Early one recent morning, Emma stood in the doorway, yelling good-byes to her older sister, who was leaving for work. As she stood there holding the door wide open and hanging her little body out of the door, the outside temp was near zero, there was a slight build-up of ice on the glass door, and puffs of "smoke" (as we call it) was escaping her mouth everytime she said a word."Ana...Ana..." she yelled to her older sister..."hasta la vista, baby...au revoir...chao, baby...adios...goodbye...goodbye, Ana!"
She yelled those words over and over until Ana had gotten into her car and was beginning to back out of the driveway.
Now I'd like to think that my littlest girl is bright (brighter than most 3-year-olds, ya know)...and bi-lingual, too, at three...and I'd like everyone else to think what a clever child she is, too. But the truth is that those words are all she knows from a foreign language...all taught to her by her older siblings (in which they learned partly from movie-lines and partly from our school.)
And then I remembered that she can count to 10 in Spanish. But she routinely mixes the Spanish numbers up with the English numbers.
"One...two...three...uno...dos...tres...five...seven...diez...oucho..."
Well, okay, so she can kind of count in Spanish. (But she can count up to 25 in English...and she has been singing the ABC song since she was 2...that's counts for something, right?)
But hold on...she can sign several words, taught to her by Ana, who is in college studying to be an ASL interpreter. Emma has been able to sign many words for about a year now...and she has actually learned them faster and retained many of the signs better than many of her older siblings.
So yeah, I guess we do have a clever little girl.
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