I wake up at 4 am to the sound of my son calling “tha tha tha”. He is still too young to distinguish between genders, and is happy calling everyone dad. Or at least that is what the sounds combined would mean in Sinhala. But nope, Akashiv does not think it has any difference, whether he calls his mum dad, or mum. He likes the word and he shalt use it.

The early hours of the morning consists on hugging the kid in an attempt to convince him that it is time to sleep, and not the time to try climbing off the cot, to jump on mummy’s bed, to make an attempt to pull mummy’s hair. He does not agree. He likes the list as they be, and many more added to it. So yes, mummy shall stay awake till he decides to sleep. And that of course is when mummy has to prep up for work. But “who cares?” Right? Mummy needs to play with baby, and baby insists.

I open the laptop, check my mail. There was a time I looked for personal mail, but now, it seems more like work, work, and work. The inbox be filled with mailing list based communication which seem to over-flow.

Baby is up, and he wonders what mummy does. She seems to like poking her finger on some letters more than she likes to spend time with him, so he must like whatever that thing is!
“Let me try to poke too!!” A high-speed crawling baby approaches mummy’s laptop just to see what is so fascinating that mummy does not seem to have time for him.

“NO NO Akashiv! Do not pull out letters off the key board!”

Too late! “T” has suffered a sudden death, permanently segregated itself from my keyboard.

Akashiv looks at me with a quizzical look. Comes close to the bed post and plays with his shadow. He has discovered of late that he can shake his fingers and make the shadows move, among other things such as : if he pulls hard the protection on the play pen will come off, if he puts his hand into a jug of milk it can be spilled, if he pulls on the spoon used to feed him he can apply the pulp being fed all over himself.

I continue typing, he peeps in and I let him sit on my lap and try to remove more letters off my keyboard.

He shrieks with pleasure, tries to stick fingers up my nose, fails and resorts to making sounds again.

And I turn to reading my mail, again.