growing baby

The topic of bedtime behavior is an ever-present battlefield between kids and parents. In our case, the key story surrounds the mama silla vs. papa silla debate — who gets to sit in a chair next to Mateo’s bed and sing songs. It also deals with the singing, specifically.

Our bedtime ritual recently has been for both of us (if present) to be in the room with him. Mateo will then negotiate songs by count (i.e. “I want mama to sing 3 songs, ok?”) and then proceed to selecting precisely which ones he wants (“I want Baby Beluga, and then Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and then Your Children.”) There are perhaps 10 different songs that we can sing, between the two of us. Eventually one of us leaves and the other will stay for another 5-10 minutes singing more songs before leaving him to fall asleep.

Sometimes he orders the impossible — songs that I don’t know, for example. He’ll verify from time to time (“Do you know all the words?”) but sometimes he’ll be adamant on what he wanted. One of the most challenging situations so far has been when he asked for me to sing the ABC song in Japanese. Normally we offer him a choice between the ABC song in English, Spanish, or Russian. So I had to get creative and find an alphabet song for Japanese.

So you can imagine my (and his) frustration when, the other day, he asked for a Chinese alphabet song. We’d talked about the Chinese language a while ago, and he’d seen Chinese characters, but clearly I didn’t explain very carefully that there’s isn’t exactly an alphabet… I suppose it’s possible to find something like this as an example, but it would be a bit tough to tie that into a any writing he’d be likely to see.

So we had a little meltdown due to the lack of an alphabet in China. I don’t remember precisely, but I’m sure we dealt with it in the end by singing something else…