22-month round-up

Leona's spoken vocabulary has really started to explode - it is so exciting!

To list up a few recent new ones:

• 魚 (fish)
• 兔兔 and 'rabbit' (though she tends to just say it in Chinese unless she is saying it after me)
• Ba (for [麵]包 - bread)
• 花 (flower)
• 馬 (for 河馬 - hippo)
• 晚安
• Many various relatives in Chinese (7 or 8)
• Nana (Eliana - and she will point to my belly; Leona is still 'Noona')
• Hwawhu (waffle)
• Hsew (shoe)
• Key
• We home / we here
• Bata (bottle, water, butter)
• Kiki (cookie/cracker)
• Eeyore (her eeyore backpack)
• Door
• Mani (money)
• Wa (wallet)
• Tee (teeth)
• Pappa/papa (previously only 'baba' - dad in Chinese, but now also the Norwegian/English version)
• Me' (mer...Norwegian for 'more' - she also has 'mo' for more from before)
• Ah sho oo (værsågod - you're welcome)

She also does a lot of babble-talking in long reams, as well as signs complex sentences (for example confirming after me 'nurse one more time and then sleep').

One thing (of many) that has me really impressed is that she has a concept of numbers (I am sure most babys and toddlers do, it is just really interesting to get to experience it in action). Meaning, for example, she has five little flip-up books, and on the plane-ride to Taiwan she had four of them in her seat with her, and was stacking them, and then looked at me and said 'mo', meaning she was missing one and wanted it. Once I got it up off the floor she continued contentedly. 

Another exciting experience was her going on slides in Taiwan. In the afternoons when the weather was nice and we were home, we would walk to the elementary school close by. The first two times down the slide (a kind of high one), she sat in Judge's lap. On the third time she pointed to the slide beside them (there are two parallel connected ones) and said 'baby', meaning she wanted to sit on that one by herself, and she held our finger (or just Judge's, I can't remember now) - Judge sliding down beside her. After a few times of this she didn't take Judge's hand and just sat up at the top for a while, looking like she was observing the world around her, until suddenly she pushed off and down she slid! Her face had a look of FRIGHT, but once she was down at the bottom she put up her finger for 'one more time', said  'mo' and ran around to the stairs for another solo-slide. And again and again. That look of fright was a staple all proceeding times, so it was obvious she was scared, but it seemed like it was just the right amount of scary, and within her range of control, so she had a total sense of conquering the slide, I think. Super cool.

She also got her first traditional dragon-dance experience along the street one evening we were walking home from grandma's house...where one guy holds a ball at the end of a stick and many more guys hold sticks that are stuck along the body of a dragon and it weaves itself forward following the ball...complete with fire crackers and fire works (for which Leona uses her 'cracker' sign to comment about each time she heard it...which is several times a day during the weeks of Chinese New Year's). These types of things are one of the aspects about Taiwan that I love the most, and it was really special for me to be there with her experiencing this part of her culture for the first time. She was super wide-eyed about it all, just soaking it all in.

That's another thing I've noticed about her, she's a total observer, much like me, very content just watching people around her and not necessarily needing to jump in and participate right away.

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