Tractor Nightmares

Avyaan is now at a stage where he, sometimes, talks in his sleep, and wakes up when has had some sort of scary one.

Today morning, when he was half awake, he suddenly woke up, and the first line he said was, "किसने लिया अव्यान का ट्रॅक्टर?" ("Who took away Avyaan's tractor?").

Some context should help here. Avyaan is very fond of model vehicles, of all sorts. It doesn't matter whether it is a big rig truck, a garbage truck, a police car, or a vintage jeep, he loves them all. My sister, Bhavya, is visiting us and she brought him a model tractor, the workhorse of Indian agriculture. As anything novel, he refused to let it leave his side for all of yesterday. You can see him sleeping with the tractor in his hand during his afternoon nap.

However, as the day went on, he started poking and prodding at its parts, and by the evening had destroyed the steering wheel. By dinner time, one of the seats was also out, at which point I took it away from him and told him that he'll not get it if he kept destroying it.

Apparently, he was dreaming about his tractor at night. It must be nice to be at an age where your nightmares concern losing toys and you don't have much else to worry about.

Mumma, TV pe Cocomelon laun de!

I always knew that Avyaan is going to be multilingual. He is typically surrounded by Hindi, Marathi, English, and Punjabi. If we continue to live in the US, I'm sure he'll have a fairly decent exposure to Spanish as well.

Hindi is my primary language and the preferred mode of communication with my side of the family. Prajakta's side almost exclusively speaks to him in Marathi, while my parents do sprinkle in some Punjabi here and there, which is culturally our native language, and which I can understand, but unfortunately, never made an attempt to learn to speak, read or write.

English is inescapable and a must-know in the modern world, but we need to do a better job at exposing him to it. The ongoing pandemic, and the lack of vaccines for kids under 5, means that we cannot enroll him into usual child activities. Both Prajakta and I are notoriously asocial, so we don't have many friends locally, and we don't get invited to anything, which also means Avyaan doesn't get any socialization.

The only group activity he is a part of is a once-a-week kids gym class at the nearby My Gym which has helped him a lot in giving an out for his endless energy and introducing him to other kids his age. But since we don't speak to him in English, the extent of English he knows is pretty much the rhymes we sing to him, what he watches on TV - Cocomelon, and some basic interactions he has with the people passing by when he's sitting in the balcony.

As he grows up, his cognitive abilities and linguistic skills are also exploding, so he absorbs everything he observes. So, we were a little surprised when he went to Prajakta, with the Roku remote in hand, and said - "Mumma, TV pe Cocomelon laun de", which is a perfect amalgamation of the 3 primary languages he is currently exposed to. He mixes languages when communicating, and will probably continue to do so as most multilingual people do, but I hope as he grows up, he gets better at regulating his language and can form sentences that stick to one language at a time.