We were very worried about Artem’s first day at school in Belgium. He was only two and a half, he didn’t know the language, we didn’t know what kids are like here, will he be accepted, will the teachers be kind to him – so many thoughts running through our heads!

The day finally came and we (in cold sweat 😅) brought Artem to the new school.

Before we picked him up we asked the teacher how the day was. She said it went quite well, but Artem did not want to eat any soup, didn’t even touch it.

“Poor Artem, probably the day was too stressful, and he refused to eat” – that’s what we thought. So we asked Artem how the day was. According to Artem, the day was good, the only thing is that the bad teachers would not let him eat – and he was SO hungry 😭

Investigation led us to the important discovery: Artem did not eat soup, because he didn’t get a spoon, because the teachers would not give him a spoon, because

Artem was waiting for the spoon, which he never got, so the teacher assumed he didn’t want to eat.

Soup in Belgium is something completely different from what we used to call soup.

This is what Ukrainian soup looks like:

You can’t eat Ukrainian soup without a spoon, it does not make sense. Parents in Ukraine would discourage any other ways of eating soup, and drinking it from the bowl counts as an offence in most families.

However, in Belgian soup all the ingredients are blended together in a homogeneous mass. Soup for younger children is served in special plates with two handles. A kid would grab the plate by the handles and drink the contents.

Here’s how soup in Belgium looks like:

It’s not some kind of special soup for kids. It’s literally a regular kind of soup. In a restaurant if you order soup you are going to get something like this (although they will serve it with a spoon :))

Long story short, we figured it out together and updated our brain firmware to enable soup drinking.

Anyway, now Artem prefers his soup Belgian style. I am still a bigger fan of borscht or buckwheat soup, though.