Aashish Sangoi, Papa of little Ananya in the San Francisco Bay area, shares some moments from his first few weeks of fatherhood.

Our baby – Ananya – is seven weeks old. At this stage, she is pretty much asleep most of the time and only plays for an hour or so every day – although that time is increasing every week.

Since she is not mobile and her eyesight can only focus up to a foot away – her playing ‘activities’ are limited. She mostly plays on her own when the conditions are right – full stomach, empty bowels. Her hands box and her legs kick when she is in a playful mood. We use a couple of props to play with her. One is a bouncer and another is a play mat – both hand-me-downs from cousins.

The bouncer has hanging props that she can hit when she is ‘boxing’ with her hands. Sometimes we also jingle these to catch her attention and help her move her eyes to see if she can focus. These props are right now at just about the right focus point of her eyesight. We use the bouncer a lot since she can play in it and we can use it to gently bounce her to sleep.

We use the playmat for shorter periods during the day. The playmat has a lot more hanging toys which we rattle and shake to play with the baby. It can also play lights and sounds but I think the lights don’t attract her yet – perhaps because they are a bit out of her focus. I sit down with the playmat and rattle each hanging toy in a circular fashion continuously so she is entertained.

We’ve also tried to play with her using soft toys but she doesn’t seem to fancy those – perhaps at a later stage.

Sometimes I also carry her – holding her such that she is looking just over my shoulders – and walk about the house. This position is particularly useful when we have to calm her and burp her. If it is light out, we show her outside the window and talk to her about whats going on outside.

Her final play time is just before going to bed. She is a late sleeper usually sleeping past midnight. However, at this time, we don’t actively engage with her to play. We try to rock her to sleep but usually end up carrying her in our arms and pacing the house. We generally sing lullabies to her while pacing back and forth. I also talk to her in hushed tones that she will be sleeping soon and gently swing her in my arms. Usually talking and singing to her and gently swinging her in a figure-of-eight motion does the trick and puts her to sleep.

Some of the songs we sing are Lakdi ki Kaathi, Nani Teri Morni, and one more homemade Kutchi song about going places. Ananya also likes it when my wife makes faces and talks expressively, which holds her attention for short spans of time.

AskAmma thanks Aashish for sharing this note, part of a series on Play.
Gentle Reader, how do you play?  AskAmma will feature selected stories periodically.

Books, movies, puzzles …
from Murthy, Nanna to 9-year-old Sahith in Seattle

Here are some things that Sahith and I enjoy together. I had to stretch the time into last year also for some of the fun activities 🙂

Murthy and Sahith

– talking about characters and events in the books he reads (for example, the recent Ranger’s Apprentice)
– watching superhero movies such as spiderman
– singing some songs when Sahith is in the mood — usually, having him take the lead in conducting/singing/directing the song gives him extra motivation and incentive.

– bicycling — did this a lot last year.
– harmless wrestling — did this quite a bit last year, simple ground-rules such as not using legs and always doing it on the bed, makes it safe. Sahith has quite a bit of fun with this.
– putting together jigsaw puzzles

hmm… what else? I’m sure there are some that I can’t remember now. All I can think of at the moment is how often he says “can I go read now?” 🙂

AskAmma thanks Murthy for sharing this note, part of a series on Play.
Gentle Reader, how do you play?  AskAmma will feature selected stories every Wednesday.

Bicycle for Two
from Somnath, Baba to 5-year old Adrita in Arlington, Massachusetts

Developed with direct inputs from Adrita:

I am very careful to not hurt the plants and the trees so I go with my Baba on the bicycle wherever we can. Of course it cannot be negative 16 deg C when we use the bicycle. But we can still walk to school in negative 16 deg C…well I walk half the way and Baba walks the full way and I sit on his shoulders the other half of the way. During the last snow we made a snow-woman which stayed for a long time with pebble-eyes and twig-ears.

I really like taking the bus and the train a lot but at times we do have to drive 😦 But when we are in the car we take turns in humming tunes of songs we both know but we distort it intentionally and the other one has to identify the song. I really enjoy this game. We have several Bangla and Hindi songs that we have learnt together. On rare occasions we have also used the boat like the people of Sunderbans.

In the summer and autumn we spend a lot of time outside. We go to the Mystic lake on hot summer days and swim with lots of other people. I like to generally stay in the shallow part while Baba goes for a swim after which he comes back and holds me by the belly so that I can try to swim. I don’t like getting out of water but invariably that happens.

Adrita is on the road with Baba

We have lots of parks around our house and we go to at least one park everyday. The parks are named after the AID people who live close to it – Funny park is close to Raju’s house because he is funny. We have Tatha park, Umang park…and of course there are non-AID parks also that we go to on the bicycle.

When spring comes we mix compost in the garden and plant mustard and methi. I love playing in the land while making beds and putting in the seeds. In some time we see baby plants sprouting. Oh, I forgot to say that I like earthworms a lot. I don’t pick them up myself but ask Baba to hold them. When it rains and they get stuck on the road or the pavement we try to pick them up and put them back in the soil. I think they have difficulty moving on the roads.

Lately, we have taken to playing ping pong on the table in our house…I am improving. There are many things I do with my Maa which I will write about in a different post.

~Adrita

AskAmma thanks Somnath for sharing this note, part of a series on Play.
Gentle Reader, how do you play?  AskAmma will feature selected stories every Wednesday.