Kids

As great as the kids are, being around a 3 year old , and a 6 year old for a month  made me think, “gee not having kids around is nice.” This was even with a housekeeper and parents to watch after them.  The older kid is smart and rather willful.  She takes advantage of people where she can.  I am not used to 6 year olds that don’t quickly move into line when I use the “tough adult voice”.  The first time was when I was trying to figure out Spanish subtitles for DVDs.  For developing my ear, I wanted to buy a bunch of Spanish language DVD movies with English subtitles.  I put in a Spanish version of Lady and the tramp and couldn’t get the English subtitles going.  So I was going to try another movie, but the 6 year old had started watching and wouldn’t give me the remote.  I come from a background where outright fear of adult males is the norm so the situation was a bit baffling at first.  You can’t exactly use force on other people’s kids.   I suspect that her parent’s had use the “scary parent” voice so many times and not come through that she safely assumes adults are usually bluffing.  I had another incident where I was fixing the DVD player in the other room and she had climbed up on the armoire to manipulate the television.  When I tried to pull her off, she wouldn’t let go and was at risk of toppling a large, heavy, old style tube based TV down onto us.  Perplexing. 

I fear for Triny the new nanny.  She is 16 and from the sticks in Peru.  I get the sense she hasn’t experienced the full benefit of a high school education.  She is very nice, very naïve, and to be put up against this 6 year old (who is about to turn 7) for the next few years seems like a recipe for moose turd pie, if not a recipe for disaster. 

One thing in my favor is that the 6 year old was better at communicating with me than Triny- even though Triny spoke Spanish as a second language after Quechan.   The Quechan normally speak Spanish slower which makes it easier for me.  But the 6 year old quickly figured out where my vocabulary and grammatical abilities started and ended and liked to remind Triny that she needed to speak slowly for Isaac. 

At times I would talk to the 6 year old and you could forget she was 6, but later she would throw a tantrum or get hysterical over bouncing a ball in the house.  At Christmas eve, she was given a roman candle.  In Peru, roman candles are 5’ long and last for 5 minutes.  She would start to lose interest and the fireballs would start heading on lower trajectories, which made it more exciting for the rest of us as she was getting more bored holding up the long stick into the sky.

The fam 1

The fam 2