Prove It

Mealtime conversations with Keziah often take unexpected twists and turns.

Tuesday while eating her leftover pepperoni pizza and "hot chips" (Spicy Dorritos), Keziah declares that she and her foster family did not have a car in China.  Of course I agreed with her and commented that they must have walked everywhere.  However, wanting her to understand that her personal experiences don't represent the whole of China, I continued with the concepts that some people walk, some people ride bikes, and some people do have cars in China.

Boy, oh, boy, did she ever jump all over me!  "No bikes in China!" 

Why would she say that, when the Chinese have been so well known for riding bikes?  Well, the province and especially the city that were her home are very hilly and mountainous.  Nobody rides bikes because it would be too difficult.  So in her six years of living in China, she did not see people riding bikes.

So we had to take an intermission from lunch to look at pictures on my computer from out time in Beijing and Guangzhou to prove to her that people in China did in fact ride bikes.  Satisfied, she returned to her lunch.

Parenting Keziah can have its rough spots.  Needing to prove myself all the time can be exhausting.  There are just moments when the six years of her life we missed make a huge difference.  Like Christopher commented one day when Keziah challenged me in a discipline situation, "None of the other kids would have done that at her age."  We go head-to-head daily, and I've heard myself utter the dreaded words, "Because I said so!" more with her than in my 15 previous years of parenting experience.

Love this girl!