Feeding kids in Vietnam; 1 guard pees, another mocks me

There are many different styles of parenting. As many styles as there are parents, I would guess. But the one constant I see in Vietnam is that parents would rather feed their little children and toddlers than have the children and toddlers feed themselves. A scene that I see everywhere is moms, armed with a spoon or chopsticks, squatting next to their child and shoving food into the child's mouth. Occasionally, I'll see a male feeding kids -- but it's almost always a mom or grandma, and she's almost always squatting and methodically thrusting food at the kid's mouth. It reminds me of a mother bird feeding its young. The little birds open their mouths, and the mother bird spits in the food. I haven't seen the spitting here -- except by males and many females on the streets, in the parks, next to churches -- but the children willingly open their mouths without so much as lifting their hands to help. My wife does this with our daughter as well, and it's a minor source of contention in our household. I got Phuong to stop chasing Joanna around the house with a plate and utensils, but she loves to feed our daughter. The White Monkey taught his daughter to use a spoon and fork (the first lessons came with passion cheesecake at The Coffee House). And I refuse to hold a cup, or soda, or glass of milk for her; Joanna holds her own drinks when dad is there or she doesn't drink. I'll bet you didn't know that White Monkeys could use tools and utensils. Anyway, Joanna and the children who come to our house for daycare are encouraged to feed themselves. The moms get it. The style of parents feeding kids continues here until the children are 4 or 5 years old. I've seen moms feeding 6-year-olds, but that's not overly common. Part of this practice could be cultural. Family sit-down dinners are handled differently here. They seem more random, with women running in and out of the kitchen serving food, men eating, drinking beer, and talking (and spitting), and kids coming to the table, eating a bite or two and then taking off to play. Joanna has been allowed to leave our dinner table and return; it's another source of contention.  But I won a concession: Joanna can't take food out of the kitchen. She'll try and cry, but it's a no-go with Dad. Sorry, Joanna.

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When I was doing tai chi at the park last week at about 4:30 p.m., a security guard at a tea shop across the canal from me and the four moms and families from our daycare group pulled out his miniature manhood and began peeing in front of us. My sensibilities were intact, but I thought the security guard's behavior was unacceptable in front the moms and kids. I yelled over to him to go inside the tea house about 10 yards away and pee, but he merely laughed and kept peeing.  I shrugged because I wasn't going to walk on water to cross the canal and confront him. I resumed my tai chi when his security guard "buddy" decided to try to mock me by imitating my tai chi in an exaggerated fashion. Just as he started, my next posture and subsequent series of postures put my back to him, so I didn't get to see his unquestionably hilarious routine. Phuong witnessed the entire episode and said the tai chi imitator stopped his routine when he saw that no one was watching him and he slogged back to his chair, tail between his legs. Phuong and I didn't understand why the first guard didn't pee inside the tea shop. The second guard was just a fool. Actually, both guards were fools. 

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-- I'm happy to report fantastic progress with my torn plantar fascia. My new shoes arrived and I'm walking pain-free and even doing minimal jogging. Very minimal. There's a tiny bit of discomfort when I run, so a scheduled return to the court for light tennis practice this weekend may be postponed a week. I'm day to day, so to speak,  so it could still happen.

-- One of the bags of fancy weasel coffee we bought wasn't quite right, and I got a mild headache every time I had a cup. Genius that I am, I stopped drinking from that bag. No problem with the other bags. Perhaps the three hours of daily screaming and crying from our house full of children is contributing to my headaches as well. Nah, not likely. 

-- Guys were shouting into their cell phones at my new coffee haunt and I couldn't read -- I could easily hear them through my headphones even with my music blasting. So I returned to The Coffee House where's it's busier but quieter. The thing about The Coffee House is that I'm more likely to bump into people there that I know from my old job, and that interrupts Jack Vance. Unacceptable.
-- This blog broke the 50,000 pageview barrier last week. Thank you to every reader of this blog. Again, a shoutout to my readers from Italy, who have pushed my numbers up quite a bit in the past year. Grazie.