I guess the first times Luísa told me I was stupid, I was really offended. I probably used some violence in my reaction. I won´t be specific, I can´t even remember exactly what kind of violence I used (screaming probably, threatening, maybe a combination of that with a more physical input of my state of mind).

I thought that I couldn´t stand her calling me stupid. I thought that I shouldn´t let her do it to me. As in, ¨I can´t accept my daughter telling me this. If I let her call me names, she will not learn to respect me.¨

Luckily, both for me and Luísa, I quit that old way of  reacting and I started to respond more intelligently. Now, I think that taking it personally is really stupid.

I learned to take her ¨You are stupid!¨ as an alarm that something is going on and that I have to devote my full attention to that ( focus on my kid and not on my own misguided feelings). I realize that it´s a sign of anger. And I´ve been reading a lot about how when kids are aggressive, that´s hiding a underneath fear. So I start addressing what can be causing Luísa to be so angry that she will scream ¨You are stupid!¨.

I start by acknowledging what she feels: ¨I see you are very angry. You are so angry, you even say bad things to me¨. I ask her what is making her so angry. Usually she won´t say what it is, but I´m smart enough to guess or get close to the reason. So I ask: ¨Maybe you are angry because I´m not letting you watch a film (or whatever seems to me at the moment).¨

She might agree and keep angry, or she might just keep angry. I let her be angry. I tell her it´s ok to be angry at times. She might even go into a fury, if for instance I have to physically not let her do something (like grab my computer, or whatever). She will try to hit me and bite me. And I just prevent myself from being hurt. I can do that.

On occasions, we can turn the anger into laughter, like when we start screaming together, the louder that we can.

The best thing for me about this process is that I´m keeping my cool. I can see through the misbehavior and work with her, instead of feeling attacked personally or feel that my child is becoming a bully.

I talk to her later about it. I recall the episode, I tell her I don´t like to be called names. I understand that she sometimes has anger about something and we might find other ways to release it. So far, she doesn´t take my suggestions (hit a pillow, spit outside, scream outside). I´m not very creative about it. So I tell her this too (that I can´t find that way by myself). I say that we can think about this again and how to do it differently. Even if we can´t find a good solution now, we can still work on it.

When other people are involved it´s harder for me

When she does it to a friend, I do more or less the same. I feel a bit more self conscious because I expect the other parent to want me to correct Luísa in a traditional way. I don´t know if they want me to, I just feel bad. I´m just learning to deal with these strong emotions myself and I know it´s not the way that people around do it.

I was once having lunch with a friend who is into spanking. I´ve been talking about positive parenting, I even lent her that book I talked about here: Your Competent Child.

Luísa and her boy were playing while we waited for our food. While they were at it (far from our eyes), Luísa hit the boy and he came straight at me, wanting me to retaliate. I took Luísa far from the table, knelled down and talked to her. Then I asked her to just be at the table until we finished (not as a punishment, but so I could prevent anything else). When we came back to the table, the boy asked her mom if I had hit Luísa. His mom replied to him ¨No, she doesn´t spank her¨.

I think we all felt uncomfortable at the table.

One of my favorite blogs is ¨Good Job!¨ and Other Things You Shouldn´t Say or Do. And to my delight, while I´m working with the ¨You are stupid!¨ in my house, Jennifer recently wrote When Your Kid Spits at You which is exactly the same thing. If you need some parenting model and practical advice, go to her blog.

In that article she says that ¨your kid spitting at you is not a pre-meditaded disrespect. But it it a sign of anger.¨

¨Overwhelmed young people literally can’t self-regulate and don’t have the wear-with-all to say, “Excuse me Mom, I’m really angry right now. I feel like no one is caring about what’s going on for me. I don’t want to go to that party. I feel like I haven’t had enough time with you. You’ve been with the baby forever and now I’m supposed to just get in the car and I’m hungry and I want to play with you and I don’t give a shit about some friend turning four.”¨

The spitting itself, Luísa reserves to strange people. She hates strangers to say how beautiful she is, or much worse TOUCH her. I came to hate it too. Why do people think they can pet kid´s heads just like that?

When someone does that mistake while I´m not watching, I realize what happened as soon as Luísa spits at the person (she might scream ¨You are stupid!¨ too).

I usually say ¨I´m sorry she spat at you (or screamed at you), but she really doesn´t like people she doesn´t know to touch her.¨ (I hate how puzzled they look at what happened)

Then I kneel down and I tell Luísa: ¨I´m sorry that woman touched you, she shouldn´t have done that. I know this makes you angry. But spitting on people is not ok. I can´t let you do that either¨.

I don´t know if I´m dealing with this in the right way. I later talk about it and tell her that she might try to spit on the sidewalk instead. ¨It´s ok to be angry when a stranger touches you¨, I say. ¨But some people have no idea how this can be upsetting, they cannot control themselves, we have to deal with it ourselves¨. I tell her about how when I was a child it really pissed me off too and how I also hate that anyone will do this to her.

I´ve held a few hands on air already, no kidding. Someone was about to touch her and I prevented it like if I had a karate reflex.

To be honest, I don´t want to restrain my daughter too much when people touch her. I myself feel like screaming at them ¨Go and touch your mother´s head, leave my kid alone!¨. But I was so trained to please strangers, I still smile at them and feel awkward instead.

I´m pretty sure I had a good old education and I learned to behave. I hope I can help my daughter to express herself in socially acceptable ways, but I don´t want her to swallow her feeling the way I learned to do. I don´t want her to just behave.

Photo Credit

Going to watch the sunset a few days before the episode.

A few days before coming back to Puerto Viejo from our surf trip to Santa Teresa, I went to the ATM and withdrew 200 bucks. After that, I went to have lunch with Luísa and then to the grocery store.

When we arrived at our camping and I looked for my wallet to pay for our stay. It was gone. No 200 bucks, no bank card, nada. I was left with the few bananas and avocados I bought at the grocery store (I was so cheap, I spent only 2 dollars before losing the 200).

As I had just published a post about safety and how if something bad happens you just have to deal with it, I simply dealt with it. I asked Nico, our host, surf student and current family memeber in the place to lend me some money to get back to Puerto Viejo the next day.

Then we went to watch our last sunset on the ocean for the time being. On the way, we met a woman who started playing with Luísa.

We appreciated the sunset and there were other friends of our new found friend next to us. Two of them started to take pictures of Luísa. Not before asking for it and having Luísa engage by first taking pictures of the people herself. Luísa usually doesn´t let anyone take pictures of her, so we were definitely having a good time with these people.

By the time we had to leave, one of them asked for my email to send the pictures (they never send the pictures later, as this one didn´t either) and as I spelled my full name, the woman couldn´t believe it.

I asked: ¨What is it? Did you guys read my blog?¨

¨No, it´s more interesting than that.¨

As it turned out, the guy sitting at the end of our log, the one I haven’t even looked at yet, had found my wallet. He was nervous that he couldn´t find the owner of that wallet. He said that was the only upsetting thing about his day. They looked me up on Face Book and sent me a message (which I never received) and that´s why the woman recognized my name (thanks to my bank card on the wallet).

We went together to their hostel where he gave me my wallet back and we chatted about the magic of all of that.

Just promise me you won´t leave your camera on the beach for a swim, explore deserted places and walk randomly at night, will you?

Is backpacking as a woman alone dangerous? Is traveling alone with a small child risky? My family and friends back in São Paulo, a city in Brazil with about 20 million people, think that I am courageous and that I could be safer back home. I think that any city with a traffic light is too big and has too many problems and dangers to be livable.

I lived in a few paradises already which were all very touristy. Now, in Costa Rica, another country, I live in exactly the same kind of place I was living before in Brazil: tropical beach, lots of tourists and lots of locals from all over the world.

One thing is for sure: where there´s tourism, there´s crime. Where there´s people with a lot, there´s people with less ¨working¨ their way around the stuff. It´s simple mathematics.

There are some precautions you have to take anywhere you go to, traveling or not.

From my experience, I can say that in all the places I lived and traveled to, petty crime abound.

Unfortunately, in Puerto Viejo, where I´m living for one year (but am on a surf trip on the Pacific at the moment) there´s more than that. There´s dudes with machetes or guns at a curve at night (not even late at night, just after dark). I haven´t seen any. I hear the stories.

That´s why I don´t go back home late with my bike. It´s really fucked up that I can´t ride my bike by myself for 5 minutes back home when I go out at night, but I take a taxi instead of taking the risk.

There´s a lot of cameras stolen at the beach, this is classic. It´s almost the stolen person´s fault to leave their camera unattended for a swim in a place like this. I´m guilty of this too, I had a wallet stolen once in my home town in Brazil just like that.

My neighbor in Puerto Viejo just moved next to my house because he was in a place that got broken into several times.  This is not the first story of this kind.

So, what can we do to be safe?

Pretty little, actually. We can  never be completely safe.

There are a few basic safety rules:

1. Never leaving your things alone in public places.

2. Being careful with the house you rent (asking safety questions to the owner and possibly anyone who lives in the street).

3. When in a hotel, asking if it´s safe to leave electronics in the room and where it´s better to do so. Have in mind that no hotel is safe either. Right now, I´m at a camping site and I leave my backpack with important stuff in a locked room. The owner of the place told me to not leave anything in my tent and I simly ask him to put it there and give it to me a few times a day.

4. On buses in Costa Rica, always carry  your bag in your lap, nowhere else. It´s normal that people ride standing and get off anywhere on the road, so thieves steal backpacks of people relaxed listening to ipods or sleeping. I´ve heard so much of this and was present at one episode (right after having some money and my credit card stolen at the border with Nicaragua). I think it happens every day in Costa Rica. I´m glad I was told this at my first stop here, or this computer that I´m typing now could have been gone a long time ago (I´m usually very distracted on bus rides, but not without my bag in my lap now).

5. Avoid walking alone at night or at deserted areas in the daytime. Yeah, it´s sad, if you want to be really safe, don´t walk too far away from people at amazing beaches. Never assume you are alone. I was once in Brazil, walking with a friend at noon at a deserted beach and then we were robbed by a crack head with gun in hand and all.

6. Not leaving your bike unlocked.

7. Asking the locals about safety in the area (like the bus situation in Costa Rica, you need inside information to know what to expect and how to prevent things).

Don´t rely on data given by authorities or newspapers, because these lie all the time.

In Puerto Viejo, if you get robbed and you go to the police station, they´ll ask you to go to another city to put it on the record. How many people do you think that besides the hassle of being robbed travel to another city to do so? I think very few, that´s why the records of crime in Puerto Viejo must be much lower than the reality.  If you go to the police station and ask about safety, I don´t think they´ll tell you anything accurate (I didn´t check this information, mind you, as a Latin American, I think the police is useless if not more dangerous than criminals).

8. Hiding your valuable items in the house when you are gone. No hiding is thief-proof, but it might save your stuff in the case of a break in (but then, who knows).

9. Use copies of your documents with you and have them all scanned, just in case. Have the number of your credit card or bank and maybe your embassy online for yourself as well.

These are just some basic safety rules, you can come up with more if you think about the subject (or if you visit forums about the place where you want to go).

Still…

You might make all the safer choices and still get mugged. That´s how unfair life on our planet is. And unfortunately, it´s even less fair for the guy who robes you.

You can only go a bit far in preventing anything from happening to you and your things.

This is why at the moment I only have cheap electronics. If my computer gets robbed I buy another one the next day, just like that. My insurance is having the money to replace it. The same for my shitty camera.

I feel for the people who need expensive items (hello Mac Book Pro owners), because really, there´s little you can do to prevent completely it to be taken from you.

I don´t follow the safety rules all the time. I almost never lock my bike, for instance.

I trust that nothing bad will happen.

And when something bad happens, it´s still more or less smooth, as in nothing really bad happens.

I take my precautions, and I trust. I don´t think there´s anything else you can do about safety.

I just met a band traveling from Mexico to Argentina on a van. They have their instruments and their mac books with them. They camp and they stay in cheap places, always with safety in their minds and doing their best to prevent the worse, but being somewhat adventurous as well. So far, they´ve been good about it.

How can you make traveling (or living anywhere) safe?

I´d say travel wherever you feel like (except maybe for war zones, you should handle security fine), be alert, make yourself informed, trust that things will be fine and have fun. And if something bad happens, deal with it and move on.

Photo Credit

That´s me coming out of a perfect wave. I love Santa Teresa!

This is the place for me to be: Santa Teresa – Costa Rica. The waves are amazing, the climate is hot and dry, the camping site is only 5 dollars a night and Luísa and I are having a blast.

It´s been a week since we arrived and I surfed 4 times. In my firsts days here I met a 12 year old from New York who could babysit Luísa. But, unfortunately, our fist meeting didn´t work out and while we still don´t have another one, I had to come up with a plan B.

Plan B for surfing this time consisted in offering the owner of the camping where we are staying surf lessons in exchange of babysitting hours. We go together to the beach, he surfs for one hour with my board and I tell him all I can to help him and then he plays with Luísa for one hour while I surf.

The first day we tried this, Luísa was not keen on the idea at all. When I went for the surf, she stayed with water in her chest crying the whole time, with the guy a few meters away from her.

If I wasn´t so caught up in our little separation anxiety drama, I´d think this was funny. I paddled out, there were big waves and for a while I couldn´t see Luísa in the sand, I drifted about 50 meters with the current, and when I saw Luísa again, she was right behind me in the shore, still crying in the water. I couldn´t resist feeling bad and I got out of the water after 20 minutes.

I had prevented the guy about this sad scenario, and I also told him it would probably get better next time.

The second time, when I was getting ready to go into the water, Luísa was playing sad and not having any of it. I told her: ¨I´m going to surf now, there are two things you can do: play and have fun, or cry and be miserable while I´m out there, it´s your choice. I´d have fun if I were you.¨ She said: ¨Ok, I´ll have fun¨, and so she did.

So, this is how I´ll get to surf everyday while I´m here from now on.

Luísa had to have fun with Nico while I was catching some waves. He´s Italian and I asked him to talk only in Italian if possible, why not fit in some language tutoring in our surf trip...

Contrary to my fears, the camping site and it´s young crowd have been great. They all play with Luísa, and though she hasn´t had any play date with children, she´s had tons of fun with other people.

There´s a group of musicians who have been playing a lot with her and one of the girls is learning to surf too, so she can use my board as well, while we all hang out at the beach.

We have cold showers (couldn´t be any different with the heat and the sun) and we have Wi Fi ¨borrowed¨ from the neighbor’s.

We spend the hottest hours of the day at our camping site .

I´m queen of packing light now. My backpack was light and I managed to carry the mattress, the tent and everything in it. I have 4 clothes, and only use 2, and Luísa has 7, and she only uses 2 as well. Crazy enough, I can say that we brought too many clothes. One of the best decisions into packing light is to not bring any toys, that´s right, Luísa is still playing all day long with things, creative toys that she makes up - NICE.

Our vacation routine is really great: all morning at the beach (including my favorite thing in the world: surfing), lunch out (dinners, breakfast and snacks in the community kitchen), a movie, ice-cream and sunset by ourselves or with friends with some extra running at the beach for a sweet and easy bedtime in our comfy tent.

This must be a child´s dream, by the way, to be alone with mommy and sleep in a tent. It can´t get better than this.

And the waves here are simply perfect.

Catching a water taxi from Montesuma to Jacó one year ago, while we were traveling the Pacific of Costa Rica.

Traveling alone with a 4-year old is not all flowers, as you might guess or know. For some, safety can be an issue, for others being on long buses rides can be the thing. For me, the scariest part is always the behavior.

I´m talking about that meltdown that happens, and also about her lack of discipline around me. It´s really amazing how well behaved she is when I´m not around.  How unfair: the person who loves her the most, gets the worse treatment. And it scares me shitless that I´ll have to deal with this in another place where I have no support system to count on (meaning people to watch her).

After a lot of analyzing what happens I came to a few logical conclusions, the main ones are:

1- So much of her short life (in our point of view) I´ve been very permissive, but with the regular shifts to authoritarian (meaning daily screams, threats and etc). This laid out some very sick dynamics between us like when I come up with a rule, stick to it, but not so much, and she wins with her tricks (wining, crying, screaming as the preferred ones). Or my rough responses to normal questions. I´m slowly fixing this, I hope.

2- Single care giver of a single child for years without any break longer than one day, a few times in all this time. Victim’s syndrome on the side, the scientific truth is that no one can be lovingly at all times under the pressure of taking care of a kid 24-7.

When I spend a week having trouble at bedtime night after night, I start wondering why the hell would I want to go through this on the road. I imagine us at the camping site, the young crowd hanging out at the kitchen, laughing and Luísa being a brat for over tiredness and my lack of creativity to deal with it at the moment and thus having a hard time in public.

It´s because of reasons 1 and 2 that many times I go through over one hour of her crying, sometimes ending with me having a fit, sometimes having me as a creative loving mother. Usualy making me an emotional wreck, my eyes frowned constantly. All my hours spent taking care of her: something I chose to do and love and also something I have no other option at the same time.

How can I then think it´s a good idea to travel?

I´ve been planning on going to the Pacific for one month. It actually started with 2 months in my mind. Then I thought, maybe, 1month, 3 weeks, 2 weeks. And then I catch myself thinking: should I go at all? Will I regret this? Will I be so tired of the day, the sun, the surf, the work online I have to find time to do and then not have a home to go nuts with my kid freely? No friend to visit to take me down of that edge? No one to call to get away from Luísa for a couple of hours?

I also fear my backpack. Even though it´s much lighter than in this first packing list. This one is different, I´ll bring a tent, an inflatable mattress (a sheet, extra sarongs for towels) and we will camp together for the first time. I really fear carrying all that I want to carry (being the most challenging item, the longboard – in my surf trip to Nicaragua, I learned that sometimes the board has to pay to go). The guitar stays behind.

But maybe, a trip is really what can cure us from our freaked excessive one on one relationship. By getting to a new place, our routine shake and we get closer, both more loving and cooperative and we both enjoy the newness around us and make new friends and entertain each other and ourselves differently than in our regular routine.

Most probably, my fear is the fear of change. The fear of shaking my comfort zone.

Luísa is really excited about the idea of sleeping in a tent. I´m exited about camping costing about 6 dollars a night.

Well, what the heck, I have to do these trips. Once I start thinking about them, it´s unstoppable. Even my fear can´t hold me back. It´s too late. I just have to go.

I´m starting to feel the high of this trip already.

Pacific Coast, be gentle with us, make us meet new friends, give me lots of waves and a nice and peaceful campsite with WiFi, just for a start.

I recently had this book suggested to me by a reader and I loved it so much I had to share it here.

Your Competent Child questions the traditional family values and suggests that most of what we understand as upbringing ¨has a destructive influence on the quality of relationships between children and adults¨.

According to the author, Jesper Jull, until about 40 years ago, families would seek for a method of upbringing and we have been held up on the notion that children need to be taught how to behave.

Instead, we have finally discovered that children are full human beings (a notion present in the RIE approach as well), they are not to be taught how to become adults, they do it naturally by growing up. These notions are so simple written down, they seem unquestionable for me, and yet, we haven´t been treating children nicely at all. For one thing, we haven´t been treated with that much respect ourselves, or you have got to have pretty unconventional parents to have been. So it´s really hard to do it without any role models, we are to become the role models of raising children with respect.

The biggest problem of traditional methods is that they easily detach us from our children. Somehow, along the history of ¨civilization¨, we have lost the ability to convert our loving feelings into loving behavior.

But, Juul writes: ¨we are regaining the skills to improve our relationships with the latest attempts to find equal dignity between men and women, adults and children. And to do so, we have to start by forgetting a lot of what we conceive as right and wrong.¨

Juul has a different view on what is children´s cooperation and by competent, Juul means that ¨children are in a position to teach us what we need to learn¨.

As an example, he talks about a mom bringing her baby to daycare as soon as her maternity leave is over. Every morning, when she drives the baby there, the baby starts fussing and crying, making the separation hard. When the dad brings the baby, the girl doesn´t get bothered. The mom thinks the daughter is not cooperating.

Juul explain that the opposite is true: the baby is cooperating.

The mom is probably unhappy about going to work and is having difficulty to separate from her baby. The daughter somehow senses the mom´s feelings and cries. She means something like: ¨Mom, there´s something wrong here, something is unclear. I am letting you know this and assume that you will take responsibility for solving the problem so that we both can feel better¨.

This is an amazing insight into our children challenging behavior as a possibility for us to realize that something is wrong and we need to figure out what is and fix it. We, the adults.

¨Children cooperate. It is the task of the adults to realize what the children are cooperating with¨, says Juul and he proposes a new paradigm: ¨Children´s behavior, whether cooperative or disruptive, is just as important for the development and health of parents as the behavior of parents is for the development and health of children. The interaction between adults and children is a mutual learning process. The more we treat each other with equal dignity, the more we each gain.¨

Now we know that children are born fully human: social, responsible and empathic, that these qualities are not taught, but inborn. Our task as parents is not to teach so much as it is to interact in healthy ways.

It´s more important for parents to guarantee an environment of cooperation both ways in the house than to try to teach and mold desired behaviors. It´s about accepting our differences too and our children´s unique traits and way of developing.

The secret is in making sure our children can count on us to meet their needs, whatever they are, that we learn how to read their inputs, that often are not verbal as we would like them to be, but always are expressed in a competent way.

To reach a better understanding and respect, we must question our assumptions about parenting and engage with our children in more honest and meaningful ways. If you are curious about the book, here´s the link again (an affiliate link).

It is my hope that every day more families shift their traditional paradigms to positive parenting solutions. One my favorites sites with practical advice on how to do this is Aha Parenting. It will be a real revolution when masses of families start treating our children with the respect that all human beings deserve.

Our Christmas day should be a lot like this

I´m not religious. I don´t really mind if there´s a God. Officially, I don´t celebrate Christmas. But, probably 99% of the people I know do, so I always end up in a Christmas party, with or without presents.

Luísa only had 4 Christmas in her life, 2 of which she went to bed at her usual 6pm time and me at 9pm. The other two, we had dinner with people and not any exchange of presents or Christmas tree or typical Christmas tree or climate. But a lot of the human exchange that it´s so amazing.

I don´t even talk about the subject with her (Christmas), it kind of doesn´t exist for us.

Only that it does. The 24^th, we will be working at a volunteer lunch as usual. Only that this Saturday it will be a special dinner with maybe more than 100 people and everyone receiving presents. Luísa will take a present and receive one, it might be the first she relates to the word ¨Christmas¨ (although she probably received presents at Christmas before from her grandma) .

It´s been an odd week for someone who doesn´t celebrate Christmas or doesn´t suffer with any of the typical family drama or loss of money that happen this time of the year all around.

Last Sunday, our temporary cat had a kitten (how does someone who is not into cats end up watching a pregnant cat?). Just one kitten was born and I had to take the cat inside the house to take good care of the kitten. Luísa´s been great at watching the kitten and calling the mom when he cries. This event puts us on the spirit of a new life, one that we have to take care of.

During this magical week, I´ve been surfing with a new single-surfer mom. This is the best gift I could get: a new friend who I can take turns in surfing and watching the kids. It´s an amazing gift that I quite deserved.

I had two ladies knocking on my door to ¨teach me¨ the word of God. I explained to them that we agree to hold certain values such as compassion and not lying, so I had to say that I didn´t believe in God. It made me nervous because I didn´t want them to feel bad or that I was some lost soul, but it was kind of fun to say so.

In short, during Christmas I always end up sharing with people, which is really nice. And usually there´s the Christmas surf session too, I hope I hold up to this tradition.

This week I am guest posting at the traveling website Bootsnall with 13 tips for easier travel with small children. The title says it all, so please check my post there.

Vacation to who?

My daughter doesn´t have kindergarten for the next two months. It´s been pretty intense to organize some time to work.

This is when I REALLY miss my home in Brazil and my friends there where I have enough intimacy to ask anytime for someone to watch Luísa for me. I think that for the next two months I´ll be missing my home a lot.

One of the single mom friends I bonded the most is now traveling and I don´t feel much comfortable to have people watch Luísa for anything that isn´t work related. So, I´m a bit burned out I have to say. Poor Luísa, is sweet and all, but I often look for the switch off button and I can´t find it.

Still, I want to make a trip to the Pacific happen in January, something similar to our surf trip in Nicaragua. It involves a lot of trust. Trust that I´ll find time to do the paid work, surf and meet someone decent to watch my daughter while I do those things.

In The Gypsy Mama´s Guide to Real Traveling with Kids, you can find advice on how to make your travels safe and fun with kids from all ages. The two authors (Jenn Miller and Keri Wellman) have experience in traveling with kids from the early months to teenagers, they have four children each.

I get asked questions about traveling with children all the time, and I have many answers, but this is a complete book on the topic, I highly suggest it. This is an affiliate link, but I really think it can help many families to make a dream trip happen.

I really loved the examples of games to play at home before getting on the road, like the ones about safety rules, airport and train security or tips on how to help you baby nap on the road. The two families were doing all kind of games, making it all fun for the children.

There are tips from packing (try the one bag rule), with lists of what they bring, healthcare options and emergency care conducts, besides what to do when a child is having a tantrum on a plane or how to work up the guts to let your teenager travel alone for the first time.

Take healthcare on the road, which puzzles many parents. I´ll say that I don´t have any insurance and both me and my girl didn´t have any medical need in one year.

We had to take flew fever vaccine before coming to Costa Rica. I only did it because it was mandatory to leave Brazil with that in hand, but if you are about to travel and are thinking about vaccinations, you might want to check this post: Should I Vaccinate My Child For Travel?

Anyway, there´s a health care section for the more careful then me in the book.

I´ve been traveling with my daughter ever since she´s 8 months old, but I´d have benefited greatly to having read this before. I did some training myself, role playing a trip, telling weeks prior to a big move what´s about to come, and I adjusted the itineraries with my girls routine of eating and sleeping.

But I didn´t train her behavior as the book suggests (and maybe in any way at all up till when she was 3) and so I think at times that most parents fear, like while at the check in at the airport, or passing by the Federal Police, I did have Luísa crawl away and I nervously kept an eye on her and another at the bureaucracy. She did pass to the boarding aisle while I was at the waiting room once. I was watching the whole scene, fascinated at how easily a child could enter the wrong airplane.

I was alert and stressed and in the end, everything was well and worth it, but I can see how parents that take the time to make games in the house and practice some situations of stress on the road can make it all so much more pleasurable.

On the ¨Where to stay¨ section, there are examples of all kind of accommodation. These families have been to hostels, tents, hotels and rented homes. No kidding they can talk about all the possibilities on the road and they give links on where to look for what you want.

I was even more encouraged to go camping with my girl after reading the book. When I told Luísa that our next trip was on a tent, she was so excited! Kids like it simpler than we imagine. When starting off in Costa Rica, I always wanted a room with a bathroom. When we went to Nicaragua, we spent a few nights at places with shared bathrooms and the easiness this resulted on the budget plus watching my 4-year old never ask for more comfort was great.

This book might inspire parents not only to travel, but to educate properly their children. Traveling with children mean having them learn from an early age social rules of behavior that sometimes can take longer to happen at home.

I love how it emphasizes that the younger a child is taken traveling, the easier and more used to it she´ll become: ¨Exposing the child to travel at an early age can better help her to cope with the stress of travel. It helps your baby gain her sea legs, figuratively and literally.¨

Are you curious about this guide? Here´s the link again.

That´s me playing at Luísa´s kindergarten here in Costa Rica

One of the biggest reasons of why I decided to take off from Brazil and live for one year in Costa Rica was that my daughter would learn to speak Spanish and English. The easy way: by deep immersion. The official language here is Spanish, but there´s a heavy influence by the US and many locals speak English. Besides this, most private schools are bilingual.

Every since Luísa was a baby, I read to her in English, almost exclusively. I kept buying myself books in English because I would read out loud my own books often too. She heard lots of Charles Bukowski, which is far from appropriate content…

I also sang songs with my guitar (here´s a video of me singing in her kindergarten in Brazil)  and I tried to play and speak in English in the house as much as possible. It wasn´t much actually, but it was something. (here´s my first post on how I was teaching her)

She also watches videos on the computer mainly in English.  She only started watching videos after she was two years old and at times she could do it for about one hour and this year it´s less than half hour and not every day. We don´t have a TV and I highly control what she watches. I´m a bit psycho on this, even at restaurants with the TV on, I´ll have them change the channel or turn it off or simply leave.

At her kindergarten here in Costa Rica, the main teacher speaks English and the assistant Spanish. The children speak mostly in Spanish.

Luísa is now fluent in Spanish and can switch to English with no problems (her English is funny, but it works).

For the last few months, we´ve been speaking mostly Spanish in the house. She speaks naturally in Spanish and I simply answer back in Spanish. I was avoiding speaking Portuguese all that I could, because I thought I was going back to Brazil in December.

Only that I decided to stay longer, probably for another year and now I´m trying to speak in Portuguese again. Yes, trying, because weird enough, I´ve trained myself so hard to not waste our language learning with Portuguese, that I finally did it: I speak to her mostly in another language spontaneously. Especially now that she doesn´t speak any Portuguese at all, it´s so simple for me to keep the conversation in her language.

But I´ve been trying to speak more Portuguese again, given the fact that I´m the only Portuguese speaker in this town.

It´s been interesting all these language switches. For one thing, every time I´m switching between languages, it makes me instantly more aware of the words and actions I´m taking at that moment.

Speaking different languages with my child helps me therefore in parenting, because I´m trying to do things with more intention and awareness: thinking, speaking and acting.

Multilingual friends

Luísa´s current best friend is Italian. They are always hanging out in Spanish, but eventually, when Luísa is over her friend´s house, she gets to hear the mother speaking some Italian. And well, I speak to the mother mostly in Italian too, but we also make that mix of two languages often.

Sometimes in our home, she´ll say something in Italian she learned at her friend´s house, like: ¨Che bella!¨ How beautiful. She asks me how to say things in Italian, so sometimes I let her watch a cartoon on you tube in Italian, she likes repeating some of it outloud.

Luísa has a couple of friends with American parents, who she talks to in both Spanish and English, and there are parents of different nationalities here, so it´s a real multicultural and multilingual environment.

Multilingual benefits

There are many benefits for knowing other languages, but here´s one that seems more important than having more chances to get a job in the future (I hope my daughter never has a job and work in various freelance projects instead): it increases divergent thinking. Here´s a nice article on this.

And as I was browsing around this subject, I found also the article Why Should Young Children learn a Foreign Language? from which I´ll quote directly this:

¨Studies show that children as young as 3-4 years of age begin to develop impressions, positive and negative, about other peoples and customs. This process continues until it begins to solidify into stereotypes by the time they are 10-12 years of age. Providing opportunities for very young children to learn about and experience other cultures gives them a more global perspective before negative stereotypes become entrenched.¨ NICE!

I have to admit that for me it´s relatively easy to do all this because I do speak fluently Portuguese, Spanish English and Italian. It´s not that easy because you really have to train yourself to practice the language you want your kid to learn the more you can, therefore at times not speaking in the most natural way for you.

It´s also as weird as it seems and I´m not a strict person at all, so very often I speak a mix of two languages, that might not be the best thing to do, but it comes naturally.

There´s a family of (originally) monolingual parents raising a trilingual girl (English, Spanish and Chinese Mandarin). You can check their experience with all this here.

Now, will all these languages stick? I have no idea. I know that while it´s easy for my daughter to learn now, it´s also easy for her to forget if we stop practicing. Only time will tell what´s going to happen. But I will be diligent about the English and once we are back to Brazil, I plan on finding a Spanish speaker friend to meet with us a few times a week.

Do you have any experience teaching and/or learning new languages with your child?