weinraub’s words

That’s my big girl!

Becca doesn’t quite have all her verb conjugation and helper words down yet. In fact, sometimes, she just bails on conjugation altogether. Pretty understandable, as Thai language has no verb conjugation by subject and only very simple and consistent conjugation by past/future, the equivalent of adding “-ed” for the past tense and “will -” for the future tense.

As an example, this morning Becca commented that she had scraped her arm yesterday playing at a neighbor’s house. Wanting to convey how brave she was, Becca added: “I not cry, I not.”

Very cute.

Apparently a Thai insurance company is running ads here using the old Doris Day song “Que Sera Sera”. Yesterday Becca came home from school and sang it to me out of the blue. Just blew me away.

Says it all.

So proud, I can hardly type through my tears.

Thanks to countless hours of private tutoring by Dora the Explorer, Becca can now count to ten in Spanish. She also knows “gracias”, “de nada”, “estrella”, and a few others.

On a similar topic, Benjamin (2y9m) astounded me yesterday by counting to ten in English.

Way to go, children!

Becca still seems to trip over usage of the words “many” and “much”.

Of course, we can see that the issue is enumerability and countability.

So we could say “I ate so much pizza that I gained 10 pounds” or “I ate so many slices of pizza that I gained 10 pounds”. The difference is that I can enumerate and count the slices. [Well, at least in theory. I don't think it's possible to really count the number of slices I ate on my last trip home, hence, the 10 pounds. Groan...]

So, as I dole out crackers to the kids, Becca will say something like “Daddy, Daddy, I want much, please.” Comprehensible, of course, but not quite right.

Still, I have no complaints at all about the one I heard last night as she was falling asleep beside me:

“I love you so many, Daddy.”

Sweet dreams, indeed.