To my pleasant surprise, even though it was extremely cold on Sunday going to and from the VHC Tet Lunar New Year Festival in Brooklyn, Kaia actually didn’t complain too much about the cold or walking. On both sides of the subway ride, we only walked about 6-7 minutes, so it really wasn’t that bad… even when the icy winds hit us. But while on the train, Kaia had some thoughts to share about the cold.

“Mama, when it’s winter here in New York, it’s summer at Suma and Topa’s house, right?” she asked me with wide eyes.

“Yes, baby… when it’s winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere where Suma and Topa are in Australia, so it’s summer,” I confirmed to her.

“Mama! I don’t like winter,” Kaia said with big frown on her face. “When it’s winter here, I wanna go to Suma and Topa’s where it’s summer! I wanna go to Melbourne because I don’t like the cold!”

This conversation was funny to me for a few reasons: 1) I love that she’s putting two and two together, beginning to understand the differences in seasons where we call home versus where her paternal grandparents are, 2) I also love (and laugh at) the fact that she thinks she can just snap her fingers and go to Australia during their summer time just because she wants to. She has no idea behind the financial costs of flying at high times of the year, of flying in general. She also doesn’t understand that it’s a commitment, that it’s a privilege to be able to have a mother who can work remotely for that amount of time and not have her job be in jeopardy (it’s also a privilege, in today’s day and age with soaring costs of living, to have a father who lives a “life of service [leisure]”, but that’s another topic for another day). How many four-year-olds are going to have the luxury of experiencing life in two hemispheres regularly… of flying on a long-haul flight from New York to Melbourne every year of their life thus far, and getting to see how amazing it is to escape the bitter cold of winter here for the summer there? Most Australians in New York I’ve met and known to date, at most, go back to Australia every other year… and that’s on the higher end. Almost no one I know other than Chris insists on going back every single year.

It’s going to be a work in progress to make sure that my only child doesn’t grow up to be some silver spoon, entitled child, who snubs other people for not seeing as much of the world as she has, or for being less worldly.