Krishna Janmashtami

Last Saturday (23 August) was Krishna's birthday (Janmashtami). For the full story, click here(ubiquitous, mandatory in every blog wikipedia link).

Apart from the religious aspects of celebrating the birthday of the most important incarnations of Vishnu, it's also, the time to disco, err... party.

Krishna's story has some similarities with Moses' I guess. The prophecy was that he would become King one day, so his evil Uncle decided to do away with him. The child was smuggled to a family of cow herders and Krishna spent his days growing up out of reach of his Uncle and raising cows. Krishna spent his days tending his herd and playing the flute.

So there's last week's mug shot in a yellow outfit. Women traditionally dress up their young as Krishna or his consort, Radha (depending on gendr). So, we ignored slight gender issues and dressed Miss N as Krishna. That also demanded a flute. Sure it'd be great if there was a shop that supplied imitation baby size decorative flutes. There's not. So, outfit was completed with chopstick covered in yellow cloth. Improv.

Anyway, so some random cute photos of Naina in her Krishna outfit complete with ceremonial chopstick, err, flute.

Getting kitted up


Hat in position, practicing holding the ceremonial chopstick


Biting ceremonial chopstick (flute)


Okay, Krishna time over, what's on outside (note disused rocker seductively reclining in the background).

Naina

Naina's good. Still "small" by Western centric standards.

I put it down to the vaccines she had last week. She put on 40g in about 8 days, but was very unsettled for most of it, so I think she may have lost weight and was on the upswing anyhoo.

But because of due concerns, I thought I'd take the afternoon off work and attend the nurse's appointment.

Apart from hurting my back carrying Ms N around, I was informed that there is a "Indian babies" weight chart. So my job is to go and find it. The nurse also reassured us (in that feint praise style) that well, at least she's putting on weight.

Funny enough the nurse advised to breast feed for 5 mins then switch to the other breast for 5 mins. I thought, hmm, that runs counter-intuitive to the idea that the real fat part of the milk is at the end and it is more watery for those first few minutes. They're the experts in this stuff, so lets give it a go.

Anyway, without going in to too much poo detail, it didn't work (the proof was in the nappy, so to speak). Naina was probably overfeeding on high sugar milk and not getting enough of the fat milk. We've gone back to a more routine feeding pattern and Ms N carries on like the happy smiley baby she is!



Ms N, 1, Murrumbeena MCHN, Nil (read as a soccer scorecard).

PS: Just found the Indian weight for age graph: Naina is in the 25 th percentile for weight (5.4 kg) and bang on 50 th percentile for height (61 cm).

Baby Bunting Madness World

Truly, baby discount stores are for mad people.

I fondly remember the first time we visited Baby Bunting. My mum insisted that we organise some clothes for the baby (yet to be born). I guess this was February 2008.

It's a massive store, the one in Oakleigh. There's the 30 to 40 different prams on display, sofas, bedding, car seats, baby capsules, clothes, maternity wear, toys, chairs, nappies (by the boxload, $50 for 144 disposable Huggies nappies), more prams, an entire wall full of baby bottles and ephemera and of course, more prams and nappies and wipes. There's also a burly (female) security guard, thefts have risen dramatically.

I was pondering my MBA recently (like, why the hell I did it) and thought about strategy. And one of the parts of understanding and developing strategy is looking at the changes in environment. One of those changes was government policy. I'm not sure when the baby bonus was introduced by Howard's crew (now in excess of 4000$) but anyone who got into the baby industry before then must be raking it in now. All those cashed up mum's and dad's buying $1000 prams (ok, joggers) and expensive sterilization equipment would support a new business quite well. Basically, baby stuff has become an industry, funded in large part by taxes. Baby megastores like BabyBunting have destroyed smaller business that can't compete on price, forcing those niche businesses to go upmarket or out of business (witness the ex-Ferrari shop that became "Parenthood" and then closed down).And that's where the Indonesian hardwood ends up in designer swings and cots. Seriously, $1000 for a jogger is mind boggling.

Certainly, Baby Bunting never seems quiet. We've been on Saturdays and Sundays and there's always about 50 shop assistants running around. But like a bad restaurant, they're always busy with another customer.

They've even got a philosophy:

Our Philosophy

The Baby Bunting Philosophy is simple: To offer our customers the widest range of quality baby products from around the world in store and online, at sensible, down to earth prices.

Random cute photos

Babies, in da hood.
Think it was a movie a few years ago.























Trying out Naina's new shoes
Straight from Target
























Catching up on the news after a busy week























New dress

Nobody warned me

Babies. So cute, so huggable.

Sure, maternity classes they teach you important stuff like how to wash a baby. Or what drugs to ask for in labour. Parents. They're pretty good too. Teach you what to do when baby is screaming her lungs out and have no idea why. Books, interesting as well, learn a lot about western child raising.

Nobody told me this next bit.

Never hold a four month old baby too close to one's nose around dinner time.

Naina managed to bite my nose today.

Andrew, don't say I didn't warn you.

Number's game (part two)

Where to begin. I think my last post was a little ill-considered.

I don't step back from the general gist of it, that being, there is a lot of finger pointing and blame games when it comes to raising babies. That somehow, as replicated in text books, academia and healthcare, there is a superior Western European way of raising a baby. Whether it be sleeping the baby in the bed with mum and dad, formula feeding, feeding a baby to sleep, using a pacifier or weight, people seem to have very strong opinions about it all. I think I am still shocked how ferociously anti- non-mainstream people can be about these things.

Certainly, these attitudes were never impressed on me before N was born. I would have thought that there are many ways to raise a child in any culture and none should be considered inferior to another.

As an example, I would have thought that being as close to a baby as possible for the first, say nine months after birth would be a great way for a baby to feel secure. For mum and dad and baby.

What I have witnessed is a general, repeated sense of "what on earth are you doing to your child". Things as humble as using mustard oil instead of olive oil invokes responses such as "don't use that, India is a poor country". Sleeping a baby in the bed invokes "you are giving her bad habits". Giving her a pacifier gets "how can she talk when she's got that thing in her mouth" and feeding her to bed gets "she'll rot her teeth out with all the milk".

I went overboard by making this distinction based on the colour of people's skin, because well ignorance and sneers are not based on the colour of people's skin and it was unfair on those people with an open mind about these things and don't care how a baby is raised as long as baby, mum and dad are happy. So I am sorry about any offense caused by that.

The numbers game

Naina's definitely small for her height. She's three months and three weeks yesterday and is 5.355 kg. She's also 60 cm tall. According to western medicine and statistics, she is in the lowest 10th percentile for weight but just in the 50th percentile for her height. Her maternal uncles and aunts are tall and thin, so I'm hoping she's taking after them. But here's the thing, those stupid graphs make people worried and unhappy, partly because they are incomprehensible to the average university graduate and partly because a lack of height or too much height or a lack of weight or too much weight makes parents thing they are doing the wrong thing by their baby.

I really find statistics and facts and what babies should be like annoying. Most books published are western centric, designed to make non-western mum and dad's feel like aliens on this planet. There can never ever be one (culturally biased) answer to something as universal as child rearing. No group, no ethnicity has a cultural mortgage over the truth of child raising, however, reading some books, one would be mistaken to think that only white people could ever raise normal healthy children.

One particular upsetting book from the Glen Eira council included a list of things never to do - never rock your baby to sleep, never feed your baby to sleep, never hold your baby to sleep etc. Babies fall asleep on the booby, that's one of the things they do! I reckon that there is a deep misanthropic streak in many midwives and maternal nurses and child experts who want babies to be clones. In the perverse sense of social engineering their pursuit is to create babies who all fit into boxes by the time they get to primary school.

Despite all the advice I have seen about not sleeping the baby in the bed with mum and dad, almost every one I have met (apart from my boss) admits to doing it a little bit or a lot and then say don't tell the white people. Social engineers. Some twit at work said to me that sleeping a baby in the bed raises children with bad habits. Yeah she'd know, because her babies never slept in the bed with mum and dad and go out and get pissed out of their skull every Friday and Saturday night. That's a healthy normal teenager according to western thinking???

A week is a long time in ...

We've had quite the week, with Naina more and more adorable each day. I think Deepti and I are both hooked on our little bub.

The updates are coming a little slower now, probably as we're more active and Naina is more constant (in a totally erratic way of course). We had unexplained crying on Wednesday morning at 6 am (good morning) and then on Thursday night at 10 pm (good evening and good night) and then a hunger tantrum on Saturday on the way to Andrew and Kate's party at the very interesting North Carlton Railway Station.

Here's a fantastic article in The Age about the disused rail lines around Melbourne. There'd be a big demand for some of those outer lines nowadays. Really like the idea of the Rosstown line as well, from Carnegie to the bay.

Naina's nani (Deepti's mum) sent a lovely jumper from India.

"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm huntin wabbits"

However, it reminds me of a rastafarian cap more than a jumper. I've started singing"I don't like cricket" to her when she has her jumper in this position. You tell me which suits.

I shot da sherriff, but I did not shoot da deputy...

Keyboard monkey

Naina hit the keyboard again tonight.

Didn't get the chance to document her typing, but she lost interest after a while and proceeded to chew my finger for 10 minutes. Maybe she's not such a savant after all and just likes a good chew.

She's also started giggling to herself when she looks in the mirror. I take this is not because of my disheveled appearance but her excitement at seeing herself clearly and her humongous eyebrows. She takes after me, not her mum in this part.

Good luck

Hindus are very spiritual people and believe strongly in karma and past lives.

Naina, we were told, was born at an auspicious time, meaning her stars were in a particular alignment that foretold a great future. I think she was born in rasi but I will have to check that.

I've been raised, cross culturally. My parents who are neither extremely Indian or extremely westernised for an Indian family. My mum and dad are quite religious though and that led to the time of the wedding being an auspicious time, the time of Naina's birth being considered an auspicious time and the ceremonies being done in the future (first solids, first haircut) being done at auspicious times.

So Naina's next ceremony will be her first food or "anaprashana", which we will do in Perth. Then when she is a bit older (before 1st or after 3rd birthday), her "mundan" where her hair is shaved off. That first hair ceremony will involve spreading her hair cuttings in the Ganges as a step of moving from her past life to her new life. N's hair will probably be at her knees by that stage. Lucky they keep growing.

I've mused on this before, where was she, what did she see, what did she do in her past life. What sins and good deeds did she do to be born in this family, in this time, in this country? It is a wonderful, open thought.

Toothless smile

Naina spends a few hours each day in the kangaroo pouch. It has to be the best invention since man and marsupial split in the evolutionary tree. Naina loves it so much that we take it with us out and about as well and she giggles crazily, toothlessly when I walk up to her and start laughing at her.

But as per previous entry, we have had no success catching that toothless smile on DVD or picture.

This was the best we got.


I tried everything. Hiding the camera till the last second, photographing her from behind Deepti, even upside down:


This was the usual look I got. (Insert quote from Marvin - here I am, a brain the size of a planet, and all they can do is try to make me laugh. Someone give me a laptop).


Well, I'm proud to say we had success. Sunday's, ritualistically are not Naina's best days. Perhaps we do too much on Sundays, but every Sunday, something goes wonky. Today it was barely feeding. However, she wasn't upset, cranky, tired or anything else we could think of. She even did big number 2's.

But then success!, we got a photo worth shouting about, early evening.

Deepti, Naina and Bobo
(one for the Simpson's fans out there)