Hummus and Milo

Evelyn continues to chatter away at home, saying more and more real words (mostly Chinese words!) and words of her own special creation. There is one particular and long combination of sounds starting with "Ma!" and a pause, followed by a crazy sound that she makes with her tongue and then a few more syllables. She repeats it often and at random (as far as we can tell) and we still can't figure out what it means.

I call my mom "Ma" (in the Cantonese way, not the Italian mobster guy way, just so you know...) and often I kind of yell it to get her attention. Now, Evelyn sometimes says "Ma!" either to me or to my mom. Today while working at home, I could hear Evelyn yelling "Ma! Ma!" across the house and my mom saying "No, call me Paw Paw." (I'm still trying to figure out how to spell Grandmother in Cantonese phonetically! Paw Paw is probably more accurate than Po Po.)

Of course, once we're around a bunch of people or if I'm trying to get her to say something on cue, she completely shuts up and just stares at you like you just sprouted a second head. So I decided to take some video of her saying a few funny things... humma (for hummus), Milo (who we just saw on Easter Sunday), and what else, my name! She hasn't said it in a while but clearly she still remembers.






Other Evelyn news... before I forget her growth stats from her 18 month checkup (which was a month ago!), she was 28lbs, 8oz (90th percentile in weight), and 33.5 inches tall (80th percentile in height). She is over half my height already, so she is surely going to tower over me at some early point in her youth. As it is, when I hold her and she wants to snuggle and rest her head on my shoulder, she has to scrunch down a bit, like the tall girl during a middle school slow dance.

The picture on the left is from Christmas in Massachusetts (obviously) and the picture on the right is from last Thursday. The pants she's wearing on the right were a Christmas gift from Grammy - they were long at the time but are already too short for her!

Say what?!

Evelyn has learned how to say my name! No, not Mama. She's saying Hai Nhu. She's been such a chatterbox lately, chatting away at the lights and her books, launching into big long monologues at Peets, pointing emphatically and punctuating with multiple exclamation marks. I can't even imagine what she has to say so much about!

She's also been mimicking a lot, so for fun, John started to say my name yesterday. Almost right away, she caught on, saying "Hi Nooo." "Hi Noooo!" At first she only did it when we said it, but today she's just saying it on her own. This morning she was wandering around, chanting "Hi Nooo! Hi Nooo!"

It's so hilarious, and somehow a little heartbreaking... I know that sounds crazy, but there's something about hearing my little girl sounding out my real name, instead of Mama...

She also said "Jah!" for John, but for whatever reason she isn't as tickled with it. She says "di di" for diaper, cha dai (for sit down), and we think she says "there!" when she's jabbing the center of her high chair tray as we get her food ready. It seems like she's learning English and Chinese at about the same rate. I can't believe she is really going to start talking soon, like really talking! I should probably enjoy the relative quiet now.

Mothering the mother

I have come down with a flu of seemingly epic proportions. Alternating between chills and boiling hot temperatures, my skin literally hurts. This is the kind of flu where you just want to chug a hot mug of Theraflu and pass in and out of consciousness all day on the couch and watch bad daytime television.

But, I can't. Not the way I'd like to, because Evelyn's here and won't leave me alone. Friday I stayed home from work and managed to have a fitful nap while my mom took Evelyn out for a walk, during which time they visited a friend and Evelyn had a little catnap. That afternoon, Evelyn took a very unusual second nap with me. In retrospect, that probably wasn't the best idea but it was so comforting to have her with me. To help her fall asleep, I recited some of her favorite books that I've committed to memory... Goodnight Moon, of course, and a few really sweet books by Mem Fox, like Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and Whoever You Are.

Evelyn's become such a book lover, more than ever. I've always read books to her, right from the beginning, and she's always enjoyed them, but now she has a newfound appreciation of them -- she's actually beginning to understand them. Funny how that makes reading so much more fun, for both her and me. She's mostly moved past board books, preferring the bigger books with regular pages. Reading books is now interactive -- she anticipates certain parts and excitedly points out and names things as we go. One of her latest favorites, Whoever You Are, is about how there are all different kinds of people in the world but that deep down we're all alike. There's a line that says "They smile like you, and they laugh like you too" and she always throws back her head and yells "ha ha!"

Which reminds me of a video John took about a month ago:


Evelyn loves the How Do Dinosaurs... series (so far, we have How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?). Friday morning, lying on the floor in Evelyn's room at 7am and feeling sorry for myself, I mumbled to Evelyn, "Mama needs to get well soon." Evelyn promptly extricated herself from me, went to the stack of books on her toy chest, rifled through them and came back with How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?. So maybe I can't be mothered the way I'd like to while I'm sick like this, but I can't think of a nicer thing that anyone can do for me.

A great set of lines from that book is:

Does he push back each drink,
Spit his pills in the sink,
Does he make a big stink?
Is that what you think?
No...

Evelyn jumps in at exactly the right time to say "Nooooo!" with me. She even did it when I was explaining to John what she did and recited those lines to him.

So obviously, "no" is one of her new words. She's also saying "hum" or "humma" for hummus, mo mo (Chinese for hat), purple, and my personal favorite, mao mo (Chinese for cat fur). Last week she started blowing at a tiny bit of cat fur, then she pointed at it and quietly declared "Mao mo." It's not too surprising really - my mom probably curses the existence of mao mo all over the house all day long.

Anyway, as this Mama tries to get well soon, I'll just continue drawing from the theurapeutic benefits of simply being with my hilarious, animated, happy little baby girl.