Sophie Henry's blog

What's on the mind of a three year old...

Last Sunday, as we're driving back from a party, E.V. asked us out of the blue:  "Do jellyfish pee?"

What will she think of next?

Sugar Hill

It's been so long I've written here, I truly feel bad about it. I had so much stuff to write about too! Like how it is to have your kid in a language-immersion school or like how E.V. started speaking French perfectly around mid-October and I mean perfectly. She went from a few words in French here or there, to full complex sentences with complete mastery of the grammar, and of verbs in particular, in a few days.  For a few weeks she had a hint of an American accent.  It then disappeared and was replaced instead by a slight accent from the south of France (like her teacher's). She also very quickly picked up the expressions of her teenage cousins while in France for Christmas.

Anyway, what brought me back to writing here is actually a little scene that took place the other night and that I wanted to make sure to write down before forgetting it.  I thought too that a certain other Vox-er (hi Ed!) would like it, so here it goes.

I'm giving E.V. her bath and, while watching her, I decide to practice my banjo.  I start playing and E.V. says we should sing the song I'm playing. I tell her I don't know the words of the song. All I know is that it's called "Sugar Hill".  She laughs at the title and with sparkling and wider eyes, she says: "Maybe there's a song called Candy Hill!".  So I made up that song.
" I'm gonna go to Candy Hill, I'm gonna eat and get my fill, Lolipops, jelly beans, I'll eat them all, cause they're all candy after all".
After that, we just went crazy.  We sang about Cereal Hill (where we eat Cheerios all day), Ice Cream Hill, Rabbit Hill and Duckie Hill...

It made my night, and now I can't play Sugar Hill without thinking of lolipops and jelly beans :)

Speaking nonsense

E.V. has started this game lately that cracks both of us up.  She will suddenly start speaking in complete gibberish, making up sentences out of just syllables strung together. It sounds kind of Hawaiian :)  She uses the normal tone of a sentence.  I will usually chime in, in my own made-up language, using different tones of voice for fun: questionning, worried, happy, surprised, and so on... After a while, we just start laughing out loud at our own silliness.  It sounds something like this:

E.V.: "Coodabata kama tikinaka!"
Me: "Oh, kanakata bitista coocoolatinama?"
E.V.: "Kapa natala  manaka titi kapilgamana."
Me (suprised): "Kapilgamana? Ooooooh? Assita mini rappaka moomoo pittinakala?"
E.V.: "Makanata kootamipilata ougounatada mala palakata!"
Me (smiling): "Zina lalala patati naka meleme tooka moopootoona.  Ha ha ha!"
E.V. (almost shrieking by now) "Kinibi takana makalabanakata booloo pikanaka..."
and by that point we are usually both laughing too much to continue.

Silly girl!  As if two languages weren't enough, she now invents her own ;)

Evie-isms

A few funny words E.V. has come up with lately
- to jump sillyways
- yesternight
- my flavorite thing

Although her comprehension in French is still excellent, she only speaks it rarely and then with a very pronounced American accent (which actually cracks me up) and only words, no full sentences.  The visit of "the cousins" (my sister's family) was very good in that she did use more French. It is promising and my guess is that within a few months at her new preschool she'll be speaking fluently. 

Ah the preschool... Did I mention it here? I don't think I have yet. I have at least half a dozen potential posts waiting to be written up including quite a few about preschools in San Francisco, language immersion preschools and the like.  There's a lot to be said on the topic.  In any case, E.V. is starting in a French immersion preschool (Le Lycee La Perouse) in September.  I'm very happy that she will be having all this French input, but I am terrified of the preschool transition process! Probably more than my daughter actually!

Un-French

    Along the lines of taking a French verb and conjugating it the English way ("je suis tombéed" for example), E.V. just did a funny little mix of French and English yesterday.  When I put her in her car seat I tell her usually something like "je vais t'attacher", or "est-ce que je peux t'attacher?".  The verb "attacher" means to strap or click in that case.  To unstrap is "détacher".  As I was about to take her out of her seat yesterday, E.V. asked me if I could "un-tache" her, using the French root of the verb but the English negative.  Pretty smart actually.

Ambition

Dylan and I are talking about various things at the dinner table, including the Pope's visit to the US (and specifically Bush's hypocrisy in welcoming him*), when for seemingly no specific reason at all, from the top of her Stokke chair, E.V. declares: "I'm the Pope!"
To which I say: if you want to be the first female Pope in the history of Catholicism dear daughter, more power to you. Don't set your goals too low.

* and our presiden'ts wonderful comment at the end of the Pope's speech (about, among other topics, how rich countries must not abuse their power but use it to foster democracy elsewhere): "Thank you Your Holiness. Awesome speech". At least Bush showed some restraint and didn't call him dude or Papa or some other stupid nickname.

Dream baby

It's about 7:30 in the morning.  For once, I manage to get out of bed before E.V. wakes up (something that does not happen very often these days) and I jump immediately in the shower. I'm putting shampoo in my hair when I feel a waft of cold air and hear the little pitter pat of slippers in the bathroom.  I open the shower curtain and E.V. is standing there, in her pajamas, eyes still puffy with sleep. She has a look like she's about to ask a question but instead she says gleefully: "I have just seen some bunny rabbits." "Oh really?" I ask distractedly while rinsing my hair, thinking she's going to tell me she just played with her bunny slippers or with one of her stuffed animals. Instead, she gives me another slightly incredulous look as she says in a very firm and happy voice: "Yes, and I just scared them away with Seany!!".
There's no way she was just running after rabbits with her daycare friend and she is still too sleepy to come up with something like that. It finally dawns on me that she is telling me about a dream for the first time.  The cutest part is that E.V. obviously realizes herself that there is no way she could just have been chasing rabbits with Sean if she is standing in her PJs in the bathroom now. But yet, the dream is still vivid enough that she is very assertive when re-telling it. 
I didn't even try to explain to her that she'd had a dream. I wouldn't know how to start explaining this to her. I just laughed with her while imagining the scene.  Dreaming of chasing bunnies is more beautiful if left a little mysterious.

A few quick ones

Just a few quick anecdotes before I forget them. All of these are within the last few weeks so with E.V. being about 27 to 28 months old.

Me: " Ok, let's go, we have to stop at the post office first, then we'll go to the park"
E.V.: "Let's go to the Postop it!"

E.V. "I goed to the store with Daddy."
(a classic by every English-speaking kid I'm sure)

Mixes of French and English are still rare. Usually it consists of putting some French words (nouns mostly) in an English sentence, but on the occasion we have the French verb. The grammar remains English however and she is still to say a full grammatically correct sentence in French only.
E.V. "Mommy, I'm glissing" (glisser = to slide)
E.V. "I tombéed" (tomber = to fall)

QotD: Can't Do Without...

What food item would you miss the most if it were removed from your diet and recipes? 
Submitted by scorpion1116.  

That's an easy one: Cheese.

I used to hate cheese.  I know, un-believable coming from a French girl no? Until I was about 18 or so, I would only eat blue cheese (roquefort mostly) and goat cheese. I couldn't stand other ones, especially the softer ones like brie. And I particularly hated Swiss cheese (emmental, gruyere, or comte) which the French have a tendency to put on everything. I remember once asking for a pizza with no cheese in a little Paris pizzeria. The guy had to remake it THREE times. Twice, out of habit, he grabbed the cheese and covered the pizza with it before realizing that was why he was remaking a pizza :)  I know he hated my guts there for a minute.

I can't even remember when I changed my mind about cheese. The only one I still can't  eat for some reason is the crown jewel of French cheeses, this most common denominator to all cheese plates: the camembert. No can do, sorry.

Anglicisme

Oh my, oh my, more than a month since I've last posted here. And yet there has been so much happening!

E.V.'s vocabulary is still growing like a group of rabbits in spring (she is in a bunny phase right now). She is very big on colors and keeps pointing at random vivid things blurting out their hue: "Bluuuue!!!", "Yellow!!!", "Onge!!!!" (orange), "Gleen!!" (for green).  All this with a sort of wonder in her voice as if it was the first time she was seeing that particular color.  She is definitively a "label-er" and loves to assign names, places, and definitions to objects. I guess that with a mom who is an Information Architect, it shouldn't be surprising.*  I've also started working on helping her label emotions like "happy" or "sad".  That should be another interesting thing to observe. When does a kid discover feelings? When can they label a feeling by seeing an expression on someone else's face?

On the bilingual front, there's some new stuff too.  Over the last few weeks, there have been more sightings of French words. Enfin!  She has used "ici" (for here), but when it is specifically targeted to me (Maman, sit ici), and other words that denote location such as "on", "in" etc... like "Sur" or "dans".  Now these types of expressions are super tricky as they are not the same in English and in French. So sure enough, she uses the English expression with the French words.  It's here first real 'englicism'.  An 'Anglicisme' in French, is when the French language borrows something from the English, usually resulting in an error of the French language.  In the case of E.V. for example, she will say something like "Papa is sur le bus" (with bus pronounced in English) which would translate into the correct English "Papa is on the bus" expression, but is incorrect in French since we would say "Papa est dans le bus".  What I can not figure out so far is this: is she indeed doing these syntax englicisms on her own, or is she merely repeating something I say.  This is the type of stuff that is really hard to keep straight when you have been living in the US for more than 10 years and although I strive to keep my French correct, I may be doing these mistakes regularly. 

So basically: I have to watch my language in front of E.V., and not just for bad words!

* not to disgress too much, but I was at an interesting lecture yesterday by Alex Wright (authour of "Glut: mastering information through the ages") and apparently humans are, at least as a group, compelled to organize things.  There are hierarchies built to organize the world around us (such as for example a hierarchy for animals) in every civilization.