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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Cultural Embarrassment #4

(Note: My parents are flying in from the states tomorrow so I'll be off having fun with them through the end of the month. Sorry, I don't expect I'll have the time to get on the computer, let alone write a blog, with all that we have planned. When we come back I'll have stories and pictures to share of our adventures throughout Germany and the famous Efteling Amusement Park. Until then I leave you with another of my infamous cultural embarrassments.)

We were in the midst of winter when I was finally starting to feel my soul settle into it's new friendships and surroundings. Spider Monkey was settled into school with her many friends and Squirrel Monkey was living up her new freedom in the big world of being a schoolgirl. The school sends home bimonthly newsletters with so much text I normally skim it for only the most important details. Those which seemed to pertain specifically to my children I would pull out my translation dictionaries and piece together in detail. It was through one of these that I was informed the school was having a Disco Night. My thoughts were still mainly full of various bureaucratic loopholes we still found ourselves squeezing through so the finer details of the night were put on the procrastination shelf. I memorized "Disco" and the times which Squirrel Monkey and Spider Monkey were to arrive as each class took their turns kicking it up on the school dance floor. My man was still taking his Dutch lessons and knew he would be missing out on the big event. I was on my own.

The days slipped by and before I knew it the night of the Disco was upon me. Disco, disco, disco? Think, think, think . . . Surely I'll be able to make something up for that theme; those styles were really in last summer in the states. I didn't have anything full of beads or sequins, but I did have a few hippie-style children's cloths we'd brought with us from the states. Same decade, right? And, hey, what other kid would be able to say they had disco era cloths from the states at the party? My kids were going to be the coolest on the dance floor. Squirrel Monkey didn't balk a bit with her outfit, but that could have been it was her only lapse in the sudden onset of illness during the day. I rushed her off to her dance time and returned home to put the final touches on Spider Monkey's outfit. She was wearing bell bottom jeans, layered shirts in the appropriate fashion, beaded necklace, barefoot, and to top it all off, one of dads funky paisley ties wrapped around her head as a headband. She looked so hip!! I was so proud of my handiwork that I was grinning ear-to-ear as I held up a mirror in front of her. She took one look and and wanted to run the other direction. "Mom! I look like everyone is going to laugh at me!"

"Don't be silly," I assured. "You're going to be the coolest looking kid in the group. No one is going to be as authentically dressed as you."

Time was of the essence so I dragged her skidding across the living room floor and grabbed both hands so she couldn't brace herself across the threshold of the doorway and into the chilly night air we ran. She pouted the whole way, convinced she looked too silly to be seen. I explained to her for the 5th time that a Disco was a really fun type of dance when her grandparents were young and frequenting the dance floor themselves and this is what people used to wear back then. "I promise, anybody who is anybody will be dressed just like you tonight."

But those silly parents didn't stick to the theme of the dance! All those cute little girls were running around wearing princess costumes just like the one Spider Monkey had begged to wear with pearls around their wrists and glitter in their hair. I had forgotten to bind those hands at the door of the school and now Spider Monkey was putting up a great fight. I convinced her that I needed to go in and get her sister and wouldn't she like to see her sister dancing? The minute she was within the building she found a corner behind the piano and hid. Still, convinced I was not the only one who would stick to the theme, I again promised her she would have other hippie companions arriving shortly and even if she didn't she'd be the envy of all those kids who didn't have "real" American cloths. It was convincing enough that I could pry the kid out of the corner and push her out onto the dance floor where she joined in dances with all of the little princesses, pirates, and princes regardless of the paisley tie wrapped around her head and the beads around her neck.

Have you guessed yet that the Dutch word for a dance is "disco". It was not a theme, it was just a dance. Will that poor kid ever let me live it down? Will she dare go to another "Disco" ever again? My husband stands convinced that she was surely the coolest kid on the floor anyway, just because she was so . . . "unique".