Every day little snippets or funny scenarios take place that I keep mentally nudging myself to include on here, and then when it's finally time to sit down and type it all out I struggle to remember everything!
Lola continues to talk up a storm lately. She managed to string ten Chinese words into a sentence earlier this week, "Mama ke shou baba ke shou, zhen me ban ne?" essentially, "Mama coughs Daddy coughs, what to do?" And she has also taken to asking "Wei shen me" or "Why?" as well as asking, "shi bu shi," or "is it so?" and responding "bu shi," or "it is not." Quite the existential little scholar!
She also says "scuse me" in the sweetest voice, and she now strings together thank yous, hellos, goodbyes and I love yous with the proper person (mama, papa, nona, yeye, tita, etc).
Her love of raisins and bananas remains unabated. She wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night and spends all of her waking time asking for "raisins" or "pu tao gan" and "boonanas" or "xiang jiao". I still think Lola's stronger language is Mandarin, but she understands the world in two languages, if that makes sense. Early on we realized that she must think everything just comes with two different names. It's certainly the case now with her beloved bananas, because she will say "xiangjiaoboonana!" whenever she sees one or a picture of one.
We bought her the Eric Carle book, "Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me," a long time ago and in recent months she has loved flipping the book to the page with the big, foldout moon. She will then, along with her various stuffed animals, take turns literally standing on the moon. Michael and I ask permission to stand on the moon and usually she is very generous and grants us permission to do so - but only for a brief while, before she says "no no" very insistently and pushes us off the page.
Lola's favorite books recently are probably Brown Bear, Brown Bear; Sleep Tight Caterpillar; The Tiger Who Came to Tea and a few pop up Usborne books that I got for her. She also likes a picture book of a kitty cat touring New York City that Michael bought for her, in particular the picture of Grand Central where she points to a brown haired woman in a striped shirt as "mama," and another picture of an elevator in the Empire State Building.
Oh, yeah, Lola is obsessed with elevators. She pronounces "el-e-va-tor" in English very deliberately, saying each syllable like it is its own word. Luckily, Hong Kong is the land of elevators. She rides in an elevator at least twice a day, but probably more like three times that amount on average. The other day, Lola shocked Michael and me upon returning home from an excursion to the coffee shop. It has become one of our routines to go for a walk right before her bedtime, as she says, with "mommy and daddy." We were in the elevator in our building with one other woman. The elevator dinged when we arrived at the seventh floor and the doors opened as the announcement was made, "qi lou, seventh floor." Lola did not even hesitate and waved at the woman and said, "bye bye!"
My jaw dropped. It was hard to believe that Lola knew that she didn't live on the seventh floor, although Lola has been learning "ba" and "eight" for a while now and, as I said, she takes the elevator in our building multiple times a day, so I was not that surprised. But what shocked me was that Lola had the ability to, by process of elimination, deduce this had to be the floor for the woman to exit the elevator, because the remaining people in the elevator (mommy, daddy, and Lola) need the eighth floor. That seemed pretty impressive to me for a barely 1.5 year old.
And I'll just leave you with this - the other day, I asked Lola how old she was, expecting her to promptly chirp "yi shui!" meaning "one year old!" To my surprise and delight, she responded, "yi shui ban!" meaning "one and a half years old!" Our nanny had taught Lola that just the day before I asked. How great, am I right?!
Lola continues to talk up a storm lately. She managed to string ten Chinese words into a sentence earlier this week, "Mama ke shou baba ke shou, zhen me ban ne?" essentially, "Mama coughs Daddy coughs, what to do?" And she has also taken to asking "Wei shen me" or "Why?" as well as asking, "shi bu shi," or "is it so?" and responding "bu shi," or "it is not." Quite the existential little scholar!
She also says "scuse me" in the sweetest voice, and she now strings together thank yous, hellos, goodbyes and I love yous with the proper person (mama, papa, nona, yeye, tita, etc).
Her love of raisins and bananas remains unabated. She wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night and spends all of her waking time asking for "raisins" or "pu tao gan" and "boonanas" or "xiang jiao". I still think Lola's stronger language is Mandarin, but she understands the world in two languages, if that makes sense. Early on we realized that she must think everything just comes with two different names. It's certainly the case now with her beloved bananas, because she will say "xiangjiaoboonana!" whenever she sees one or a picture of one.
We bought her the Eric Carle book, "Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me," a long time ago and in recent months she has loved flipping the book to the page with the big, foldout moon. She will then, along with her various stuffed animals, take turns literally standing on the moon. Michael and I ask permission to stand on the moon and usually she is very generous and grants us permission to do so - but only for a brief while, before she says "no no" very insistently and pushes us off the page.
Lola's favorite books recently are probably Brown Bear, Brown Bear; Sleep Tight Caterpillar; The Tiger Who Came to Tea and a few pop up Usborne books that I got for her. She also likes a picture book of a kitty cat touring New York City that Michael bought for her, in particular the picture of Grand Central where she points to a brown haired woman in a striped shirt as "mama," and another picture of an elevator in the Empire State Building.
Oh, yeah, Lola is obsessed with elevators. She pronounces "el-e-va-tor" in English very deliberately, saying each syllable like it is its own word. Luckily, Hong Kong is the land of elevators. She rides in an elevator at least twice a day, but probably more like three times that amount on average. The other day, Lola shocked Michael and me upon returning home from an excursion to the coffee shop. It has become one of our routines to go for a walk right before her bedtime, as she says, with "mommy and daddy." We were in the elevator in our building with one other woman. The elevator dinged when we arrived at the seventh floor and the doors opened as the announcement was made, "qi lou, seventh floor." Lola did not even hesitate and waved at the woman and said, "bye bye!"
My jaw dropped. It was hard to believe that Lola knew that she didn't live on the seventh floor, although Lola has been learning "ba" and "eight" for a while now and, as I said, she takes the elevator in our building multiple times a day, so I was not that surprised. But what shocked me was that Lola had the ability to, by process of elimination, deduce this had to be the floor for the woman to exit the elevator, because the remaining people in the elevator (mommy, daddy, and Lola) need the eighth floor. That seemed pretty impressive to me for a barely 1.5 year old.
And I'll just leave you with this - the other day, I asked Lola how old she was, expecting her to promptly chirp "yi shui!" meaning "one year old!" To my surprise and delight, she responded, "yi shui ban!" meaning "one and a half years old!" Our nanny had taught Lola that just the day before I asked. How great, am I right?!
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