Paradox Blog

"In the puddle sito, in the cuddle sito, in the puddle SITO." Samantha, my 2 year and 10 month old, recites her made-up rhymes. She is fast absorbing new words and imitating everything she hears and sees. She is learning two languages at the same time, English and Mandarin. Double the confusion, double the fun. She tries very hard to sort out the "I", "you" and "me", as well as "wow" and "ni" (I/me and you in Mandarin). One time she tried to defuse my scolding at her. She said "ni bu-yao ma ni, ni bu-yao ma ni wow" and finally settled with "ni bu-yao ma wow". (Don't scold you. Don't scold you-me. Don't scold me.) I bought "You Got Mail" on tape. For a long while, she calls it "'Wow' Got Mail".

She loves her Sesame Street friends or "sami street" as she calls it, and her Teletubbies, Twinky (Tinky Winky), Dipsy, La La and Po. In particular, Elmo is her baby. She pretends to read to Elmo stories that we read to her. She would memorize most of a simple book by the third or forth time we read it to her so she can fake reading pretty well. She converses with Elmo what we had said to her. She pretends to bathe and feed Elmo and the Teletubbies. She hugs and kisses them they way we squeeze and smolder her.

She has quite a few patterns memorized, among them, the word ZOO, the stop sign, and the logos of the makers of our cars, VW and Volvo. She seems to know the name "Thomas" in writing, one of her favorite engine characters. But one time I read out a sign that says "Hippopotamus", she insisted that it was "hippoTHOMAS". And this is how she sings the alphabet song: ABCDEFG-HIJKanimalP-QRS-TUV-WXYNZ.

She is such an imitator. She wears my heeled shoes. She applies my lotions. One time I dozed off on the sofa in the afternoon, a bunch of mails I just retrieved from the mailbox lying on the sofa table. She was playing by my side. From my blurred eyesight, I saw her apply something all over her face. Suspicion woke me to find her to have opened the shampoo sample came with the mails and used it as lotion. My keyboard workbook has her scribbles in it in all the right places. She only scribbled in and around the boxes where the names of the music notes should be filled in, because she saw me filling in those boxes once.

I love you Samantha. Don't grow up too fast.