communication

It's really fun watching Esther figure out how to use language. She is definitely working on grammar right now, trying to apply past tense ("The ball rolleded"), auxiliary verbs ("Are you want some crackers?"), and negatives ("No my hippo!"). She seems to be developing pretty normally, though sometimes I wonder about her transposition of sounds (there were several she did chronically, but the only one that comes to mind right now is "wiper dipes" for "diaper wipes") and words ("May I drink glass from your water?"). She has also learned lots of workarounds when a word doesn't come to mind immediately: we hear "thingy" a lot, "stuff" from time to time, and at least once, "thingamabobber." In any case, she is learning more and more vocabulary, and figuring out creative ways to say what she wants. A couple of recent funnies:

She was peering into my ear one evening, and when she started poking her fingers into it, I said, "Hey, that's my private ear!" Tim joked, "As opposed to your public ear?" "No," Esther replied, "that's the other one."

Last night she wanted to shut the door to the bedroom partway. So she said, "Let me close it in half."

a story

Esther wanted to read me a story. The book she was using was a devotional book that I think mostly has pictures of flowers and such. The story went as follows:

Jesus God every day. Then Jesus fell in the water! God said, "Don't fall in the water." Then Jesus went boom [illustrated by jumping off the chair and landing on her knees].

After that the story got a little muddled and I (and Esther too, I think!) lost the flow of it.

On a related note, a few nights ago Esther was praying and started getting distracted, so I finished up for her. She was offended at being cut off, until I told her that she could talk to God anytime, and she could talk to God in her crib after she went to bed if she wanted. As she absorbed this idea, a delighted grin spread across her face. I didn't actually hear any talking from her (though I had the Olympics on, so I might not have), but when I went later to re-tuck her in she said, "I talk to God in my crib. Then I go to sleep!" I'm not sure if the statement was supposed to be past tense or future tense, but...may this be the beginning of a life-long, two-way conversation!

Chunjie Kuaile!

That is, Happy Spring Festival! This is the greeting you will hear in the northern parts of China around Chinese New Year, which the Chinese (at least in Shandong) usually call Spring Festival. It's pronounced something like Choon-jeeah kwy-luh. The actual day was February 14th this year, but we did most of our celebrating on the 13th, when we shared a Chinese New Year's party with the Chinese fellowship that we attend. Esther had been watching the Chinese New Year episode of Nihao, Kailan, so she was excited to get to wear special Chinese New Year clothes like Kailan. She was also, naturally, excited about seeing her friends and eating homemade dumplings, a traditional Spring Festival food and one of her favorite meals. Here are a couple of pictures we took (at an earlier date) of her in her Spring Festival jacket.

And it's still coming down!

Our historic "blizzard of 2010" is slowly winding down, but we don't even need those last few inches to make this an amazing experience! I'm not sure what the final snow amount will be for our area (I heard 30 inches quoted for Laurel, which is nearby), but I'm pretty confident this snow is deeper than the 20-inch storm we had our first winter in Laurel.

Note: for some reason, the pictures are not formatting the way I'm used to. I apologize for the awkward layout, but hopefully you will be able to tell which text goes with which pictures!

This picture gives an idea of how the snow was coming down earlier in the day. Note the downed tree in the background: the wet snow on its branches was just too much for it!

Esther's zipper on her snowpants is broken, and Tim doesn't have any snowboots, so we improvised. Behold, the plastic bag gang! (Esther did put a coat on over this getup before going out in the cold.)

The mound of snow to the left is a car. You can just see the side mirror sticking out.

Here is Tim shoveling out our car. He commented that this is the kind of snow where you have to uncover the license plate first, to make sure you're digging out the right vehicle!

The snow is up to Tim's knees! Esther doesn't sink in as far.

This snowdrift (next to the steps leading up to our entrance) is higher than Esther's head!

I don't know if you can really tell in the picture, with the different levels of white snow all blending in to each other, but the actual snow level was somewhere above Esther's waist. She is standing on the sidewalk, which had been cleared by a snowblower earlier in the day (and subsequently accumulated several more inches).

This is a picnic table.

The way the snow stayed on the top of the fence was both fascinating and lovely!

Esther, handygirl

Today we needed to change the batteries in one of Esther's noisy toys. Doing this required removing a tiny screw from the door to the battery compartment. So I got out the screwdriver, at which point Esther begged to use it. I figured that would give me time to fix my hair before she got frustrated and gave up, so I let her have it. I had not even finished my braid when she called to me to tell me that she had done it herself. And she had. Another milestone...I'm not sure whether to be proud or scared!

this kid says the darndest things

And the more she talks, the funnier it gets!

An old funny I forgot to mention happened when we were visiting Grandma Pack last May. Esther was doing something inappropriate with her spoon, so I threatened to take it away. She frowned at me and said, "You have YOUR OWN!"

One day Esther told me, "Daddy go to work. I not go to work. I go to work five. [i.e., I'll go to work when I'm five years old.]" I've told her that she'll be big enough to go to school when she's five, so I think she thinks that's the age of being all grown up! (Another time when we were discussing Tim's work I told her that I don't go to work because my work is to take care of her. She gave me a funny look and reminded me, "Daddy takes care of me too!")

For a while, she was very into role-playing. She would stand in the corner outside our door where we put the trash before taking it out and proclaim, "I'm a garbage!" Or, belly-flopping onto our bed, "I'm a dolphin!" Tim's favorite was, "I'm a thunderstorm!" (said as she pummeled him and made thundering noises). Her favorite was, "I'm a frozen blueberry"--I pretended to shiver because she was making me so cold, which she thought was hilarious, so she played at being a frozen blueberry several times thereafter.

One day we happened to glance out the window and saw a man in our swimming pool area (at this point the pool was covered over for the season and the area hadn't been used for a while). So we watched him for a while, speculating on what "the guy" might be doing, and why. In the middle of the conversation, Esther announced, "I'm not a guy. I'm a woman!" Then last night Tim was trying on a suit and Esther asked him about it, so he explained that this was fancy clothes for a man. She asked, "Are you a man?"

The other day Esther was playing around with a flashlight. She instructed me to open my mouth and say "Ah," explaining, "I wanna look at your lungs."

I have been working with Esther on not demanding things in a whiny voice. So when she whines for something, I will tell her, "I might give it to you if you ask in a nice voice." She doesn't entirely grasp the point of this exercise...her usual response is to say (in a much more pleasant tone), "nice voice!" She also, when instructed to ask for permission before doing something, will say, "mission?"

I've mentioned before that Esther tends to associate words based on sound. Recently in the grocery store she asked me if I needed to buy "those kneepads"--meaning Depends, which she thought were sanitary napkins, aka pads! And last night when Tim told her that he loved her, she replied, "I love you, too! Three, four, five, six, seven!"

Last week Esther wanted a turn at saying good-night prayers, but she wasn't quite sure how to get started. I asked her, "What do you want to tell God thank-you for?" Thus encouraged, she launched into something along the lines of the following: "Dear God, thank you for people, and Sunrise [the assisted living center we visit], and kids, and stuff, and people, and Ji Ayi [a family friend], and Sunrise, and stuff, and toys, and...NOSES [touching mine], and people, and stuff...Jesus, AMEN!"

snow days!

No, we're not having a snow day right now (although we are supposed to have a day of "wintry mix" tomorrow--sounds yucky!), but we had so much fun with snow before Christmas that I thought it was high time to post some cute pictures.

First, we had a snowfall of several inches. Or at any rate, only several inches stuck. It snowed hard all day, and I think we would have gotten some impressive accumulation if the temperatures hadn't been well above freezing. But the not-too-frigid temperatures made it more pleasant for playing in.

You can tell from Esther's face what she thinks of snow!

Later in the day, Esther had a fabulous time playing out back with some big kids who were kind enough to include her in their antics. Here she has just finished tasting the snow.

Shortly before Christmas, we got a rare deep snow. It was the most snow (16 inches!) that has fallen in the area since the big snow we experienced the winter we moved to Maryland for the first time, seven years ago now, and it was an all-time record for the area for December. Last year Esther wasn't such a fan of deep snow because she couldn't walk well in it, but this year she LOVED it!

Look, Ma, it's higher than my knees!

This is what our car looked like when the snow stopped. Although I wouldn't want to deal with it on a regular basis, there is definitely camaraderie involved in mass car unburying, and it was fun to work alongside our neighbors as we all dug out.

Esther was VERY proud of "her" shovel!

Taking a break on a pile of freshly shoveled snow.