I started this a couple weeks ago, but Blogger kept giving me error messages when I tried to publish it. grrrr... then we've been unexpectedly away last week...
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Well Miss Hannah has been sick the last 2 weeks and has basically been a very very grumpy, weepy, difficult, screaming at times for a while little girl... poor Robin! He's borne the brunt of most of it.
But even through all of that, she's been learning and changing everyday. Before I forget I had to mention her 2 new sentences!!
1) we were coming home from grocery shopping and we were getting closer to home. Hannah was in the backseat (of course) and called to me... I tried to turn around while not driving into the ditch. She pointed ahead and said, "Mommy, Home this way!" then pointed behind her and said, "Home, bu this way!" ("Bu" means "not" or the negative/opposite of something), then she said, "Daddy and Joshy this way!" again while pointing forward and then pointed backwards and said "Daddy and Joshy bu this way!". Not only was that a sentence, she recognised where she was amid all the trees and farmers fields!
2) The other night afterwork her and I played GO Fish with our Go Fish Alphabet Deck. After we counted out the cards, she wanted to go first (what 5 yr old doesn't!) and then proceeded to clearly and slowly say, "Mommy, do you have a C?" I nearly feel over! I said, "No I don't actually" and she said, "Go fish (or pish as she says)". HOLY COW!! After the game (and many "Mommy, do you have a ......s" I asked Robin if they'd been playing the game that day or practicing that sentence and he said NO! She remembered it from the other times we played it!
I've been reading research (not a lot's been done) on older adoptees language aquisition and basically she's now lost her expressive ability in mandarin (by about 6-8 weeks home). In about another month or so they say she will have lost her ability to understand spoken mandarin too. Right now she can speak neither language, which is a scary thought! But in a few months she will basically be completely unilingual in English.
Robin said he noticed already that when she's upset she no longer "tells him off" in mandarin (she used to go into great detail and length about what we'd "done wrong" and why it was wrong and how we were supposed to do something". Now she just cries or screams. She also forgot how to say "apple juice" in mandarin last week and Robin reminded her it was "Ping guazhu"!
Also, she used to "read" her books outloud in mandarin, making up stories from the pictures. Now she doesn't really do that, she points to each letter of each word and says the name out loud in english or asks us to identify the letter if she doesn't remember it. (this takes a LONG TIME! She does this for every single word in the book! what patience!)
We already knew that she understand a HUGE amount of what we say to her in english. She still watches her mandarin videos, but she also prefers to watch her english Dora shows now.
The research says that, because we don't speak mandarin in the home, even sending her to mandarin school will not help her keep it, that will actually hinder her ability to learn english fully and fluently. Basically emotionally and pschyologically she needs to fully emerse herself in our family culture to be able to attach and process everything that's happened, so expecting her/forcing her to try and speak mandarin is actually a very stressful and upsetting thing. Pretty much 100% of children adopted at an older age refuse to speak mandarin to mandarin speaking people, and get upset if forced to do so, and this is why.
We are sad to think that she will loose this important part of who she is, but it is part of the hard realities of adoption.
Robin's going to coach both Hannah and Josh's soccer teams this year. Hannah is not excited at all about soccer.. she's ecstatic!! She wore her new uniform for 3 days straight and would have worn it again today but it was in the wash!! (she even has PINK shin pads and PINK and black cleats). She was very sad and grumpily put on her second favourite outfit - her pick Dora top and pants. But she is very happy that tomorrow her uniform is all clean and ready to be worn!
But she soon got the hang of decorating eggs and was the last one doing it. Josh was an expert helper.
