Time is Passing so Quickly

Wow, the business of the season has me so far behind it isn't even funny. December just slipped up on me. I have NONE of my Christmas shopping done and the things we are making as Christmas gifts this year are just now getting started. Darcy, too, is way behind in her homeschooling this year. (Let's see...we started late, hating to give up on summer!...then we took a couple of weeks in October off for our family vacation in Branson...then we took a couple of weeks off in November for Darcy to sun in Texas on her own vacation....then, heaven forbid the child actually do any school work when her BROTHER gets a SNOW DAY--which accounts for last Thursday and Friday.) If Darcy were in public school, she would be in the fifth grade right now (instead of the seventh), so, I am rationalizing that if we spend two years finishing up the seventh grade curriculum, we are still a year ahead. (Mind you, Darcy doesn't want to fall a year back...but, neither does she want to do school work on the days that she is vacationing...so....!) We are just finishing week 7 today and we should be beginning week 16!



"DayGuh", the Final Remnant:

It is always sad to see a child lose their birth language as they learn their new language. So often, one replaces the other rather than both residing side by side in their memory. Doug was six when he came to us. In his case, he couldn't speak very much of his birth language (just single words here and there...or short phrases--and, even the pronunciation of those were mostly perplexing), so there wasn't a lot of his spoken language to have preserved. It has saddened me, though, to realize he has lost his understanding of spoken Chinese (which was further along than his speaking abilities were). Two and a half years after coming home to America, there remains only one Chinese phrase in his spoken vocabulary..."Zhe ge" (which he used to pronouce "Ditka", but now pronounces "DayGuh"). He used to use this phrase for every exclamation and every question. Now he mostly just uses it to ask for affirmation that he is doing something correctly. "DayGuh?"...I hear that question a hundred times a day. As I heard it again at the breakfast table this morning, it suddenly struck me that this is the very last Chinese word(s) to leave his memory. For so long, he always said, "Ni" instead of "You"...but it has been ages since I have even heard "Ni".