In Memoriam: Judy's Infancy

Judy and her Dad at 3 weeks

 

Judy and Terry at Murrays Bay 1963

 

Just starting to walk 

 

Towards Christmas 1961 

 

 

In Kashmir, learning to crawl.







Judy was a great baby. Three days after she was born I went to Calcutta for a few days.

 

A few days after I got back home, Audrey and Judy moved to our house, and we started to learn the job of parenthood.

 

In January, my Aunt, Doris, paid a visit to us. She had for many years worked as Treasurer of the Baptist Womens Missionary Union, and was a very significant person in my early life.  She stayed with us for three weeks in Agartala, and obviously enjoyed getting to know Judy, and spending time with us as a young family. Sadly she died of a heart attack a few weeks after returning to Auckland. She was only 63.

In May of 1960, we went on holiday to Kashmir, taking Judy with us in trains, planes and busses, and staying in a houseboat in Srinagar and a tent in Pahalgam, and even on the station platform with dozens of others at Pathankot.

 

Judy was a good baby; we had a reasonably straightforward learning curve as parents. When she was around twelve months, however, and learning to walk, she caused us to scratch our heads.

As we were sitting reading in the evening by the light of the pressure lamp, a little figure appeared in the doorway (there were no internal doors in our house) and started to look around and talk to us. As it was well past her bedtime, and we had thought she was sound asleep as usual, we picked her up and bundled her back into bed.

 

The next evening this treatment didn’t work; Judy appeared a second time soon after we had put her back to bed.

 

After a few nights of this game, we hit on a solution. We decided that we would just carry on as if she wasn’t there; in other words, we would not reward her behaviour with any attention. So when the little figure appeared in the doorway and started to carry on her usual lively social interaction, we just continued reading and passing the odd conversational remark to each other, completely as though she wasn’t there. Of course we were splitting our sides with laughter inside, but we managed to hold our breath long enough to convince Judy we weren’t seeing or hearing her. She came up to each chair in turn and peered into our faces, and that was the most difficult time for suppression of giggles! Eventually she got her pillow (she always carried a “Nai-nai” to hold while she sucked her thumb) and lay down by the doorway, and after a few minutes, went off to sleep on the floor. We picked her up and put her back in bed, and she never tried that again.

While Audrey and Terry were in hospital, Judy and I enjoyed ourselves. Among other things, her language was developing fast. I counted over 100 different words she could use, including several two and three-word phrases.

She was always ahead of her age-group at her grasp of language.

 Judy 17 months, Terry a few days, in Shillong

 

 

During her third year, Judy went through a period of tantrums. If crossed, she would get upset and cry. To calm  her we would take her to her room and sometimes even to her bed where she would gradually calm down. This might happen once in six weeks, but after a few months, she grew through this phase.

 

 

Most of the time, she was a happy, friendly, positive little girl, loved by all her family and friends.