Bilingual

After spending four months in the daycare, April showed a little bit sign of bilingual. Right now, she speaks mainly Chinese mixed with some English words at home. Like, she would say "要milk", which translates "want milk", or "怕big bad wolf"， meaning "afraid of big bad wolf".

The thing even amazing is that when we are teaching her Chinese characters at home she will translate some to English. Like today, when we showed her this character "兔"(pronounced like /too/), she immediately said "Rabbit" in English.

I guess she must relate the Chinese character and "Rabbit" to the real rabbit, and through the real rabbit, Chinese is connected with English and translation happens instantly.

Amazing.

Vocabulary

She can read a little bit over 100 Chinese characters. We did not teach her any English before she went to daycare. Here is the list of English words she picked up since she started daycare a month ago:

NO, yeah, nice, bubble, pillow, water, mommy, bagel, diaper, pull-ups, more, pee pee, poo poo, slide, swing, hi and bye.

one phrase: no more

Funny notes:
1. One day last week we were very surprised to hear her yelling at us "No, no, no, no!". Before that, she always said "Bu" -- No in Chinese.
2. When she cries, she is crying for "Mommy", but she is not looking for her mom. My guess is she does not what "Mommy" is, just learned from other kids in the daycare when they cry.
3. Her favorite song now is "ABCDEFG...", but she doesn't remember all the lyrics, so she repeats "ABCD" over and over again.
4. I change the lyrics from "ABCD" to "no more no more", and force her to sing along with me when she wants more juice but she already had enough :)

Face painting

April's daycare had a summer safari
yesterday. We had a lot of fun there. In the end, April had a blue dophin painted on her face.

Bye, Grandpa and Grandma

Over the past few weeks, we told April several times that Grandpa and Grandma are going to leave us and she will stay. Surely, she doesn't understand what all that means, but I can tell that she felt something was going to happen.

7:00 am this morning, while April was still sleeping, Grandpa and Grandma was already on the way to the airport. 18 hours from now, they will be in Beijing, China.

In the past two years, Grandpa and Grandma took really good care of April. During that 2 year span, April was only sick for once. She is happy, healthy, smart and beautiful.

I am sure Grandpa and Grandma will miss April a lot. So do we. When April gets a little bit older, we will take her back to China to visit her loved Grandpa and Grandma.

Swim

We took April to the War Memorial Hall for the second time yesterday to teach her to swim.

It was better than the first time, she did not cry and "swimmed" for about half an hour. But the life jacket did not help at all, it kept April off balance. And we had to grab her hands all the time.

If anyone knows a good life jacket for baby (2 years old), please let us konw. Thanks!

April's first checkup since getting back

Everything looks good. She's got all the vaccines needed for daycare. And here are her numbers:
Age: 22months
Height: 34 inches
Weight: 27.2lbs

According to this chart, April is taller than 75% and heavier than 63% (or I can say lighter than 37%) of the girls in her age.

April and Grandpa, Grandma missed the flight

Got a call on my way to the airport today. It was April's grandpa, saying they missed the flight from the Chicago to Roanoke because their lugguages did not arrive on time. While they were waiting for their lugguages they missed the fight to ROA. Therefore, they had to stay at the airport over the night. UA will put them on a plane tomorrow morning 9am.

Damn! I have to wait for another 12 hours to April!