Last night Will and I were talking, while Jaan seemed to be playing and just minding his own business. All of a sudden Jaan yelled, "Нет! Нет! Собака не горячая!" ("No! No! The dog is not hot!") Huh? And then we realized that Will had just mentioned hot dogs, and we started laughing. So he does understand English! (By the way, one of Jaan's favorite books right now is Go, Dog, Go, which he calls "Go, Собака, Go.")
And as for Raia. . . I'm finding hair training to be much harder than potty training. She does not want to keep barrettes or anything in her hair, but her bangs are so long that I have to do something. The moment I look away from her, she has her hair loose. We're making progress, though. By the end of yesterday, she would reach for her head, then start to shake her finger like нельзя/no-no. She also started using that to say "no" to me, though! Last night she didn't want to go to bed, so as we approached her crib, so she told me "нельзя."
4 comments:
Wait until he discovers pig in a blanket! Or chicken fingers.
( - ;
Love -Dad
The ladies at church learned not to mention how pretty Kelly's hair looked. They realized if she made it to church with her hair still up, it's because she had forgotten about it and if they mentioned it, she'd pull it right out. The style you're using on Raia is the only one that would work for Kelly, too!
Catching up here. . . my heart melted at Jaan's sweet words re: the orphans. Yes, we are born with a sin nature, but even the youngest of us know when something is against God's good and perfect will.
Its wonderful that your children are bilingual :).do you talk to them in english and russian or has Jaan just picked up english from hearing you and Will speak it? How long have you known russian, did you find it hard to pick up?
To Anonymous:
We speak Russian to the children and English to each other. There's no particular reason for that; it's really just out of habit. Jaan must be learning from listening to us, because he doesn't hear English anywhere else. We do read English books to him, too. I learned a little bit of Russian in high school, but I can't say that I really started picking it up until we moved to Russian in 2001. Was it hard? Yes and no. It was one of my big challenges at first, but it also came pretty naturally.
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