For Daddy's birthday, the kids made cards. Jiejie made several; T.J. copied Chinese characters onto construction paper he had decorated with a printout of another hero, Ultraman. He did this after his homework, homework from two days of school, some of which was not due until later. Homework with T.J. is great fun. We did the worksheets of addition and subtraction by counting pennies or cherry drops: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven minus two, bye-bye one, two!" Then T.J. would count what remained aloud in English and fill it in in his careful hand. At the end of each page I would add a red-wrapped candy to his personal pile. In English, anything over ten is a mystery to T.J., but we can switch to Chinese for those. The English homework is a bit trickier. T.J. loves to copy his vocabulary words, and repeat them. It's much easier to explain to him the concrete objects on the list: "gum," chomp, chomp; that's easy. "But," however, is harder to explain. He's learning nouns and verbs and speaks a few two-word and three-word sentences. He has also spoken sentences in Mandarin, filling in a word in English: "puzzle." His receptive language is even better. He sometimes translates back to Ping or Haley or Yuanfang something I told him in English. Tonight the kids watched cartoons in our room after a little dance party to some conga music and before bed. T.J. and Jiejie at the foot of the bed, were discussing the finer points of Spongebob, and I believe I heard Jiejie speak a few short sentences of what sounded like authentic Mandarin.
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