Beckett turned 3 on the 18th of June.
She has also developed a personality and a few habits. Much of it is for the worse and not something I expected to see or have to deal with. She gets aggressive and enters shouting matches when her bidding is not done, she cannot stand rejection or being told that hitting someone or making a mess is not cool, and starts crying at the drop of a hat.
But the worst and most heart breaking development is that she's stopped trying when encountered with something tricky or difficult.
In laws and Missus have tried hard to bully me into accepting that this is normal behaviour, but yours truly is not buying any of that crap. Beckett @ 3 is a far cry from the fiercely determined Beckett, who at 8 months learnt to crawl and grab my far away placed phone, and who at 2, relentlessly kept trying till she learnt how to jump with both feet.
The first blame for this heart breaking behaviour is mine - Having a part time father is not good for a child. Hopefully that is behind us and Beckett will have a full time father for the foreseeable future. The second, which unfortunately is a corollary of the first, is being exposed only to consumption and always having someone at her beck and call to cater to her whims without any pushback, instead of learning basic constructs of acceptable social behaviour and importance of effort.
Hopefully Pre-school, Missus realizing that mollycoddling can be very pernicious, and I being a voice of dissent (and sanity) will help undo some of the damage. But this is a situation I would have wanted to not get into in the first place.
But not all is bad.
In the time between the post on April 5 and this one, Beckett has learnt to speak 3 new languages. Hindi, English, and phrases of Marathi. Hindi - because of her playground friends in Vile Parle, Marathi because a couple of the nannies of her friends would talk to her in Marathi, and English because she has recently started going to Pre-school here in SF.
She has learnt how to name objects. She has a stuffed monkey who she named Sitaram and a penguin who she named Shitole. She has a doll whose name changes daily - Jignita, Vruddhi, and Elila being some of the names that I remember.
She is completely potty trained (that is another story I will tell someday), has learnt to jump on to mattresses from a height of 3 and a half feet, hates being photographed, and does a great job of cooking me make belief food in make belief utensils. She's also discovered public parks and public libraries and makes full use of them.
P.S: I hate it thoroughly when someone calls Beckett a princess or doll. It is a devious social construct to shut down possibilities for her. And more often than not, it is women who are more likely to indulge in this stereotyping. I wish they would be more specific. I would be a lot less agitated father if they called her an amazon princess or soccer girl Cassie.
