Thu 28 Jan 2010
Where’s jie jie?
Posted by Jaime under Children Development, Thaddeus Aaron
This is now the little boy’s favourite phrase! He will lift up his hands, palms facing up and jiggle them up and down and go “Where’s jie jie?” cheekily.
He also did his first 4-word sentence - screaming “I want to go!” last week when he saw us getting dressed and ready to go out of the house without him! I think nothing like desperation to conjure up an intelligible sentence to make sure we know what he wants!
He is now able to imitate almost all the words we say to him, whether he understands them or not is another matter altogether though. He recites 1 to 10 in both English and Mandarin now but I think he has no concept of counting yet though. We have the 我会读 level 1 mandarin flashcard-concept books and he could follow after us and read almost all the words with I would say 95% correct pronunciation. We were actually rather impressed because Talia’s mandarin is still rather accented compared to his.
Singing remains a favourite with him and he could carry a tune quite well, doing his rendition of twinkle twinkle little star with maybe about 50-60% of the words clearly audible (usually the beginning and the ending words) and the alphabet song with the same tune, with most of the alphabet audible too. We did not bother to teach him any alphabet and he picked up singing the alphabet song from the leapfrog fridge magnet thingy. But I think he recognises quite a number of alphabets because at the trial montesorri class, he stood up and shouted “M” when he saw it! Took us by surprise actually.
Our stern NO is still able to deter him from doing certain things. Like when he wants to climb up the stairs and we say NO, he will stay there and whine “I want!”. When we repeat our NOs, he will start crying with more “I want”s but will not climb the stairs anymore.
He melts my heart by calling me “meme” (nobody taught him that and Talia calls me “mummy”) and rushing over to me calling out “hold hands” when we are out walking. At 18 mths now I really think he can’t get any cuter than this, walks like a penguin, grins like a cheshire cat, chuckles like an old man and talks in a cartoony voice! and boy, how much I love this little guy!
