Kids, Food, & How to Kill a Chicken, Improvised.

Posted by Multilingual Mama

My kids, overall, are good eaters. I won’t go into my philosophy in detail just that I take a French-mother/Man Who Ate Everything approach to feeding them. It seems to be working for us –despite the occasional protests.

One thing I have always tried to do is make sure my girls know where their food comes from. I do not want to find myself, burger in hand, facing my kid around 12 suddenly stricken with a look of horror saying:

Wait you mean burgers and cows are the same thing? So what was the animal we ate last night?

Me: Well we had venison so you could say we ate Bambi, well probably her mother.

Living in Thailand has made this pretty easy. Granted, we have not passed Daisy the cow on our way to ballet class, but we have waved hello to many other edible friends. I knew I was succeeding with my mission when upon seeing new animals, SweetPea would point to the creature going by and ask first:

What is that

followed closely with

Can we eat it?

Both girls love chicken but for SweetPea, it’s an obsession. She will choose chicken over any other food including sweets and cake any day so chicken features pretty regularly on our menu.

While eating chicken for dinner the other night:

P: Maman why can’t I see the chicken’s blood?
Me: Well they remove it before they sell us the chicken.
P: How do they remove it?
Me: They cut the chicken’s head off and hang him upside down.
(At this point I know that chickens get heads cut off and pigs are bled so I am just trying to piece this together)
P: Like this? (Showing me with her dragon piggy bank conveniently located next to her).
I nod in agreement.
P: Maman can I please do that next time we have chicken for dinner? And how do we catch a chicken?
Me, quiet worrying about a Dexter in our house.
P: And I want the chicken blood.
Me, thinking it is time to redirect this conversation: Well how about some boudin noir which is blood sausage?

Close call.

The next day, I worried as we head out of the house. There’s been a trio of scrawny birds hanging out by the front of our mobaan –a cluster of houses, like a little village. I didn’t want SweetPea getting any ideas. Fortunately the chickens were so scrawny. They were like the Kate Moss of chickens: breast-less, always in black, and in need a good meal and long night of sleep. I figured she wouldn’t find them appetizing enough to want to make the kill.

Right, I must brush up on my art of butchering skills. Til the next time readers.

Newtown Tragedy: How My Parenting Changed Forever for the Better.

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I’ve been struggling to find the words to express what I feel for the families of Newtown. Then my friend Magnolia Ripkin, an exceptionally talented writer and editor, wrote a piece on behalf of our Blunt Mom blogging group, which expressed exactly what is in my heart. I urge you to read and share it.

Many of us try to find meaning in what happened or at least, in our own way, do something so that somehow these precious lives lost were not entirely in vain. For me this has manifested itself in two ways. First, despite being far from home, I’ve tried to participate and put pressure on legislators to create common sense gun laws. We haven’t succeeded yet, but we will. I have no doubt about this.

The second happened at a much more personal level. Bedtime should be such a precious and intimate moment, but frequently, for so many of us, the end of a long day coupled with tired kids can be a recipe for tension, lost patience and ill feelings. Too often, I would try to rush through the process and even uttering less than kind words to my kids in a desperate attempt to just get them to sleep. The night Newtown happened, I caught myself doing the same and remembered that despite my girls acting like right little horrors, 26 families and in particular 20 parents of young children would do anything to get the chance to be tucking their child safe at home. I vowed never to take bedtime for granted again.

That night I stopped and took a deep breath. I tried to take in and appreciate every second of our nightly routine instead of rushing through it. I thought about how I would say goodnight if I knew I wasn’t to see them again the next day -and then realized that I couldn’t realistically cram all of us in one of the small Ikea kid beds for the entire night. So extended hugs, kisses, and whispers were shared. I remembered to tell them I love them and not just in my rote ‘night night’ voice but while being 100% in the moment and engaged with them.

I still get tired and cranky. I still fumble and stumble at bedtime but now I am much better at catching it early and hitting the reset button. And as I do this, my heart hopes that Charlotte Bacon , Daniel Barden, Rachel Davino , Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Ana Marquez-Greene, Dylan Hockley, Dawn Hocksprung, Madeleine Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Jesse Lewis, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Anne Marie Murphy, Emilie Parker , Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Soto, Benjamin Wheeler, and Allison Wyatt know that I am a much better parent thanks to them, that I will never forget them, that I’ll keep fighting on behalf of their families and I bid them sweet dreams along with my own two angels.

How Halloween Saved The Christmas Countdown

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I have a tendency to beat myself up over things. Right now, as I type this, a little voice is berating me because every time I check a published post, I find a typo but by the time I log into WordPress, I can no longer remember where it was.

Halloween 2012 was great fun but after an excruciating few weeks where little C never managed to earn a piece of Halloween candy after dinner, leaving her sister sweet P to work her way through both bountiful stashes of candy booty, I decided to jump on the candy fairy wagon for 2013.

It’s actually genius. You get the kids to pick out 10 (or whatever you deem reasonable) pieces of candy and the rest gets packed up to be collected by the candy fairy for less fortunate kids. In exchange, the fairy leaves a gift for the kids. For our inaugural year, I chose a small box of lego. I was so impressed with how willing they were to let go of the booty, I even stuck two lollipops on the box and a little fairy dust –aka sparkles that never actually make it into anything crafty.

The extra candy was hidden away to be disposed of when the kids were out. So of course, six weeks later, it’s sitting exactly where I left it. Every time I look at this one shelf of books, the candy bag says:

tsk tsk tsk, here I am still waiting to be given away. What’s wrong with you? You need only walk to the security gate and hand me over. Surely that’s not too difficult? Even for you?!

I could go on. Luckily, Thai Halloween candy is so unbelievably lame, I wasn’t tempted to consume it myself. Had there been decent candy, well I don’t even want to go there.

Chocolate Flavored Skim Milk Tablets. Yum.

Before I know it, it’s November 31st, and I haven’t bought anything to put in the advent calendar! Crikey, what sort of SAHM am I? And then I remember the Halloween stash. Saved by my incompetence. Determined not to stuff them with sweets, I pick out a lone pack of candy for day one and vow to buy stickers and things for the next 23 days.

Day two rolls around and I have to distract the kids, while briefing Jefe where the candy is and tell him to put some treats the next box.

Later that day, I run off and buy a collection of erasers and small safari animals. I was rather pleased with myself, until I realized only the gorilla and brown bear fit in the boxes. Oh and strangely the camels. Every other creature will have to be a stocking stuffer.

This time I take it as a sign that the rest should be filled with the Halloween candy, reducing the pressure on my budget and my conscience as the voice from the book shelf is much softer now, with only half a bag left waiting for a home.

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.