Milestone: A full sentence!!

Yes, she did it today! Screech Monkey is among that class of children which are statistically challenged due to the influence of a multilingual environment. Therefore she has taken a lot longer to define her vocabulary. Only just within the last month has the words "Mommy" and "Daddy" actually been used regularly and she has finally started repeating words we say, even using them every day since. At the dinner table she knows to say "Ahhhh Done!" when she is done and wants to get down. She's learned the word "no" and uses it at every chance, even with a vigorous head-shake. She likes the word so much she even uses it when she really actually means yes. She's got the name of one of our friends down pat and calls him by his name when she sees him. To us, it's still a foreign name and we find it hard to really call somebody by this name, but we still summon up the strength to call him by name, Jelle (pronounced the Baltimorese way of saying yellow: yell-uh). No doubt about it, the kid even calls out her own name over and over again and we know she'll have no problem with her l's.

But today she shocked me with what I would consider a full sentence as we were walking down the diaper aisle of the grocery store. Faces of babies lined the shelves and she excitedly pointed in their direction and yelled out, "Een baby; kijk, hoor!" (A baby, look!) Yes, all in Dutch! She's even got their intonations down. "Hoor" (pronounced like "or") is added on to the end of a statement (ex. yes, no, go) to add an extra intonation of severity, anger, irony, or surety. I'm so proud of my little multilingual baby!

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What my children will do for a good meal

We prepared to partake of a scarce and favorite meal of Macaroni & Cheese; one of the few boxes which get shipped to us from the states by one grandparent or another. The kids were so excited that they were fighting over who got to pour the box of noodles into the pot, who got to stir, who got to pour the water, etc, etc, etc. I'd finally made the decisions for them and gave Spider Monkey the go ahead to pour the noodles into the pot, thinking her the most responsible to handle the precious little bits. She excitedly grabbed the open box from the counter . . . and dropped it. The tiny noodles sprayed across the kitchen floor and even scattered themselves through the living room. I suppose in America we would have swept it up and opened a new box, but we've only got ONE box left. I put the pot on the floor and all the kids got on their knees and began scavenging the floors in search of every little noodle. I think I later ran across one or two which they missed, but the result was still delicious.

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