Summer Days, Part 1

I don't know what it's like where you live, but here, it's been 90 degrees the past 2 days! We've been trying to get outdoors but still not melt in the sun and heat. Who knew that shade at a playground is so crucial (or that we would pick our favorites based on that criteria)? Generally we've been going on walks or going to our complex's little playground early in the morning right after breakfast or in the evenings.

In between, our days are filled with--you guessed it--water!

This week was the first week our complex's pool has been open every day for the summer. Silly Bean loves to talk about whether the pool is open or closed, and he gets very excited when he sees the door open and the lifeguard getting the pool ready! We went swimming three times this week--splashing by the steps, me holding Silly Bean and walking around in the pool, and playing with water scoops.

But when we aren't at the pool or indoors, we're playing on the deck at the water table!

I just can't rave enough about water tables for toddlers. In preschools or daycares I think they call them sensory tables, and you can put a variety of different things in it that children can explore (water, dirt, bubbly water, sand, etc.). Young children love to learn by interacting with things in the world around them, and a lot of them love learning through the sense of touch (Ever have that kid who you tell not to touch something, and they just keep touching it and trying to figure out what it is?)--hence the word "sensory." I've also heard it said that playing with water has a therapeutic and calming effect for children, and I have to say from experience that it's pretty therapeutic for adults as well! So fun :)

We just love our water table in this warm weather! Silly Bean's 婆婆 got this particular one for him from Costco, but you could also get one second-hand in pretty good condition (we saw one on Craigslist but it was snagged too quickly!).

There's enough shade on our deck in the afternoons after nap time for it to not feel like 90 degrees, and water in summer of course is just wonderful.  Silly Bean loves pouring the water on the top part to make it rain down, "wash" his hands, and bathe his fish and dolphins. Since we live on the third floor, we have to be so careful though to not spill the water through the cracks of the deck and flow onto the neighbor's deck immediately below, but lining towels on the ground have been doing the trick so far.

Summer is such a fun time for toddlerhood! We sure are enjoying the sunshine.

Growing up bilingual, part I

A lot of people have asked me what it's like for us to raise Silly Bean as a bilingual kid, and while I don't think I can fully answer the question in one post, I'm hoping to give y'all a small picture of what it's like for us in this stage in life.

One of Silly Bean's favorite books is "Oh! The Places You'll Go!" by Dr. Seuss, which features an ambiguous-looking character that we call a baby, going through life-encountering success, failures, and building resilience throughout. I think he loves the rhymes in the text (honestly, I think it's really well written and inspiring as well!), the colorful pictures, and especially the balloons, that are in the book. We saw a bulletin board set of Oh! The Places You'll Go! at Target for $3 so we just had to get it. Maybe a month or two ago we re-vamped the wall in Silly Bean's room (the one that had the alphabet train on it from a previous post) to make it "Go Go" (as Silly Bean calls it) themed.

In addition to putting up the bulletin board set, I also took the opportunity to label some of the balloons with the numbers in Chinese, from 1 through 30.

Now, can Silly Bean "read" the Chinese numbers as well as he can "read" the romanized numerals and his letters? Not as well, but the pictographic system is also a different ball game that we haven't really gotten into yet.

In terms of oral communication, I speak to Silly Bean in Cantonese 98% of the time (with the exception of when we are singing songs in English, when I'm reading him books that have a lot of rhymes that don't just translate in Chinese, or when I just have no idea what the Chinese word is/there isn't a Chinese word for a particular thing) and we're basically talking all day long, repeating many of the same things, and I try to extend his vocabulary by saying more about the word he says. I'm pretty sure that he knows over a hundred words already (both in his receptive and productive vocabulary, though he understands a lot more than he can say or produce). Kevin speaks to him in English, and he also probably knows hundreds of English words as well. I was really amazed when one time, Silly Bean and I were talking about whether he was happy today (in Chinese) and Kevin asked what we were saying, and I asked Silly Bean in Chinese, "How do you say 'happy' in English?"and he said, "Bibi happy" in English. I think there is some awareness there that he is learning 2 languages and that for him, there are two words for everything-- a lot of the times when I ask him for both, he can tell me both! This is really surprising to me because from all of my study about language acquisition in bilingual learners, it seems as though kids often understand a lot (receptive vocabulary) in a given language, but their speech in that language (their productive vocabulary) develops more slowly. This, however, is in kids who grew up speaking one language, and English is their second language a few years later, while for Silly Bean, the language acquisition is happening simultaneously, so I'm not sure how that all fits in. I also don't remember what it was like for me at age 1-3 so I don't really know.

Silly Bean knowing Chinese is important to us because with language learning, you aren't just learning how to speak in that language, but the culture of that language is also being transmitted. It's going to be easy for Silly Bean to learn the dominant culture here in the US, and we want Silly Bean to know all the different parts of his ethnic identity, including the parts where we need to try harder to convey that part to him. But ethnic identity is another topic for another post! For now, learning Chinese and English is a lot of talking and reading, interacting with friends and family members, singing, listening to music in Chinese and in English, listening to Peppa Pig in Chinese, and generally just talking a lot lot lot!