The Reluctant Rider

This morning TJ did not eat much breakfast. We had to coax, then nearly carry him onto the bus to the park at Baiyuan Mountain. Once we arrived at the gardens, he took lots of photos but wasn't himself, and then, back on the bus, he vomited without telling anyone. Poor kid. During a big, dim sum lunch, which he devoured with surprising alacrity, we borrowed a motion sickness patch from the family of his best buddy, who also hates the bus and taxi and, essentially any means of locomotion. Although this was the first time we had seen symptoms of car sickness in TJ, perhaps the patch will be an answer to at least one aspect of his worries.


At the park, he smiled for pictures, enjoyed the waterfalls and raced with Jiejie, but he also chose to stand in one spot for 20 minutes of the hour we had to explore. On the way out, he screamed and stomped when we did not buy him the most expensive bubbles, telling the vendor the set we got him did not work. When we got back to the hotel, we invited his buddy for a play date. All was well until the buddy left and he and  I took a promised walk to the pool. We never made it. Instead we had a 30-minute tantrum in the lobby of the health spa, much to the distress of the staff.
 TJ tried to pry open the elevator doors, then planted himself in front of them, screaming all the while in Chinese, "Why can't I see my friend? Why? Why?" A difficult question to answer. His friend's father had said they might meet us at the little playground past the pool, but we never got that far. We spent the time sitting on the cold mosaic floor, TJ crying, Mama coaxing, telling TJ how much I loved him, and repeating my other three comforting phrases in Mandarin.
We have never felt the language gap so keenly.

The amazing Ayi Susan, the local representative of our agency, came to the rescue again last night and this afternoon. She has been helping us to prepare TJ for each day's events by talking to him the night before about what's to come. She must never get any sleep.  She has suggested, very gently, that we be more direct in our parenting and that our reliance on our Chinese au pairs and Chinese friend, Ping,  to translate, did not really put us at an advantage. TJ might have understood more of the words, but (oops! stuck in italic) he was engaging with the person talking instead of with Mom and Dad. We are following her advice, and little by little it seems to be changing the course of our bus.