Kiran Simone

It's been about 5 months now, and most everyone I know already knows we've had a new baby daughter born in May. We've named her "Kiran Simone" after both her grandfathers. She was born with a full head of jet-black hair, it was pretty amazing. Sometimes we call her Kira for short.

She was born full term, unlike Siddharth who was almost 3 weeks early. Because of that, being that babies gain a lot of their weight towards the end of their term, Kira was a bit bigger. And she continued to get bigger.

At first we were kind of worried about how Sidd would deal with having a new person in the house, especially one that would be diverting a lot of attention away from him. But I was surprised how quickly the initial impact lasted, as in, he immediately took the big brother role, before the age of 2, instantly. Sidd adores Kiran, to a degree that I wasn't expecting at all. We all refer to her as "mei mei" or little sister in Mandarin and he's always talking about her (in his own mish-mash broken language), always hugging her, always kissing her on the face or hands or feet or pretty much anywhere.

It's great, and the only concern really is that he's too affectionate, which is understandable since he's only 2 years old.

And at the same time, she adores Sidd. Sidd makes her laugh in ways that nobody else can. Her big brother can just be jumping around or spinning or doing any number of silly things a 2 year old does and she's full on belly laugh; a level of jolly that nobody else can even get her to come close to. While at the same time Sidd knows he's entertaining her so he keeps it up.

Other than constantly being smothered by her older brother, Kiran has been a rather a silent observer. She doesn't cry all that much but Sidd was the same way. However, she seems to have an awareness that Sidd never had at the same age. One of the things that we noticed when she was only 2 months old or so, was she'd recognize when people on TV were talking. I know this sounds like a really strange thing to take note of, but my parents stayed with us for a month (and my dad a week before that) and they'd be watching video on their laptops, Kiran on their lap and follow along with all the dialog. If two people were on the screen she'd always be looking at the one talking.

She's at the age now when she's supposed to be "taking in stuff", like observing random things like dog's throwing up (honestly read a baby milestone guide that talked about observing dogs throwing up), but she still seems in my mind at least, keener on her observations compared to our only other control subject, her older brother. She could probably hear better than him, Sidd failed his just-borned baby hearing test. But she was tracking her eyes just a few months old, and it seemed like it took Sidd a longer to get to that stage.

Anyways, she's rounding out a little, still gaining a lot of weight and generally looking adorable.

A lot of people I know who have kids were in this situation before us, we got into the having kids thing late in the game. While I think that I have a pretty good distribution of friends and family who both had offspring and opted not to, I only relatively recently switched teams to the offspring pack. I don't regret it at all but there's definitely stuff you miss, especially when we have two, and the biggest thing is that you simply don't have all that much time than before. Like, pretty much all of your time, any you could have spared, is nearly gone. It's not any kind of new thing and everyone speaks about your life ending when you have kids, but it's really not as bad as it sounds.

I used to have a lot of time on my hands, and as you get older, you just have more stuff that needs to get done but the 24 hour day doesn't yield you any favors. I remember having so much free time as a college student, and this was a Carnegie Mellon student in the very highly competitive ECE department where I spent most of my senior year sleepnig under a lab bench so we could finish our projects, I remember having the kind of free time where you could do things just to do them or engage in long pedantic debates about whether eating puke or shit is worse. 20 years later, here I am with no time on my hands but it feels so much more rewarding, every second of the day that I can spend with Sidd or Kiran. And I will definitely admit that I am wearing the "these are my offspring" goggles. They have VIP treatment from me because they're my kids.

I remember long ago before kids, when I'd be at a friend or family's house and their kids would be running around going nuts and jumping on shit or riding bikes indoors or whatever, and think "man, if I ever had kids I'd never let them do that", but here I am and when I see Siddharth zooming around on his little bike indoors I think "wow, look at him go".

Here's one more sly picture of Kiran, in her very fashionable sting-ray onesie:

I've been neglecting taking as many pictures or videos of her, there's not nearly as much compared to Sidd. I'm sure a lot of that is because the pure mind-blowing aspect of having a living blob of flesh that can smile at you isn't new this time around, but I'm also sure it's not because this kid is not amazing. She's something else, in a way I never imagined anyone in my life could be.

10/9/2015