Every evening she tugs at my pants and informs me "'Puter!", which is my hint that it's time to go down to the workstation and watch videos. Not just ANY videos: they must be songs, and only songs with live action (no still pictures or slide shows, puh-leeze!). Currently we have about a dozen that we've watched probably ten times each. These include The Wiggles (although only a select few make the cut - Miss is too sophisticated for most Wiggles fare), several "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" (one of her favorite songs) videos including this one, which always makes us snort milk out our noses laughing, Go Diego Go, Dora the Explorer and a handful of Pucca song videos.At the time I took these snapshots we were watching this:Not great Art, but, hey, it's "something good for me" as the Peeper would say. And it makes happy smiles like this one.
Interesting little bit of Kai-lan trivia. We believe, and the early intervention linguist thought, that Missy's orphanage spoke mostly Cantonese. She still seemed to react to Cantonese, but not Mandarin, as recently as the spring. Now? Not so much. But yesterday we were watching one of the Kai-lan videos where Kai-lan asks her little viewers to say "Thank you" in Mandarin; 谢谢, pronounced (roughly) "Shyea shyea". Kai-lan said "谢谢", I said " 谢谢"...and Missy said "谢谢你": "Shyea shyea ni" (thank you very much) very neatly and clearly.Well..!
I hope you are having happy smiles yourself. Busy day tomorrow, so I'll see you Friday.
9 comments:
thats funny. my girls begged for the obama/mc cain jib jab snippet over and over and over. hazel called it the parade movie.
It would be so cool if she were to become bi-lingual...so few American kids get the education they need to speak more than one language. That's something I never understood about my own public school upbringing -- other languages weren't even mentioned until 7th grade, and by then I was too old to pick it up!
That jib-jab bit was brill, eh?!
Chris: I showed her that but she wasn't excited; I think it was a little too kinetic for her. But I like "parade movie" as a name for it, since there are lots of people parading around for whatever reason...
Meghan: We're not trying to keep her Cantonese, really, sdly it's just one too many things to juggle. I hope to take Mandarin classes with her when she gets to school age and is old enough to get the "big picture" on speaking another tongue. Unfortunately, any Chinese dialect is hideously tonal and difficult. We'll have to see how it plays with little Miss.
Lisa: That was a hoot, wasn't it. Best political ad I saw all year, in a sense.
Chief,
I just heard about Portland's "Santacon" on NPR. Can you explain these strange Portland phenom's to me?
Lisa: Santacon!
OMFG.
Basically, you won't be far off if you rent "Bad Santa" from your local Blockbuster. It's just your basic drunken debauchery, spontaneously outrageous and random acts of artistic wierdness, only done while in Kringle drag. Think "Burning Man" only in December.
Every so often you run across one of those "Keep Portland Wierd" things, like this or the Adult Soap Box Derby. Fun, fairly harmless, and good for scaring the Rotarians out in Beaverton.
Thank you. You West Coasters are just too avant-garde for us hillbillies. All we know is, Santa is a heavy fellow in red velvet (but not the cake) who lords it over a bunch of elves. Kind of like a jovial Hank Paulson, or something.
Ah, America, the Beautiful!
Q shows no interest in DVDs or anything cartoon-related. We don't have cable, so we don't mind in the least if she doesn't get hooked on TV...but lately she has been fascinated by videos of other toddlers on YouTube...especially if they're singing or dancing. Not the Yo GabbaGabba kind of singing and dancing...more the real kids, home video kind of thing. The more ingenuous, the better..especially Capuchin, the little French girl on Vimeo.It's the only thing that will hold her attention.
WD: Missy blows hot and cold on other kids. Sometimes she seems fascinated by the music and dancing (and it has to have music - otherwise she immediately swipes at the screen in her gesture of "away with this dross..."), other times she just glances and is on to other things. And I've never been able to define a why or why not.
Sometimes what goes on inside these little people's heads is an utter mystery to me, and therefore somewhat magical.
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