She just throws them

My 17-month-old daughter loves throwing things on the floor, and given a chance, she also throws stuff down the balcony. Many a time she’s been intercepted while approaching the toilet seat holding her toys or other household tools and appliances. In fact recently she cracked our surveillance and threw my mobile phone into the flush.

Talking about the phone, she loves flinging the phones with great force. She does that with a calm face — it’s like, one moment she is engrossed in some deep conversation with the phone tightly held against the ear and the head tilted slightly towards the phone and both the shoulders slightly elevated, and the next moment she smashes the phone against the floor and moves on to some other object that catches her fancy. We’re quite amazed at the sturdiness of our phones. By now they should have disintegrated multiple times due to the impacts they incur everyday.

She launches a volley of vociferous protests when someone dares to interrupt her. When she wants to throw something, she means business, and you gotta be out of your mind if you want to stop her. No amount of verbal warnings can deter her and in fact the more vehemently you say “no”, the greater are the grin and the force when she throws the thing. She construes our cautionary expressions as a part of the game. So you can only hope that she gets distracted just in the nick of time if you were careless enough to leave your precious thing within her reach.

It’s not that we are dead against her sending things flying after every fifteen minutes but she doesn’t discriminate between expensive and inexpensive, heavy and light, and breakable and unbreakable objects. For instance, that day she pushed the dining chair and it fell on the floor with a great slam, rattling the entire neighborhood in the process. Then, she brings heavy utensils from the kitchen and bangs them against the floor, totally freaking out the people living on the first floor (we’re on the second floor). It often becomes a juggling act for Alka who constantly tries to catch the objects before they hit the floor.

Sometimes she doesn’t throw, as in, she doesn’t hurl the object as an act of throwing, she just let’s it fall from the point she’s holding it, without giving a second (or even a first) glance, as if it doesn’t exist, orchestrating an expression like an angel singing a melody of innocence, and you just want to give up the world for her there and then.

Fortunately she hasn’t broken anything very expensive yet and we hope her constant banging of utensils against the floor won’t get us thrown out of the building.