Yuki and I met in Japan.

The next place we got together was Hawaii. We couldn’t get flights that arrived on the same day, so I spent the night in the airport. Most of the airport is open-air, and quite comfortable, but there are no benches to sleep on. Any benches are either made out of 2×4’s, or have fixed armrests.

After that, Yuki visited me in Oregon.

In Oregon, riding up an escalator in Nordstrom’s, she needed to ask me a “difficult question”. I didn’t know what to expect, as she had never phrased anything that way before. I told her to go ahead and ask. She hesitated a little bit, mentally formulating the best way to ask, and said “Which would you rather eat? Curry flavored poop, or poop flavored curry? You have to choose one”.

I didn’t really expect that question, but it was a good question that really made me think. It’s one of those questions that is really difficult to answer.

Similarly, the premise of a movie that Yuki watched tonight hit on the same difficulty of finding an answer;
You learn that your 5-year old child is not yours. They were switched at birth. Your child has been located, and has been raised by another family. Do you attempt to get your genetic child back, or do you continue raising the child that you have raised for the past 5 years?

This is a pretty extreme question. It’s not like people would be faced with that sort of situation on any regularity, but we’ve been thinking about how to raise our child – who will be the “bad cop”, how to effectively enforce time outs, how often to dole out sweets, and how to react when they eat dust off of the floor (I think they should go for it. It will build their immune system, give them a taste for adventure, and cut down on the need to vacuum).

There is a lot of pediatric information out there which is probably leaps and bounds more reliable than anecdotal evidence, but it is hard to shake what you were raised with. I will probably want to enforce “eat everything on your plate before you may be excused”, because that’s the way I grew up. Pediatricians probably have done studies into this and found that it is horribly detrimental to the child and contributes to food fetishes and cake farts that manifest later in life.

Perhaps I am thinking far too deeply into this, but thinking deeply into this just raises another question: How deeply should I be thinking into this?

This child rearing thing seems pretty difficult.