In this calendar year, it’s amazing how much Kaia’s speech has advanced. It’s almost like every day her sentences get more complex and her vocabulary grows. In just the last seven days of her new Chinese immersion school, she’s started speaking complete Chinese sentences to me. And when I’ve heard them, I’ve done a double take and stand there a little shocked. It’s as though she knows what she’s doing is impressing Chris and me because after she says a whole Chinese sentence, she will sit there and grin ear to ear. Or, the other hypothesis I have is that she’s been holding out all this time and just waiting to unleash her Chinese sentences on me, which could very well be the case since she’s such a cheeky bubba.
Sometimes, she will say sentences when she thinks neither of us is in the room or listening. The one time I laughed out loud earlier in May of this year was when she was in the snacks bar of a hotel where we were staying during Chris’s parents visit, and she kept going on and on when she got excited and saw the goldfish crackers: “Wow, goldfish! Ooooh, I like goldfish! Goldfish is yummy! So tasty, so good! I can’t have that!” She also knew she wasn’t allowed to touch it, so she never got her hands on it and just kept staring lovingly at the bags of goldfish crackers.
Today, she said, “I want orange” in Chinese. This doesn’t seem that exciting or complex, but the fact that she actually said, “I want (fill in the food)” was a big deal because she’s never even done that once before with me. She will say “want” or the name of what she wants, and that’s been it to date until now. She’s also said she likes x. It’s literally verbal baby steps.
While reading her Dragons Love Tacos book lately, there’s a page where there’s a large dragon sitting on top of a house. In the last couple weeks, she usually points at that dragon and says, “That’s a dinosaur on the house!” I’ve corrected her a few times and told her that it’s actually a dragon. She usually fights with me and gets upset, saying that it is really a dinosaur. So I’ve let her have her way with it and relent, responding that sure, it could be a dinosaur. Yesterday, she looked at the dragon on top of the house, paused for a bit, and said, “This is not a dinosaur. It’s actually a dragon!” I squeezed her and gave her a kiss and said, “Yes, Pookie! That’s right! It is actually a dragon!”
They grow so fast, people always say. It could not be truer for my Kaia Pookie.