Top 10 Musts When Traveling By Plane With Young Children. (In addition to copious booze, which goes without saying)

Posted by Multilingual Mama

This summer I survived -among other things- a 23 hour journey alone with a 5-year-old, a 2.5 year old, two planes, and a final long car journey and this is what I learned.

Bad hand-luggage, good outfits. See 4a, 4b,5a. All rights reserved.

1. Don’t pack too much. You are better off paying a fee to get laundry done somewhere then having to lug endless changes of clothes with you. If staying with friends, I’ve always found access to their washing machine has been no problem.

2. Following on point 1, expect to carry, pull, roll whatever cute case or bag you have purchased for your wee one. Your best bet is to make it small enough you can chuck it into your own hand luggage if necessary. Check to see if your airline still gives out kid-packs. I found that my kids were entertained with their free sponge bob giveaway activity packs and the in-flight entertainment for the 16+ hours of airport travel. Imagine my joy having lugged 8kg of books or about 50% of Usborn’s toddler line.

2a. Leave space in your hand-luggage for kid’s bag.

3. Have them pack their own bag. That way, if they suddenly want a toy they don’t have, they won’t be able to blame you.

4. Never, ever, ever bother with hand-luggage that does not have a set of wheels on it. Not a rolling suitcase requiring overhead storage but something that has wheels and can fit under your seat.

4a. If you simply cannot get something small enough that fits in your own luggage for your kids, best to follow same adult hand luggage rules and acquire a backpack type bag with wheels so it can stay at your feet and get easy access. (Trunki cases, as seen here, were a very bad idea)

4b. Make sure you do the tipping-test with said bags. Nothing is worse – yes nothing– than a 4-year-old with a packed Thomas the train wheely bag that keeps falling forward. Hello Tantrums, I didn’t plan to see you ’til halfway through the flight, not before we’ve even made it through security! (I learnt this on my previous long haul crossing. )

5. Always pack a change of clothes for each child and adult. Pack each one separately in a ziplock bag. It will be easily found and then you already have sealed bag for juice, sauce, vomit encrusted clothes.

5a. Ladies, don’t forget an extra bra. Vomit is far-reaching. I was a 34DD/E when nursing and learned the hard way on a 14 hour flight.

5b. While we are on the topic of clothes, dressing the kids alike is also helpful to spot them in a crowd of if you’ve temporarily misplaced one.

6. Insist on sippy cups. I don’t care how precocious your kid is at drinking with regular cups. They will spill something at some point, most likely on the stranger sitting next to them or your last spare set of clothes.

7. Many planes have headset plugs that only fit their headsets, which do not fit small children. Bring a small beany baby or bean bag to help create a fit that won’t budge. Spongebob giveaway on Qatar was an emergency solution but far from ideal.

8. Make sure the airlines/transit airports you are visiting’s planes actually go all the way to the terminal. Having to manage kids & bags down metal stairs in the desert [hello Doha] and on to bus to terminal only to repeat the process to get on the next plane will have you wishing you were never born.

9. Pack plenty of hand sanitizer, kleenex and wipes. Also pack lipbalm and an extra one if you have klepto kids like mine. Finally lollypops for ascents and descents. Caution: give them too early and take off traffic will mean they’ve finished them before the plane has begun to flex its flaps and rev its engines.

10. Pick an Asian or Middle Eastern Airline if you can. Seriously. I’ll take an extra flight and layover anytime with people who appear to adore my kids more than their own flesh and blood relatives than a direct flight with people who look at me with that ‘don’t think I am going to look after your brat while you go to the toilet’ look. Thai Airways, Qatar, Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Tiger, Asia, etc… these people understand children, their limitations on flights, and how a welcoming environment makes everyone more relaxed and as a result better behaved than a hostile one.

And for those of you who noticed it is actually more than 10…well has anything ever gone according to plan with kids? My point exactly.

Wills, Life Insurance & Who Gets the Kids When You Live On the Other Side of the World

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I like to think of myself as a very organized person. Well perhaps not organized exactly. More like I get the really critical things done. I can fish out important documents in an instant even if I can’t find my sunglasses for the umpteenth time. (And yes they were on my head)

When it came to having kids, I fit the urban upper middle class cliché. I researched nipple creams and organic mattresses, to vitamin K or not, what were the best BPA-free bottles for my freshly expressed milk. I am the one trudging through international airports with car seats in tow even though I don’t own a car or a driver’s license at that. You get the picture.

If you told me then that I would find myself living halfway around the world, with two children five and under, without a will, established guardians and life insurance, I would cry “sacre-bleu! How dare you accuse me of such neglect and irresponsibility!”

Yet here I am, without any of these papers in my waterproof emergency filing briefcase.

Apart from the fact that I can’t even believe it myself, the truth is that each time I try to tackle this, I am totally overwhelmed about how to handle the situation given the life we have chosen.

Starting with life insurance: I can’t figure out where I should take this out. Do I take it out here in South East Asia? Do I take out a policy in the US? What happens when we move again? And why didn’t I take it out before that bout of postpartum? Apparently taking anti-depressant are likely to drive up your premiums. Seriously, given that we pop these in the US like breath mints, I wonder how many folks would reconsider the severity of their condition. I definitely needed mine but had I taken out the policy earlier….sigh.

What about the kids? What happens if the grim reaper comes knocking earlier than expected?

I find I have to turn down my architect husband whenever he suggests I join him for a romantic escape to some exotic location he’s currently visiting on business. With my luck something would happen to the both of us and our precious mini-banshees would find themselves alone in Bangkok with no family for thousands of miles. And when that family showed up, they likely wouldn’t even recognize anyone.

Once upon a time, we had more sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles. Chances are, we lived closer and saw them more regularly. Now, under the guise of globalization and hyper efficiency, people must follow jobs where they can find them, often on the other side of the globe. Families are smaller, more scattered and lacking the close-knit ties that proximity often engenders.

My girls have never met their Mexican uncle and his family. They’ve seen their abuelita a few times on Skype but they can’t really communicate with her because their Spanish is limited to a few phrases. We left the states before our eldest could really create memories and since then, our girls have seen my elderly parents twice in the flesh. Once in 2011 and once in 2013. Hardly serious bonding time. They likely couldn’t recognize my brothers if they tried. The only life they’ve known or remember is life in Asia.

Without a will, the law leaves it up to the families to work out. Try as I might, I can’t imagine making the girls pack-up and move far from everyone and everything they have ever known. Taking them away from a familiar environment, culture and friends following the loss of their parents seems cruel. And even if we did subject them to that, most of our immediate relatives are ruled out due to mental illness, age, and health. The few that are left either already have large broods, don’t speak the same language as the girls, and are complete strangers to the girls. My lip starts quivering at the thought of putting the girls through such a situation.

So what to do when you are an expat with limited resources and a family that just can’t or wont travel to see you? For me, I’ve felt that we’ve developed a family of sorts with the friends we’ve made abroad. My eldest knows and loves several of my friends more than any of our family members. And I can’t help but wish that, should something come to pass, the girls could at least transition with them.

But I also can’t find the courage to ask them. It’s such a huge responsibility– albeit a hypothetical one– to put on people. And so another day passes, and our Will is left unwritten.

Are you living far from your family? How have you handled this? I’d love to hear from all of you.

A Week in the Life of a Multicultural Mom

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I very excited to finally be back from the land of ZERO connectivity. Despite my much-needed break, I am catching up on loads of un-exciting parenting stuff and rather than bore you silly, risking the loss of your patronage forever, I am so grateful to European Mama for this hilarious tongue-in-cheek guest post she let me to snatch for my blog!

Global Children via Plushkies.

So, if you’re a parent, you’re bound to get conflicting advice. Even if you’re a multicultural parent, because no matter how good a parent you are, the French/Chinese/Dutch/whatever do it much better than you do. So, I tried to imagine how it would look like if I tried to take all these advice to heart? I made a plan. Every day of the week, I would parent like another culture, and see what happens. I will stick to the books, “Bringing Up Bebe”, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, and “The Continuum Concept”, and also this article.

Frenchday

So, I go French! I want to start my day with a nice warm coffee and croissants, but the children eat all my croissants before I can even slip into my role of a French mom, and the coffee gets cold before I even get to drink it. Slowly and hesitantly, I assume my role. I tell the children that from now on, we’re going to have a few rules. Such like: no snacking. Food will be served four times a day and not more. And that no actually means no. I take them to playground to practice to practice my “no” saying skills. I try it: in Polish, “nie!”, in German, “nein!”. It doesn’t work, so I try French, “non!”, and that doesn’t help, either. I try to give them the famous French “big eyes”, les grands yeux, but my children only look at me, think that their mom is actually a crazy person and start laughing so hard that they get a belly ache and start complaining. So we go home. They’re hungry and it’s one hour left till dinner! They’re crying from hunger but today I am a French woman and won’t let them do “n’importe quoi”. I am actually kind of lucky that this is French day because I get to pour myself a glass of red wine. And then another. And another. I am starting to panic because I have to prepare a 3 course dinner, and haven’t even started yet. So, another glass of wine it is. I realise that I haven’t gotten the ingredients, so we go to the store to get them. The children are super hungry but I just can’t give in! The trip to the store was traumatic and I’d just skip writing about it. I cook dinner which takes me another 2 hours, and by the time I’m done, the children are too hungry and tired to eat what I prepared: oysters! Frogs legs! Boeuf bourguignon! And cheese! They want me to cuddle with them when they go to bed but I calmly explain that they have to learn to be independent. So, another no it is. I am so tired after this day. I wish my father was here to make his famous crème caramel. I hope next day will be better.

Chineseday

I wake up my children in the morning, calling them lazy and bad people and what will they do without me. Uh Oh. This is not going well. They, of course, rebel against me, but I am a strong mom, a Tiger today. So I tell them that they will get no food if they don’t get up and dressed right now. This ends with everybody screaming and fighting and a scene so ugly that I won’t even describe it here. Let’s just move to dinner. I serve rice and Peking duck. I tell my children to set the table and criticise everything about the way they do it: not neatly folded, not symmetrical, not pretty enough. My children, they’re so lazy. After dinner, I make them practice the violin and the piano for 6 hours. It is true what Amy Chua says: the 5^th hour is the worst, for everybody involved. But they can’t go to sleep until they’re done. I am so exhausted and pour myself some sake. I know that it’s not Chinese, but I don’t want to be so discriminating. I am off to bed.

Indigenousday/Kenyaday/Indiaday

I wake up on the floor in my bedroom. I decided to co-sleep today and the result was me falling from the bed. The baby wakes up, and of course, I feed him on demand. This is actually quite nice. Until I remember that I need to go diaper less. That changes the day to the worse, because while my big girl is pretty much potty trained, I have still two more to go. My little girl doesn’t run fast enough to make it to the potty, and the baby, well, he’s a baby. Which leaves me with lots of pee and poop, pretty much everywhere. I need some alcohol, but don’t know what kind. I decide on a shot (or two or three) of homemade nalewka. It’s homemade so it should do. I am busy the whole day: preventing poo tragedies, feeding them when they’re hungry (all.the.time), breastfeeding, baby-toddler-and pre-schooler-wearing. I don’t even have the time to meditate or smell the flowers or go outside to hug the trees. At the end of the day I am so tired I want to go to sleep. But I can’t because the children aren’t tired just yet. So I wait. And wait. And wait. In the end, we all fall asleep on the floor.

USday

So today I can be an American mom. This is harder than I thought because they have all these kinds of parenting methods: attachment parenting (which I pretty much went through yesterday) and there are free range parents and helicopter parents, and it’s so complicated and I only have a day for this! So, OK. Maybe I’ll be a helicopter parent for a while and then I’ll be a free range parent for the other half of the day. I follow my children everywhere. I always ask what they’re doing and why they’re doing them. I also decide to take this one step further and apply to University in their name, and started to look for jobs. I also constantly praise them for how clever, pretty, intelligent and funny they are. After few hours the children are more than annoyed with my constant putting my nose into their affairs (and the constant praise that goes with it) and want to play by themselves. So, OK I go free-range. The plan is, we go to the park, I leave and they go back home by themselves. Sounds easy! We get to the park. I explain that at 2 and 4 years old, they’re almost ready to go back home by themselves! I thought this was a great idea! They didn’t. They started to cry and cling to me! And at home they couldn’t even wait for me to leave me alone! But I praise them for how well they’re doing and we go home. But I totally forgot about the cheerleading, and baby-genius enrichment classes! I need me some brownies. And a few hamburgers and fries! With ketchup! And pumpkin pie! Any alcohol? Well… maybe some Starbucks pumpkin latte would do? OK, we go to sleep.

Dutchday

OK, as you may know the Dutch are very focused on routines and order. So, I make a schedule for the day. 8:00- we get up. 8.30-9.00 – we eat breakfast. I feed the baby after that. 10.00-11.00 we go to the park. 12:00- we eat lunch, bread with cheese, ham and some tomato (in Dutch, they call it “broodje gezond, healthy bread, I am awesome!). We drink coffee, yes, the children as well, I just add milk to theirs. But wait, I am too late for shopping! What would the employees at my local Albert Heijn (that’s the biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands) say if I show up too late for my shopping? OK, maybe it’s not that bad… what I’m 10 minutes too late? For shopping! Oh, no…I am so stressed at the supermarket that I buy a bottle of Jenever and some Heineken to help me with this. O, and some Belgian chocolate wouldn’t hurt either… or appelflaps and stroopwaffels, oh, and I totally forgot the apeltaart! I also smoke a joint. But wait, that’s not the time for eating sweets, not to mention the alcohol? Whatever, I eat them anyway. But then, I need to get right back on schedule. I nag the children to finish eating dinner so that they go to bed on time. This day reminds me why I hate schedules. We go to bed.

How good that it’s the weekend and I can go back to my usual parenting style, which is pretty much everything mixed up together. Of course, I didn’t do all the things described in this article (I do, however, have some homemade nalewka at home). And, in case you’re asking, I am not really making fun of other cultures. I am making fun of myself for having such a chaotic parenting method (meaning no method whatsoever). If you manage to parent like the French/Dutch/you name it and it works for you, more power to you. If you set out to do it and failed, don’t beat yourself up. You don’t need to follow one culture. You can make up your own parenting culture that fits your personality, personal beliefs and your children.

Pinning My Linguistic Hopes on More Travel.

Posted by Multilingual Mama

This post was written for June’s Raising Multilingual Children Carnival hosted this month by All Done Monkey. This month’s theme is Multilingualism and Travel. If you would like to participate, host or simply learn more about the carnival, please visit Piri -Piri Lexicon’s Carnival Page.

I haven’t been home in two years. Wait, that’s wrong. I haven’t been home in three years but I am not sure anymore what home really is. I haven’t seen my parents in two years. The last time we saw each other, they flew from New York, the city where I was born and raised, to meet us in France, where I grew up spending my summers. Two years ago, they met our second daughter for the first time. She was 10 months old.

Prior to the trip, I was brimming with anticipation as I was sure, once immersed in the language, that my daughter Pea would flick a switch and start speaking French fluently. I felt like I’d read about this a thousand times, children who understood a language simply needing some time in the country to make the linguistic leap to actually speaking.

I was so very disappointed when it didn’t happen. Truth is we weren’t there long enough. We were also surrounded by people who understood and could speak English and who were all too keen to do so despite my begging them not to. I was reminded once again that there are no quick fixes when it comes to multilingualism. I did console myself with the idea that she had been immersed in lots of lovely French culture and, in a bid to try and view the glass half full, wrote a post on the topic here.

One of the reasons we chose to move to the other side of the world was the idea that we could afford to send our kids to a French school. I knew from friends’ experiences that spots in French/English immersion programs at public schools in New York were nearly impossible to come by, and private schools in the US are utterly unaffordable for us mere mortals. At the time, my daughter was attending a local Singaporean school but, after that trip, I was more determined than ever to get both our girls into French or bilingual schools and our upcoming move from Singapore to Bangkok was going to make that a reality with a more affordable French Lycée and an amazing little French/English bilingual nursery called Acacia conveniently near our new digs.

The first year was pretty much everything that I’d hoped for despite some major bumps in the road that caused me no end of neuroses -oh how I need to learn to think long term and not panic at every short term setback. But I digress… English is still the dominant language in our house but the girls’ French is fluent and I know progress has been made when, despite being an ‘English day’ at school, Pea comes home and choses to speak to me in French. My wee one, little plum already happily switches back and forth. They both love their schools and it’s all been a great success.

So why am I pulling them out?

A year in and I’ve realized the choice is really between private schools or tickets home to see family so in the end, I am opting for the latter. I’ve often preached about sticking to your heritage languages but what exactly is the point of my kids speaking French and Spanish if they then can’t go see their Mexican and French extended family? And really, since el Jeffe works all the time and all our funds go to the French school, Spanish is barely hanging on in our household.

What I will lose in giving up their formal French education I hope to gain with the ability to take more trips to France and Mexico in order to deepen their cultural connection and truly live their languages. Right now the girls don’t really get why Spanish is important but I know once they spend a few months with Abuelita and meet their cousins, they will want to actively add this language to their linguistic arsenal, as will I.

And let’s face it, I really miss good tortillas and ceviche.