Advent Stockings

Grandma Jackie sent Connor a set of Advent stockings. I had no idea what this really meant until Linds told me! It was fun to find out that the tradition is to have a little surprise gift for the recipient from December 1st every day until Christmas!

Connor loves his Advent stockings and looks forward to finding out the goodies he will receive each day. Especially when the goodies are chocolate balls and mini candy canes!

Here is a video of Connor on Day 4.

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Toddler Talk

It is quite amazing to witness the growing bilingual toddler talk. Connor started speaking single words shortly after turning two, and before I knew it, within two months his spoken English vocabulary had expanded to at least 50. He did not speak many Chinese words then.

Now two months later at 2 years and 4 months young, he has added a lot more Chinese to his vocabulary. He gets 'Chinese immersion' during the daytime with PoPo and he fully understands everything she says to him. Even she is amazed when Connor suddenly says a new Chinese word. Sometimes Connor will refer to something in English and then again in Chinese, or vice versa. He's teaching his English-speaking father some Chinese to boot!

About 3 weeks ago Connor has began to string two to three words together. At the time, he would say things like:

"Mommy, wake up!"
"Too big"
"Monster truck"
"One bear"
"Yellow slug"
"Follow me"
"Oscar, come!"
"Oscar, out!"
"Oscar, wait!"
"Oscar, eat!"
"Best friends" (the name of a picture book)
"Tummy hurt"
"I don't know"
"Hip hip hurray"
"Come here please"


I was somewhat worried as Connor reached two years old and still not many words were forthcoming. Two years old was the age I've read as when to contact the doctor about possible speech issues. Then I heard about a theory dubbed The Einstein Syndrome. The author, Thomas Sowell, had a late-talking child and investigated and held studies on late-talking children. His two books on the topic, The Einstein Syndrome, Bright Children Who Talk Late and Late-Talking Children provides the results from his studies, which revealed that many late talkers are boys and grow up to excel in their careers. His research found late-talking children to have excellent memory, musical abilities, strong wills. This certainly describes Connor!  Another interesting finding was that these children had close relatives in jobs requiring analysis or in music. You could count myself as an analyst, and the musical side comes from Linds and other relatives on his side whom are musically inclined as well.

Reading the The Einstein Syndrome gave me some peace of mind at the time, as Connor did show many of the same traits as Sowell's test children, such as (what we believed to be) an exceptional ability to understand what we are saying, to remember and associate words to objects, and learn things in general. Having said that, while we do perceive him to be very bright, he doesn't demonstrate any exceptional capabilities that I would personally classify to be out of the ordinary (such as, in Sowell's book, he describes how his son as a toddler figured out how to undo a child gate lock).

Well, thankfully those concerns are a thing of the past for us now. Connor can now be as chatty as any toddler. Often he will repeat words to himself, as if he were teaching himself to remember. If you tell him a word once, he will repeat it and remember it. He can now string more words together and can speak short sentences with a subject, verb and object. Not only in English but in Chinese - I think his Chinese vocabulary is just as good as his English vocabulary!  He mixes up his English and Chinese together in one sentence too. Gets his Daddy quite confused! :)  This week he also started to stutter a bit when beginning a sentence, but I believe this is only when he is struggling to say a larger sentence. We are definitely at the point too where we have to watch what we say, as he often repeats our words exactly; it's like there's an echo in the room!

Here's a video where at the end I ask Connor to say hello to a few people. We were playing with some home-made play dough. We've since purchased him a Play-Doh set, and he absolutely loves it and it's the first thing he wants to do in the morning. He's watched a lot less television because of Play-Doh.  He had, in the previous weeks, been hooked on the movie Finding Nemo and also the TV show Super-Why; although I don't mind him watching Super-Why at all, it teaches the alphabets and reading.

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Connor Meets Santa

Last weekend we braved the malls and visited Santa at the mall! The lineup was not bad at all, just four other families in front of us. Connor was excited to meet Santa, but he was very shy as usual. See the photo, the boy just would not smile! But I can tell you he loved meeting Santa!

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