We are all practicing social distancing right now, as well as of course lots of hand washing and trying to not touch our faces much. As mothers have pointed out- it’s hard to stop our kids from putting their dirty little hands on our faces! Yul does that sometimes, but he also loves putting his feet on my face. I’m wondering which one is worse? Are there likely to be more germs on his hands than his feet?
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Our video on the toilet paper hoarding panic in Australia.
Can you make instant kimchi ?
If you know anything about kimchi your immediate response would be “of course not!” However, we do attempt to make instant kimchi in this video. Our secret weapon? A new kimchi seasoning product. We do know the women who invented this product but this is not a sponsored video. Hugh uses it just as seasoning but we wanted to try it for actually making kimchi.
Most of the results were pretty good! Especially if you don’t always like the sour aspect of kimchi. Personally I like kimchi when it’s first made and before fermentation, but for those that do like the deep sour kimchi taste, fermentation is still important when making kimchi.
But also if you just want a spicy kimchi taste on other food, the powder is great for that! It should be available online in the next few months. It’s only a small company, so they are working on making it available at the moment.
We talk about what it’s like in Seoul, South Korea right now
The infection rate and deaths will be continuing to go up since filming this video so please keep that in mind. In this video we talk about being stuck inside. And you can see what it’s like with a toddler! I think our video gives an accurate representation of being a parent of a toddler!
The feeling in Korea at the moment is subdued with people just being careful. It’s very quiet but also life continues on, just more carefully. Seoul hasn’t had many cases in comparison to some other places. Schools are shut and many businesses are making people work from home.
As we mention in the video, the government has done a good job of mobilizing the country to combat this. They are testing more than 10 thousand people a day. In comparison, many countries aren’t testing near enough. The virus in other countries, they just don’t know to what extent.
The coronavirus is mild in most people. Those at risk are the elderly or those with compromised immune systems. Most people don’t need to be worried, but you do need to be prepared for your city to “shut down”, your way of life may change a lot in the coming weeks and months.
Masks don’t really stop you from getting the virus but in Korea masks are useful in stopping the spread among the population. Many people can get infected and not have any symptoms and spread it. When the whole population is wearing masks, and washing hands, it does limit the spread. Unfortunately that is hard to replicate in other countries due to mask shortages and cultural differences where it’s not normal to wear a mask.
The best advice is constant hand washing and to avoid going to crowded areas.
In this video we talk about our past jobs, well mostly Hugh’s past jobs! We have an unusual sponsor for this video. It was through a government scheme for matching YouTubers with companies and we didn’t have a choice once we signed. The company they matched us with is very nice but both of us were bewildered at who made that decision. But we did the best we could and it did give us a chance to talk about things we have done in the past.
I think as parents we never fully understand how much toddlers know and can say and are constantly surprised.
Usually our son Yul doesn’t draw on walls or cupboards, but with the Covid-19 crisis we’ve been inside a lot more lately. There is only so much that we can do to occupy a toddler with unlimited energy. And he discovered he could draw with crayon on other things.
He thought it was hilarious to blame an imaginary baby, and also hilarious when I pointed out that he is indeed the baby in this household.
People have some preconceived notions about kids and speaking…
Parents, whether parents of monolingual or bilingual children, always get asked “Does he/she talk yet?” And usually when the child is still young, parents have to say “Well, he can say this word, or this word and he babbles a lot”. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that don’t understand the slow process of acquiring language and think it happens overnight. I was even asked in a YouTube comment, “Does he speak in coherent sentences yet?” Well what do you consider a coherent sentence to be for a toddler?!
This can be frustrating for parents of monolingual kids, but there are even more questions about bilingual kids learning to speak.
I deliberately left the Korean untranslated in the comic to give the real feeling of interacting with a bilingual toddler. But he’s just saying things like “Mummy”, “Let’s go”, “Strawberry”, “Crocodile” and “Don’t want/ Don’t like”.
Even though there is a lot of research showing all the benefits of being bilingual, there are still a lot of misconceptions out there. People think bilingual children’s language skills are “delayed” but really they are just sorting out two different languages. Also a monolingual adult is only recognizing the words from their own language. This has caused situations where monolingual speakers can judge the number of words a child can speak and claim it’s less than the average child’s. But really, bilingual kids have the same amount of words as average, they are spread over both languages.
Only someone who speaks both languages can accurately judge if the number of words they can say is in a normal range.
Of course our son is still learning to speak and around us he knows we can understand both languages. Though I think very soon he’ll realise the limits of my Korean! He understand both languages pretty equally but his babbling sentences seem to have more Korean structure at this point. But he has been saying “No!” in English a lot more now!
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