. This happens more or less every day with the hour changing a little bit but the routine is more or less the same.

We have to train her to remain in her crib. We can only do that once we lower her crib so that she cannot fall out of it. Hopefully I can do that today. Then of course comes the painful part of training her -- which would involve letting her cry for a while -- and a long while it is going to be. She can now cry very loudly for close to a half-hour. Terrible.

A parent's day is never over. Take yesterday evening and then the last night for example. I reached home around 7pm and Akshra was having her dinner. She has been giving a bit of a trouble with dinner last few days but she seemed fine yesterday and she finished her meal promptly. After that she was happy. She spend about half an hour just playing with her toys while we ate our dinner. She did not demand attention or become fussy in any way. After we finished our dinner we started joking around with her and she was in this fantastic mood. I got the video camera and we took 15 minutes of just fabulous shots. She was such as doll and so happy! We would ask her all sorts of questions and she would do everything right and jump around and laugh and giggle and yell and everything that we wanted her to do on the video. It was so much fun! Puja and I just couldn't get enough of her.

We started winding her down around 8.30 and got her into her night suit and it seemed like we had just had a really good evening. We warmed her milk and took her to her crib to put her to sleep. She started throwing a fuss as she has started doing these days and wouldn't sleep in the crib. So Puja decided to put her on our bed and put her to sleep. A huge mistake as we realized soon.

She drank her milk and seemed to have fallen a sleep. Puja almost fell asleep next to her.

It was about 9.30 and I was in another room working on the computer when I heard Puja's screams. I went running and much to my chagrin Akshu had vomited all over the bed and on Puja and was actually in the process of doing more. I gave Puja some towels and napkins and lifted Akshu and took her to the bathroom where she continued to vomit copiously. It was quite an incident. Akshu hadn't vomited in months. This was just bizarre. Before long she had thrown up all the milk and dinner and anything else she had had since afternoon. This was all over the bed (which thankfully was covered by a comforter so only that was ruined and not the bed-sheet or the bed itself.)

Akshu was in a bad shape. Her throat was hurting her and her nose was blocked. We had to wash her and changer her clothes. She seemed as shocked as we were. It was all very strange.

We started the cleanup mission and dumped the comforter, towels and a bunch of clothes into the washing machine. We cleaned up the bathroom and the bedroom floor.

Akshra was very quite, a bit nervous.

Finally around 11pm we were all done and we just collapsed into our bed. Akshra fell asleep as well and we put her back in her crib.

The day is never ever until you wake up the next day and then another one starts all over again.