What do children call you?
My husband and I decided that we'd like to be called Mr B- and Mrs B-.* We decided this because we expect our own children to call adults by their last names. But we didn't realize just how difficult this would be!
First you have the parents who don't instruct their children to address you any differently than they do. They may feel like Mr and Mrs is too formal.
Then you have the kids who just assume they can call you by your first name. This is the case with some of the kids in our neighborhood. It's a bit comical when a ten year old rings the doorbell and asks, "Can Greg come play?" I feel like he's asking if my son can come out and not my husband! Luckily most of the neighborhood kids don't call us anything (with the exception of my husband's basketball buddy) and so we've mostly dodged this one.
[I feel like that's how I handled it as a kid - I never knew what to call adults (other than teachers) and so I just awkwardly avoided addressing them. I would rather that not be the case for our children. My husband grew up knowing that he was supposed to call adults Mr and Mrs and that was that. So much easier!]
Then you have the families that call you Mr or Miss Firstname. I can understand this because sometimes last names are really hard to pronounce. Miss Elizabeth is certainly an improvement, though it also makes me feel like a daycare teacher again.
Finally, the toughest of all are the adults who don't want to go by Mr or Mrs X! I carefully make sure to get their last name so Miriam can call them by it and then they say "Oh, she can just call me Sally." I'm sorry, Sally, but we'd actually prefer her not to. You're not her playmate - you're an adult and we'd like her to treat you with a bit more respect.
But is that being disrespectful to Sally? Is that being hypocritical of me, to prefer to be addressed one way in spite of what the other adult usually does, but disregard their own preferences? Or do people just slide into whatever mode of address is used by the people around them, and they don't care either way and I'm just overthinking everything?
So far our strategy has simply been to instruct Miriam to "Say hello to Mr Doe," "Say thank you to Mrs Smith," etc. Obviously she can't actually say any of this yet. But it conveys to other adults how we'd like for her to address them, and hopefully subtly indicates how we'd like to be addressed as well. It hasn't worked perfectly, and I'm still debating how or if we should say something in those other instances.
What do you prefer to be called? How do you handle it if children call you something different? And are we stodgy old stick-in-the-muds for wanting to be addressed as Mr and Mrs?
*I suppose I could also go by Dr B-. But I'd rather people not be confused and turn to me in the case of a medical emergency! So Mrs B- it is.