It's sprayback time!

Once upon a time, someone sent me a forward with the picture of a baby whose entire face was covered with baby food. It was cute, but unlikely to happen, I thought. How on earth a small baby could get all that food all over her face was beyond me.

Till the day I watched my sister try to shove some gooey mushy stuff into Aish's mouth.

Aish is just getting started on semi-solids, and she makes no qualms about expressing how much she hates it. Her mealtimes have become family affairs, often spanning a few hours, and involving not just her immediate family, but second and third cousins of ours and the domestic helpers too. Everyone tries their hand to get her to eat, but she has all sorts of strategies to counter the situation.

You'd think it's an easy task. Just take some of the gooey mushy stuff in the carefully manufactured plastic spoon with rounded edges and gently place it in the little one's mouth, and she'll just gobble it up, right?

Wrong.

Then I decided to take matters (and the spoon) in my own hands, proclaiming, "Give me that, tum logon ko kuchh nahin aata hai!" What I did not expect were the miniature Karate moves that Aish had somehow mastered. A left hook to the spoon and a right uppercut to my elbow, and suddenly all the food that was once in the spoon had neatly landed on her forehead. Five spoonfuls later, she has food everywhere on her face except her mouth, closely resembling the baby in the forward I had received. This is actually a very funny sight, and everyone except my sister is amused.

After pleading and cajoling yielded no results, my sister came up with smarter tactics. She looked at Aish very very sternly and suddenly yelled in capital letters, "EAT OR I'LL GET VERY ANGRY!" I think she scared me more than she scared baby Aish.

"What's wrong with you?? Why are you yelling at the baby???" I yelled.

"Shhh... if I yell, it will scare her. If I scare her, she will cry. The moment she opens her mouth to cry, I will put the food in her mouth." She whispered, still maintaining the stern look.

Ah, clever.

"Arre wah! Tum toh uski hi nahin, hum sabki maa ho!" I proclaimed.

Meanwhile, Aish was looking a bit surprised, trying to figure out what the hell had happened to make her usually quiet mother scream like that.

"I'M REALLY VERY ANGRY, AISH!" My sister yelled again.

Bingo.

"Waaaaaaaaaa" went a visibly shaken Aish, and in went the spoon with the gooey mushy stuff.

For a second, Aish looked extremely surprised. Then in what was to become one of her trademark moves, "phooooooooooooooshh!" she sprayed all the food back at my sister, sending me into fits of laughter. Aish leaned back in her stroller with a smug look. And now her mother was the one resembling the baby in the forward.

My exasperated sister looked at me helplessly and asked (this time in lowercase letters), "Sayesha, why doesn't she eat???"

Erm... it was of course a rhetorical question, wasn't it? Surely she didn't expect me to know why baby Aish refused to eat, right?

But I looked at my sister guiltily. Cos deep in my heart, I knew. That I was kinda responsible for Aish's disagreement with food in general.

Damn I should never have pointed out babe Aish's hot bod in Dhoom 2 to baby Aish.