One of my daily duties is to put Vikram to sleep in the afternoons, when I go home for lunch. And the usual trick is to play the nursery rhymes DVD which has been a very effective tool in putting him to sleep (I wonder how is he going to take being taught these rhymes again when he goes to a nursery school !), but he does enjoy the animation and the music.

We have a good collection of DVDs from many different labels but the pick of all is Pebbles ! We have 3 volumes from Pebbles and as a product I could see tremendous improvement with every release. They have done really a wonderful job compared to others which are version after version, simply pedestrian. Personally I liked this a lot compared to even the Baby Einstein series, much hyped in the US. Vol 3 has become one of my, as well as Vikram's I believe, favorite music video, as much as a Bon Jovi or Pink floyd live concert video ;-)) Has good music composition, orchestration and Shalini Singh has sung beautifully. The animation also shows characters more lively and expressive in this volume.

I strongly recommend this to kids around age 2 or less and their parents ;-)

Waiting for Vikram to move up the chain and start watching Tom and Jerry and the like ...

Its only fair that I write this first about Vikram. He just turned 1 and among many other fascinating things about him,  this one stands on top for me : his fascination to TV ads from when he was 8 months old. He just does not care a thing when something else goes on TV, but as soon as the ads start his eyes are lit up and the face becomes bright. His eyes are glued to the TV screen, does not even wink and sports a 'I will give my life for this' kind of expression on his face !! I usually try all tricks to hide the TV screen by standing in front or use my hands and I simply enjoy his counter moves. He wont even bother to show any reactions or get irritated (he reserves this for other things), he will just be putting his best efforts to move around me not to even miss a second of the ad. The moment the ads stop and the programmes resume, he is back to his usual business. No matter how jazzy the other programme is, it always miserably fails to catch Vik's attention. I am still amazed at how he is able to correctly and distinctly identify the ads (and may be the other kids too). One thing I am happy about is he does not (yet !) like the TV serials ;-)

I will be very happy if he becomes a Prahlad Kakkar or Rajeev Menon some day !! Or if this is just a baby thing and his fascination to ads vanish and becomes a drummer, I still wouldn't mind