The First (Of Many!) TCK Moments

For all of you not in the know, the term TCK stands for Third Culture Kids.  It refers to children whose parent's culture (Culture #1) is different from the culture in which they live (Culture #2), so their own culture & worldview is a hybrid of the two (Culture #3).  I suppose if you counted our boys' Ethiopian ethnicity, you could call them Forth Culture Kids.  But the acronym FCK leaves a little bit too much room for misunderstanding, don't you think?  So we'll stick with TCK. 

I never thought that at as young as two we would already begin to see traces of Micah's cultural worldview.  But there it was, plain & clear as we were reading a Dora the Explorer alphabet book the other day.  Next to each letter of the alphabet is a picture of a corresponding object.  B is for ball, I is for ice cream, Q is for quetzal (whoever said kids book aren't educational for adults is wrong! I never knew what a quetzal was before Dora).  Next to the letter J was a juice box with a little straw sticking out the top.  Except that Micah points to it and says, "Milk!" True enough, my son, because here our milk looks like this:

It made me laugh to think that anyone else who had never lived in or been to China would have corrected him.  And I'm quite certain that this will not be the last time that we'll see our little men show their true colors as TCKs.