About a month before we left for Australia late last year, Kaia randomly came home from school one day constantly calling me “mama-ji.” She continued to say this while we were in Australia, which cracked up Chris’s mom because “ji” is usually added to the end of a name as a sign of respect in India. It’s why you oftentimes hear people say “baba-ji” in India. And since coming back from our trip, she stopped saying “mama-ji,” but now it has evolved into “mummy dear” or what occasionally sounds like “mummy-daah!” For Chris, she greets him by saying “Daddy-ma! Daddy-ma!” “Daddy” now always ends with a “ma.” We’re not sure if one of the books they are reading in class is doing this or if she heard another one of her classmates call their parents by these terms or similar ones, but we’d assume so since we definitely do not hear these things in what we expose her to.

It’s been really cute to see how the way she addresses us has evolved. What I hope will never happen, though, is that she won’t start calling me or addressing me as “Mother.” That would annoy me to no end. It already sounds annoying to me when Chris refers to his own mom as “mother.” It feels very cold, formal, almost borderline hostile, as though you don’t feel any warmth or endearment towards your parent if you have to refer to them so formally as though you just took the dictionary term for them and slapped it on.