American in Spain

It was like flipping a switch. My cute loving toddler turned into a hateful monster.

Nora had a cold last week, so I got her some cough medicine at the local farmácia. It cleared up her cough, but also gave her an upset stomach, diarrhea and vomiting, which made for a terribly long weekend, during which she insisted on watching this video of herself about a thousand times, each time tearing up when her onscreen doppelgänger got upset.

Somewhere among the “Oh, poor thing, she’s so sick,” whining, twenty-four days before her second birthday, a special, dreaded, kind of behavior arose: The Tantrum.
(more…)

As an expat parent of a toddler in Spain, I have noticed a rather bizarre parenting behavior exhibited by Spaniards caring for small children. A typical scenario goes something like this:

A toddler is careening around and hits her head on a table. Tables and desks are right at forehead height for a two-year-old. The parent or caretaker rushes over and hugs the crying child. Immediately the caretaker turns to the table and shouts, “Bad table!” and smacks the table hard with his hand and encourages the child to hit and scold the table as well.

If you’re like me the first time I saw this parenting technique, you have a big “WTF?” thought bubble above your head.
(more…)

Today Nora experienced a new first: pigtails! Nora’s friend, Ana, at the local supermarket has been working more or less ever since Nora came home from the hospital towards gaining her confidence. A fortnight ago, she managed to put a hairpin in Nora’s hair, and today she successfully gave Nora two pigtails, called coletas in Spanish.
(more…)

Nora’s Spanish has taken some leaps and bounds in the past couple weeks, yet her spoken English is lagging behind, and I can’t help but blame myself for it. In the mornings, when I care for her for 3-5 hours depending on when she gets up, I speak only English to her, except when we are around Spaniards in the grocery store. She, however, chooses to speak Spanish to me. There are some exceptions. When she asks for a cookie, she says “Doh-chi!“, and when she wants to get down off of something (e.g. chair, sofa, stroller), she typically says, “Down!”, although she has recently taken to saying “Al suelo!” (to the floor).
(more…)

Today is Kings Day, the traditional gift giving day in Catholic Spain. For people who prefer Christmas to be more about Baby Jesus than the North Pole, it makes more sense to give gifts on Epiphany, when tradition says that the Wise Men allegedly gave gifts to Jesus.

This morning, my mother-in-law articulated a concern I’ve been feeling but had yet to put into words:
(more…)

Nora’s vocabulary continues to advance. She’s big into repeating whatever you say, particularly the last part, so if you say, “Do you want some yogurt?”, and she says, “Yogurt!”, that doesn’t necessarily qualify as an affirmative response. The problem is, however, that she’s not very good about open ended questions. “What do you want?” still isn’t likely to result in any meaningful communication, although if she’s been asking for something, she will repeat what she wants (hint: it’s usually a cookie).
(more…)

Recently I have been witnessing one of the things I was most looking forward to as a parent, the bilingual language acquisition of my daughter. You can say “Where’s the table?” or “¿Dónde está la mesa?“, and she’ll point right to the table. The same works for her anatomy and toys. In fact one of the best tricks I’ve discovered for keeping her occupied while I sit on the couch is to say, “Where is [object not currently in this room]?”, which prompts her to run off to verify that whatever is in its place. Every day I try to teach her a little more vocabulary. Yesterday was “elbow” and “knee”; today was “couch” and “TV”. But what really amazes me is when I ask her about stuff that I haven’t explicitly taught her, and she knows what I’m referring to. That’s what really blows my mind.
(more…)

One aspect I did not foresee of my child gaining her bipedal mobility, was that she was not the only object in our house that would no longer remain stationary. Scores of inanimate objects move about our house seemingly randomly on a daily basis. Conversations like, “Where’s the television remote?” “Have you checked the bidet?” have become commonplace. Just this morning I had to use Apple’s “Find My iPhone” service to locate my phone. The question is not if an electronic device will end up in the toilet, it’s a matter of which electronic device will get flushed.

A very recent behavior has emerged of hoarding certain objects. I can tell, whenever she’s marching from room to room with that determined look on her face, that some exodus of objects is taking place, be it coasters, pencils, toys, or clothes pins.
(more…)

One of the most frustrating parts of parenting for me is the distinct lack of right answers to questions of how to raise a child. Not every issue is as straightforward as “Should I let my child crawl on the ledge of my 7th story window?” (Answer: Only if you’ve double-checked the harnesses.) Like life in general, most issues come down to a judgement call with good arguments in both directions. One issue about which I often feel completely clueless is that of what to do when my child cries in the middle of the night. It seems that there are two opposing strategies.
(more…)

Nora is constantly eating. Upon waking in the morning, she complains nonstop while her breakfast formula bottle is prepared. After drinking 200 cc’s of the milk and cereal mix in her bottle, she can sometimes make it an entire hour before asking for a cookie. She does this by first shouting “YETA!“, which is how she says the Spanish word for cookie, galleta. Even though I know what she wants, I ignore her until she “switches to English” and shouts “DOH CHI!“, which is her approximation of the word “cookie”.
(more…)