The Pochemushka

When you learn a foreign language, there are words that are just better than others - that capture things do ingeniously that you can't forget them.  And so it was that when our babysitter dumbed Saphira a pochemushka (почемушка), we were delighted - at least with the title if not fully with the actuality of the fact.  Почему  - pochemu - in Russian means "Why" and ushka is a diminutive, feminine ending (like in Babushka) and so the best translation of the term would be "the little why girl".  Not quite the same ring. While stories could be written about a pochemushka, the little why girl becomes an abstract entity.
And so we have a pochemushka.  So many "whys".  I think the problem is my strategy has always been to answer them to the best of my ability.  This defeated my Russian early on and my English is also giving under the barrage.  Last week, I was ready to wave my white flag by 10am.
I think this is where having other people around you who are also parents of young children is at its most valuable, (and is something that is harder for us to replicate as we interact with our Ukrainian friends mostly on the playground and so don't always see how some situations play out) because it can give you other ideas of how to deal with the issue at hand.  I had tried asking her to repeat my answers to her whys and soоo realized that for the most part, she wasn't listening.  The whys flow in an empty babble of sound that start before a full answer can even be given.
It was only when were were out with some friends and they turned the flurry of whys around on her . . . now why do you think that a cow couldn't take care of a person? The stream of whys stopped - not so much because she had an answer but because the start of thinking through the whys was actually presented before her.
But old habits are so hard to break and I often find myself explaining why this and that until I'm exhausted and frustrated.  I forget that I need to wait, and to ask back, to encourage her to look and observe and deduce.  That a wrong deduction isn't a set back, but is rather one variant closer to a right answer later.
I'm so thankful for the tools I get to steal from other parents, if only I could remember to use them more.