Conversations, Circuses and Michaels

(K coughs)
Me: Stop that coughing, please.
K: I'm trying to stop but sometimes it just comes out.
Me: Well, please stop, because I don't like coughing.
K: (coughs)
Me: I believe I asked you to knock that off. (I pull out phone and make imaginary call to circus to arrange the sale of two disobedient young children)
K: You're just teasing me. You aren't really going to sell me to the circus.
Me: You think so? You know, when I was a little girl Grandmama told ME to stop coughing.
K: Did she sell you to the circus?
Me: No, she never had to, because when she told me to stop, I stopped.

As a bit of background to the above conversation, it is true that my mother used to tell me to stop coughing. Specifically it was "Knock it off!" and "You're just doing that for attention", and the whole family does it now.

And when K was a screamy baby, the Slovak and I amused ourselves by coming up with outlandish ideas for what to do with her if she didn't stop. One of our staples was selling her to the circus. We even wrote down the phone number from a circus poster and put it on our wall...for just in case.

Don't worry, though. We're not complete monsters. We made sure to stop that line of joking well before K was old enough to understand what we were saying, and now that she is old enough to judge when we are serious and when we aren't, it has started popping up in conversation again occasionally.

I like to think of that as Good Parenting.

***

Okay, I know I put this one on Facebook, but I have to put it here, too.

K: (Hungarian girl) speaks Czech now.
Me: Does she speak a lot of Czech or a little bit of Czech?
K: Medium. Like you.
Me: EXCUSE ME? I speak better Czech than you!
K: (looks offended)

And this from a person who can't say R! :)

***

Also, did I mention before that in the states she ate a lot of Michaels? We always eat plenty of bagels and cream cheese while we're there and K kept misremembering the word "bagel". So now the whole family enjoys an occasional Michael.

Primitive and Sophisticated Languages

Okay, you know how people are always telling you that their language is more sophisticated than English, because English is so primitive? Primitive is, of course, defined as not having a complex case system. The truly bewildering set of verb tenses doesn't seem to count.

What, people never tell you that?

We clearly move in different circles.

This is what you say:

"You know, supposedly on a historical level languages are actually getting simpler over time...so if you think about it, that really means that English is more highly evolved."

Then watch the reaction.

I bring this up because the Slovak pulled this on me the other day, just trying to get a rise out of me. Sometimes that man will say anything!

The Slovak was just being silly, but the first time I had this conversation, with someone else several years ago, the person was totally not joking and totally did not like this idea. She also didn't like when I mentioned that to a native English speaker, it sounds "primitive" and caveman-like to speak without definite and indefinite articles (Slavic languages, at least the ones I'm familiar with, don't have them). It's all about perspective.

Whether the premise that languages are getting simpler over time is actually true is debatable, but it doesn't really matter. You have to fight pseudo-science with pseudo-science!

Kristova léta

Where I live there is a concept called "Kristova léta" - the years of Christ, referring to the age 33. I think it's supposed to be a time of reflecting on your life and what you have accomplished, given that by age 33 Christ had achieved, like, a lot more than you. I'm not aware of a similar idea in the USA as referring to a time in a person's life, but I remember hearing about it here years ago and thinking...well that's a long time off.

Today is my 33rd birthday. I feel like there should be a snappy punchline to that, but there isn't really. I have a family I love and work I enjoy. Both are going quite well. :)

I was going to bake myself a birthday cake, but with everything going on this week it just wasn't going to happen. I hope to get out a batch of gingerbread tomorrow at least. This December has been so brutal that we've barely done anything for Christmas yet.

The good news is M is on the mend, so things might start getting back to normal.

Having Babies and Making Glossaries

I have spent my blogging time yesterday and today writing up information and a Czech-English L&D glossary for a friend who is about to have a baby here in the Czech Republic. I am thinking I should expand (or condense? I tend to be very thorough) it and publish it here as "The English Speaker's Guide to Giving Birth in the Czech Republic".

My sample size is not large (my own two babies plus comparing notes with friends), but I think I still managed to cover some ground in the area of what to expect, what not to expect, and preemptively explaining some potentially mysterious things that no one will explain to you because they assume you already know. Like why they may only give you day-old bread. Also the word for "dilated", because "how far dilated am I" is usually the lifeline you're hanging your every hope on.

Having written all that up I have been in flashback all yesterday and today to my two very different experiences with my own two children.

I also made a Facebook page for this blog, but I haven't figured out how to make a button or whatever else you're supposed to do with it. For now you can see it here:

www.facebook.com/WhereGoingHavo

5th birthday Interview and Story Time

Tomorrow is my daughter's fifth birthday. I tried to convince her to just turn four again, but she is determined to move on to five.

Yesterday I did the following interview with her, in which she demonstrated that she either doesn't know what "favorite" means or doesn't know what her favorite things are, because most of the answers are wrong (i.e. what she had for lunch that day at school, not her favorite lunch). I will share it anyway.

1. What is your favorite color? pink
2. What is your favorite toy? My little ponies
3. What is your favorite fruit? Tomatoes. Strawberries and boruvky [blueberries]. Apples.
4. What is your favorite tv show? charlie and lola
5. What is your favorite thing to eat for lunch? Rybicku, maso, ryze a mrkvicku [what they served yesterday at lunch]
6. What is your favorite outfit? My pink dress and beautiful shoes what are red
7. What is your favorite game? The one [new best friend friend] gave me for my birthday
8. What is your favorite snack? Bananas and jahody [strawberries]
9. What is your favorite animal? frogs
10. What is your favorite song? Katyusha
11. What is your favorite book? The Gruffalo, o zviratech [books about animals]
12. Who is your best friend? [new friend and Russian friend from school
13. What is your favorite thing to do at home? Watching TV but not all the time. Going to school.
14. What is your favorite thing to do outside? If somebody will pretend to be a policajtka [policewoman] and try to catch me
15. What is your favorite drink? Apple juice.

16. What is your favorite holiday? Halloween and Mikuláš.
17. What do you like to take to bed with you at night? giraffe
18. What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? yogurt
19. What do you want for dinner on your birthday? cake
20. What do you want to be when you grow up? I didn’t decide yet

Also, in the last several months I have been giving K the opportunity to tell me a story and I write it down for her. She loves doing this and will rattle off several in one go. Her stories make almost no sense, and she seems to feel like they ALL have to be about pigs and/or wolves and/or the forest.

Here are a few of the stories she has told me:

Pinkie Pie went in the forest. She was so happy because she heard apples and candy. And then she went home and found a big dragon and it couldn’t scare her because it was too scared. So she went home then and she found a big dog and it was so big that no one could ride on it and so she went home and she found a big, big, giant man. And that’s the end. – 23.7.2012

(note how Pinkie Pie goes home about five times in this story)

Once upon a time there was three pigs. The mommy and apo went on a walk outside with the babies. They went on a walk with their apo and mommy. Then the three little pigs went out for a walk on their own. Their grandmama went with them because they were really scared because they were still babies and because they were still little and they didn’t even know how to walk, so that’s why their grandmother went with them. And then they looked on the clock and then they went home again and that’s the end. 2.9.12

Once upon a time there was five pigs. And they lived in the forest. And they went to a walk in the big bad wolf forest. So the big bad wolf ate the pigs. But the pigs wasn’t scared because the pigs was so, so brave because the pigs had a sword together. And that is the end. 15.10.12

(I really did leave a bunch of pig-wolf stories out. There were more.)

Once upon a time there was a pig and three wolves. And there was one wolf who wanted to eat the pig. But she didn’t eat him. But when the other wolf, second wolf, said "I want to put that pig into my tummy!" So he said, "I am a bandooda" (that’s the wolf’s name). And that’s the end of the story. Oh, and I still wanted to say the pig is alive and Baby M is the pig. It was just a mask and the three wolves was K, mommy, and apo. Three wolves and one pig named M. End of the story. 19.11.2012

(I like how this story comes with an interpretation at the end)

Once upon a time there was a žralok [shark] and a sklenička [drinking glass]. Sklenička wasn’t a socha [statue]! It had legs, arms, and it had eyes. And it had a nose and it had a mouth. And the žralok ate the skleničku but he was sick so he couldn’t ate her the skleničku. He said, "I don’t want to eat that" and he pokakat [poop] on his eyes. And he said "I don’t know what’s my name I forgot what’s my name! Spoon, spoon, what’s your name? I don’t remember what’s my name," said the žralok. And then they went to a big moře [sea]. There it was hot and warm and there wasn’t even rybičky [fish]. But there was only whales, only žraloky, and the žraloky ate the whales, and the whales ate the žraloky. And that’s the end. 20.11.2012

(In which we prove that poop is funny to all preschoolers in all languages. Also I tried to record exactly what K said, so this is a fairly good representation of how she speaks. This story has a lot more Czech in it, I think because Apo was home and listening while K was telling it. You have to adapt your style to your audience. She doesn't mix so much most of the time.)

***

All of which is to say - happy birthday, K! You are one silly girl.

I Want to Go There! Just Kidding Edition

So today's post was supposed to be about our long weekend in sunny Venice - our first vacation in two years. Family visits don't count. We do love to travel, so we were all pumped.

Everything was set, bags packed, excitement at a peak, prepped K looking at pictures of Venice and informing her that she already knows one word of Italian: čau/ciao, flying out Friday at noon, when...K woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach bug. Poor child had never actually thrown up in her life (even as a baby, she spit up a total of 3-5 times ever), so I had to explain what was happening and that it is a normal phenomenon. She also wanted to know how to say "throw up" in both Czech and English.

I took her to the doctor early Friday morning but it was pretty clear - no flying for us. The doctor said a three-day bug is going around at the moment and she'd probably be fine by Monday. So we let the airplane take off without us. Sigh.

The Slovak took Baby M out for a walk late Friday morning while I took care of sick K. She was very pathetic - still not convinced she wasn't dying. (On the way to the doctor's earlier I realized she thought we were going to the hospital for in-patient care.) She took a long nap and woke up after noon, when we were waving goodbye to our Venice-bound airplane.

When the plane took off, she was still sick. We definitely couldn't have traveled. And yet, like magic, when the plane landed an hour later K was JUST FINE. Looks like it was a 12 hour bug, just long enough to keep us home. Weep. She spent the rest of the weekend running around perky while the Slovak and I came down with bad colds and tried to pretend we were in Italy.

The bad news is we lost the price of the plane tickets (no changes). The good news is we didn't have to pay for the accommodation, so it could have been a lot worse, right? The other bad news is, obviously, we didn't go to Venice.

And now I suspect we never will! You see, six years ago we also had purchased plane tickets to Venice for the weekend. A week or two before the trip they canceled the flight (the only Prague-Venice flight) so we ended up going to Budapest instead. We've been looking forward to trying again ever since then. Now, though, we're kind of nervous as to what might happen to us next time we try to go. Maybe Venice just doesn't want us!

I think we are going to travel everywhere else in Europe and never, ever see Venice except for in pictures. I can live with that. As it stands now, though...I still really need a vacation. In fact, our bags are still packed. We may still be in denial.

Someone take me somewhere fun!

A Prayer for Melissa

This is the post that I wanted to write on Thursday had my two beautiful trilingual children not chosen that day - and the days since - to be uncharacteristically screamy and less than obedient. And every moment not dealing with the fussing I've been trying to work on the translation due Monday that seemed like a good idea at the time.

(It's still a good idea. I'm going to finish today. Although it turns out googling "working at home with a newborn" does NOT give you the secret of what to do when the newborn refuses to nap at his accustomed time. Serious information gap there.)

Anyway, this is where my thoughts go this time of year...twenty two years ago

I hope to get a more substantial post up soon. As soon as I can keep my hands free and lap empty for long enough. (This post is brought to you by my right hand. The left hand is busy holding beautiful trilingual child #2.)

A Word from the Sickroom

2011 has really knocked me for a loop so far. We started off with ear infections, soon moved to (consecutively) flu, sinus infection, flu, bronchitis... K is home from school this week and next, so we're spending our days curled up on the couch watching Buffy Season 3. Also just started Doctor Who Season 3. (What? Good parents let their preschoolers watch scifi. Seriously.)

Then factor in keeping relatively busy on the translating front and I find my blogging mojo seriously flagging. I am good at multi-tasking on the micro level but seem to have trouble devoting my attention to multiple endeavors at once. Currently child-rearing and working have been winning the race for my attention, I guess.

I have so many blog posts half-written in my head that I haven't been able to write out or publish. I don't seem to be the only one who's gone quiet in the beginning of 2011, though. Seems like lots of us are MIA for one reason or another.

I had been waiting until I felt better to try to write something here, but it seems that is an unreasonable goal for this winter! I am settling for "somewhat less pathetic than I was" as a more attainable level. Also factoring into this is the second "flu" in the list above, which turned out not to be flu at all. On which more later.

K loves her new school, by the way, and so do I. She has a new best friend and is using more and more Czech at school and at home both. I went to pick her up one day about three weeks in and the teacher said, "She talks now!!!" She's doing really well - just have to get rid of this sickness so she can go back again. Poor sweetie.

I have a blog?

Oh. Hello! Happy New Year!

My husband has been nudging me since my last post to update again, why haven't you updated yet, will you just write something already, ARE YOU EVER GOING TO WRITE AGAIN? Since between my last post and today is the number of days past her due date that Baby K was born, I think his impatience and incredulity lacks a certain oomph, if you know what I mean.

We spent a week in Slovakia with Babka and Dedo, which was basically a repeat of our previous visits there, plus Christmas food. And a ridiculous number of Christmas presents.

Then the day after we got back K started complaining of pain in her ear. In the morning, she cheerfully announced, "Mama, my ear hurts! I need to go to the doctor!" By lunchtime she was curled on the couch, saying weakly, "Mama...my ear hurts...I need to go to the doctor..." So we went to the doctor and spent a week battling the almost-an-ear-infection that was a lot like an ear infection but apparently caused by allergies. Either way, it involved temperatures, four kinds of drops and fever medicine. K still loves doctors but now hates medicine. Especially drops.

I do, too. *sigh*

Anyway, between one thing and another - including starting her new school this week - I've been distracted lately. More on school later, I imagine.

Fortunately I wasn't too distracted to notice that Ready For Ten, a parenting website, included me in their list of 50 favorite bloggers of 2010. I'm skulking in the back, in the W's. Thanks, guys!

I have also just updated my About Me, which still said we're located in UK. Oops. I'm also going to get around to the Family Language Diagram at some point, because it's out of date, too.

Ways in which my daughter is already assimilating

1. She not only takes off her shoes at the door, she loudly berates visitors for not doing the same. "You no shoes here! You shoes THERE!"

2. At a restaurant, she wanted to play with the coasters but Apo told her, "Sú iba na pivko" (They're only for beer). Her instant and excited response: "I want pivko!"

3. She is proud of her beautiful country and enjoys seeing different parts of it. We went to southern Bohemia this weekend and she was suitably impressed by the castle we went on a tour of this afternoon. Kept saying "Wooooow!" as we came to each new room. The Czechs on the tour enjoyed her enjoyment!

She's already Czech, my friends. The language is just a detail.

Grumpy Mama

Busy week. Starting a business. Paperwork. K burned her fingers while baking muffins (really) at preschool last Friday. Took it very bravely despite three large burn blisters on her little fingers, poor thing.

Took her to the doctor to get it wrapped up. She feels like a rock star - really likes doctors. Keeps looking at her bandage and saying, "I'm very brave." Also held hand up to Charlie and Lola on TV today and said, "Look, I've got an owie hand! Oh, you can't hear me..."

I can't say that the doctor herself (at the hospital, not our pediatrician) lived up to my warm, fuzzy recent impression of Prague. So far (since first coming here) I've had mostly positive experiences with private practice doctors and mostly negative experiences with hospitals. No surprise I guess.

Lots of staying inside and watching DVDs this week, unfortunately. See above mama starting business, K burned (now bandaged) fingers. Mama not feeling that great. And Tuesday-Wednesday are our no-preschool days. We're kind of hurting without our UK playgroup routine for no-preschool days. And the two hour break I have to take in the middle of each preschool day (to go pick her up) is really wearing on my nerves and cutting into my productivity. I have to leave at 11:30, 11:40 at the latest, to make sure I'm there to pick her up for 12:30. Thus a full two hours less, practically speaking, than our Bracknell nursery pick-up (five minutes away) of 1:30. It's enough to make me consider starting to drive.

The rest of my productivity is apparently shot in the foot by the inexplicable lack of phone signal in our apartment. I knew we had reception problems in the bedrooms (baby monitor didn't work, only talk on phone in living room) but the living room used to be ok! Now half the time when I talk to someone on land line or cell phone, I can hear them but they can't hear me. And that's WHEN the cell phone even rings to let me know I have a call! I'm contemplating whether it could be a phone provider issue or if our walls are just that full of lead. Or whatever it is that screws up your phone service. I have to make my phone calls from the park outside. How ridiculous is that? Hard conditions to work under, I tell you!

And with this clearly optimistic frame of mind :) I am supposed to go out for our approximately bi-annual date while dear friend watches K at home. Too bad all I feel like doing is going out by myself for a coffee and coming back in, I don't know, three days. Or whenever we get a blessed neighborhood preschool spot so we can start living like normal people.

By which I mean people who take fifteen minutes to pick up their child from a school that is a reasonable distance away, for which privilege they pay a reasonable price. My hopes are set on next school year.

Still can't believe how easy that was...

I had the loveliest experience today at the city offices for our district of Prague today. It feels funny even to write that, because my experiences of bureaucracy are usually of the "We don't like you and are refusing your application, oh, and also, you're stupid" or at least the "Why don't you have these other three papers I never mentioned before?" variety.

I went in this morning feeling cautiously optimistic that maybe the person I talked to last week was correct in claiming that I didn't need any extra paperwork, but prepared to have this be the first of several visits, just in case. In fact I had the most pleasant, painless bureaucracy experience of my life.

I showed my IDs, paid my money, filled things out, signed them and was instructed to come back in a week to pick up my final result. Everyone I talked to was unusually helpful and friendly. All in all I'm feeling very pro-Praha 10 today!

I suspect the difference is that this was the office for residents of a certain district of Prague rather than the country-wide foreign police, for example. A higher standard of pleasantness and helpfulness may be typical for a local office. Or else Praha 10 is really just that great of a place!

More Encounters at the Playground

I just got back from another playground visit with K. We have to take advantage of the decent weather while it lasts! There were a bunch of kids there to play with.

One boy of about six was really intrigued by the fact that he couldn't understand K. They were taking turns on the slide and she was speaking English some.

"I go on my tummy!" she announced.
"Teď jsem jí nerozuměl," he said to me. (I didn't understand what she just said.)
"I go on my tummy!" she said on her next turn.
"To bylo to samý, co řekla před chvílí!" (That's the same thing she said before!)

I agreed with him that it was the same and that she had said she wanted to slide on her tummy. He remained intrigued and was obviously paying attention to her for the rest of the time they played. Then we bumped into each other later in the nearby farmer's market and he came up and talked to us for a minute. Very friendly boy!

I also thought it was funny that K and a slightly younger girl got into an argument about sand (the other girl thought ALL the sand was HER sand - so I didn't get involved). The girl yelled at K once in a while and K yelled back. Sometimes K yelled the same things ("MOJE!" - "No, MOJE!") and sometimes she said nonsense syllables that presumably sounded like Czech to her. K held her own, though, and they came to an agreement. K: 1, Czech: 0.

Too Sick to Blog

I wish I could offer an insightful, entertaining look into multilingual life today, but I am unfortunately prevented by the piles of boxes to unpack and piles of tissues from my fun new cold. I'm not sure which situation is more annoying.

Yesterday was K's second day of school, where she continued to make a good impression on the staff (the principal was throwing around the word "vzorná", so there you go). She was happy and engaged and made lots more friends. Whatever my reservations about the school itself, I couldn't be happier that she is starting off so well. She'll continue Thursday and Friday for her three half-days per week, which is what I'll think I'll keep it to for the time being.

Off to unpack some more...or else make myself a cup of tea with honey. One of those two.

Neither Here Nor There

We took our last trip to London today. Went to the Natural History Museum, which was pretty awesome in fact. We didn't see everything, but that leaves us something to look forward to if we ever come back here again. K was down with the dinosaurs and the bugs, just like in the Smithsonian earlier this year.

The Slovak of my dreams is watching college football on ESPN tonight. I think he's going to miss it when we move, unless our cable provider has improved its American sports selection while we've been gone.

In an attempt to amuse myself while failing to get very excited about American football, I have added a short list underneath the blog archive to the right over there. I thought it might be useful to link to previous blog posts with some basic information about us/this blog. Is there anything else I should cover?

I have a present for you

Use it well.

This is an old Czech song that's had a major revival on the Polish internet in the last few years. Take a look at Jožin z bažin, a Czech song presented with Polish subtitles! Does that not break your language brain?

(It's like the time I told someone calling me from America

Me: "I'm just watching a Polish movie."
Them: *strangled sound*
Me: "What? No, it's not in Polish. It's dubbed into Czech."
Them: *strangled sound indicating that's not much more normal* )

Jožin z bažin is actually pretty funny, so here's a version with English subtitles if you're interested. Give it at least until the guy starts dancing (just under 30 seconds in).

I totally have to show this video to Baby K when she gets home from school.

Voice recognition technology doesn't speak Scottish

I'm usually late to the party with regard to online videos and similar, so you may have seen this already. But it made me laugh pretty hard.

Voice recognition technology doesn't speak Scottish

Conversations with my husband

"I like how you refer to me on there as 'the Slovak'."
"Do you mean you like it or you want me to change it?"
"I mean, you could call me 'the Stud' or something. Just if you wanted to."
"I am totally blogging this."

Sort of like the time he told me I was free to tell anyone about our, ahem, private life, provided I was sufficiently complimentary.

---

K brings me a Ferda Mravenec book and insists I read it to her.

"You know, you're really getting a British accent in Czech. I think I can hear it there."
[insert glare and pointed comment about who dragged who to this country]

---

And then the other day when I was counting from 1 to 10 in Hungarian, and K was repeating after me:

"Hey, her pronunciation is actually better than yours."
"WHY CAN YOU NEVER SAY ANYTHING POSITIVE ABOUT ME?"

---

But when I felt sick this afternoon, who leaped up from his desk and came home to take care of us? It was the Devilishly Handsome, Raven-Haired Slovak of My Dreams!

(There, sweetie, what do you think of that one?)

Tourism in my own country

Posting may be light for the next week or so, as we're on our second day in Virginia. We came for a wedding and are seizing the opportunity to explore a part of the country that I, at least, haven't been to before.* My mother is even driving up to see us** in a few days.

I'm excited about this trip, among other things, because it's our first time doing what we've talked about for years: visiting different parts of the country as a family, letting our kid(s) get familiar with her (their) native country. We do plenty of traveling in Europe, since it's fairly easy to travel that close to home. It's harder to get very far in America, since everything is so spread out and you want to spend as much time as possible with family instead of sightseeing. In a couple of years maybe we can visit the grand canyon!***


* Oddly, the Slovak has traveled more widely in the USA than I have (I may have him beat globally, though). He is going to be my tour guide in DC.

** A polite euphemism for "just K, actually".

*** Another place the Slovak has been that I haven't.

Meltdowns, tantrums and screaming

For a bilingual parenting blog, this one has so far been heavy on the bilingual, light on the parenting. Today I'm contemplating a classic parenting challenge: screaming and tantrums.

Let me start by saying that this post isn't motivated by anything K has done recently. *grin* In fact, my daughter never screams. My daughter is sweet and well-behaved and wouldn't dream of running off or screaming in the store. On occasion, though, a stranger has taken the form of my sweet girl, a stranger who misbehaves, screams and generally carries on with unsociable behavior, and even worse, tries to act like I'm her mother! I am usually busy acting like I don't know her at times like that... (I couldn't get through this paragraph with a straight face, could you? "My daughter never screams", indeed...)

At the risk of puncturing the image anyone may have of K as the ideal child, sitting calmly all day reading a book (in between fixing me cups of tea), a certain amount of hooliganish behavior does occur. She has actually been very reasonable lately, but in months past we have not been precisely strangers to the middle-of-the-store meltdown. I have a variety of methods for dealing with it.

My favorite is, as alluded to above, pretending not to know her. Commenting aloud to my husband that somebody's kid is really misbehaving today, what sort of parents are those? This has mostly entertainment value - not to be taken lightly in the stress of public misbehavior! Hand-in-hand with this goes ignoring. I find ignoring her is effective when she ignores my attempts to calm her down or ask what the problem is. She gets more upset at not being noticed, but then when I engage her again, she responds. Promises of disciplinary measures are pretty lost on this age group, especially when overcome by stress, anger, lack of nap and whatever other factors led to the meltdown in the first place. I don't even bother with those. Distraction can work, if she's not too far gone. Looking her in the eye and repeating her name until she registers what I'm saying is also oddly effective. I do NOT give her what she is screaming for. I don't want to encourage her to think she can get what she wants by screaming.

Nothing groundbreaking there. I post this today in order to pose a single question related to a popular piece of advice:

Who came up with the advice to "just leave the store immediately and go home" or "end the outing immediately" when your child has a tantrum? What sort of privileged life do you lead where that is even possible???

One essential problem? Leaving the store is typically what the child wants in the first place. How is that a win? That's just giving in.

Another essential problem? Clearly whoever came up with that gem doesn't have a 45 minute trip home by public transportation. Your child has a meltdown in downtown Prague (just to pick a city at random...) and you have no choice but to deal with it there and then. "Ending the outing" isn't exactly a solution, unless you fancy spending up to an hour with a screaming child, weathering the disapproving looks of strangers.

Even in UK, where I do have access to a car, I also don't understand what you are supposed to do when you need to finish the shopping, misbehaving child or not. K and I go window shopping just for fun, true, so on those days we can just head for the car and home, but most of the time we are in the store because we need groceries, without which we won't have anything for dinner that night. "End the outing immediately" means no food to eat. Or no clothes to wear, or whatever it was I needed at the store. Presumably I am supposed to leave the child at home next time, so I can complete my shopping in peace? With a relative maybe. Seriously? Lu. Xu. Ry. I giggle at the thought.

Basically the people for whom this advice is useful: 1) have cars at their disposal whenever they wish, 2) have the luxury of completing the shopping trip another time, and probably 3) have someone to leave the child with next time. Otherwise, the next shopping trip would probably end up the same as the last, and nobody would be able to cook, ever again.

I am left with the same giggly, rolly-eyes feeling as when I read in a book on personal economy that you should price-compare and do your shopping at five or six different grocery stores, and that this could be accomplished in an afternoon. I lived in Prague at the time, where that would take days, factoring in having to make trips home in between each store because you carry everything in your hands or on your back. And I didn't even have a child back then. That was not the only piece of advice in that book that totally fell flat once you leave the United States, either.

What do you do when your child (or lookalike claiming to be your child) loses it in public? And what common pieces of wisdom are totally inappropriate for your circumstances or cultural environment?