File Under "Lost in Translation"

I've been busy and dealing with a lot around here lately, so the blog posts are scarce. It seems like I almost always say that these days.

Living with little people who are learning a first language (and in our case, one who is also learning a second) leads to all sorts of funny linguistic errors. Hobbes has been pretty slow to speak compared to his brother, who was speaking in full, complex sentences by 14 months, but his speech has taken off in the past few months. Unfortunately, all of that practice has not improved his pronunciation. I'm not sure if he just refuses to believe in consonants other than D, B, and M or if he just can't use them yet. Either way, it makes for some funny moments. He also has a funny habit of saying "my" for "I'm." I wrote earlier of his antics in trying to get out of bed at night. We have chosen to ignore him when he stands and screams, at the top of his lungs, that he is crying and we had better come get him. With his inability to use the consonant C, and his two-year-old drama, it sounds quite dire:

"My dying! My dying! Mommy! My dying!"

Who knew sleep could be so deadly?

In another funny language moment, Calvin was looking through a Chinese to English board book of colors the other day. It is one of those books that has a different color and objects of that color on each page. He loved those books when he was building his English vocabulary of essential words, like "dog," "cup," "apple," and the like. What a great way for him to build his essential Chinese vocabulary! So we read "lily," "orange," "bear," "gun." Yep. That's an important one for toddlers to know.