a) Fancy words and complex conversations-Beatrice is the queen of adjectives and we randomly hear "divine, fantastic, splendid, superb, magnifique, heavenly, lovely..." She also has turned the corner on being a conversationalist with other people. At the St. Patrick's Dinner table the other, she out of the blue started chatting it up with the other guests with "I read chapter books. Right now we're reading
Little House on the Prairie. There are two of them that we read. The first was
Little House in the Big Woods and now I'm reading the second one....." Also, "Sometimes I fly on airplanes sometimes to my Lolo and Lola's house. That's my dad's mom and dad. They live in Maryland and have two houses, one is near Washington, D.C. and the other one is a beach house..." She has also adopted the transitional phrase of "at some point..." which is definitely from me. She still says "EE" for "it" and "wuh-pwetend" for "let's pretend." Her speech is perfect when she slows down, but the errors comes out when she talks a mile a minute, which is usually the rate we hear at home.
b) Songs-she loves, loves, loves making up crazy silly songs, the most recent of which went something like this: "The Sea of Manila is my Destinyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!" I have stopped complimenting her songs though, because if I do she asks me to then sing it, and there's no way I could remember or repeat the lyrics she created. Her imaginary friends Mango and Madonna have come to town often again lately, and they too are topics of conversation and singing, as are shadows, ever since some PBS show featured it.
c) Birthdays-Beatrice is always up for a pretend birthday party and presents, but we're on a roll with four weekends of parties in a row right now, including this past week's at Zoink's Fun Factory, a place with 13,000 square feet of inflatables, frozen pizza, brightly colored cupcakes, princess chairs, etc. Bea thought the place was simply heaven. Next week is a swimming party, then two home parties, so we'll see what ends up happening for this girl in May.
d) Dreams-every morning I get the report, or I'm awakened with screams from a nightmare, which she has sadly had a few times in the past couple weeks. The happy dreams include astronauts and spaceships, aliens, robots, cats and dogs, costumes, "bad situations at my school" (which are usually very mildly bad, like the kids misbehaving and being silly), Christmas dreams, losing teeth, etc. The nightmares are usually too bad to even talk about. She does like to hear what I dreamed to and then we compare stories of our silly brains making things up.
e)
Little House on the Prairie-Oh how she loves this series, which is a suprise to me because Laura Ingalls Wilder can spend 15 pages on how a roof is built for their house, but I'm thrilled that it holds her attention and that she can keep up with the vocabulary and comprehend it. As with everything Beatrice consumes, she acts it out in her play, so we frequently hear now about Indians, cooking stoves, building doors, wolves, and covered wagons.
f) Citizenship-That's our new favorite word around here because Bea came home with a letter recently that she was the Citizenship student of the month in her class. We are so proud of her, and she is beyond excitement that she gets to have a pizza lunch with the principal this week!
g) Racism-Last night, we read some library books at night, including
Harlem Songbird, the story of Florence Mills, a children's book about a wonderful singer during the Harlem Renaissance. The book noted that Florence was the child of slaves, and she fought for the rights of Black people, so at the end of the book we started talking about what a slave is, and it led to a conversation which I will never forget. It was not easy to put the concept into words that she would both understand and not be too upset by, and I apparently failed, because after I explained to her that some white/light skinned people thought that some Black/brown skinned people weren't as good as them and thought it was okay to make them work for them without asking, Beatrice came out with "you don't think that about me and Daddy because we have brown skin, right Mom?" I almost vomited right there in the bed. She had such a sad and terrified look in her eyes when she asked. Anthony and I spent the next fifteen minutes backtracking and reassuring her how wrong people with those thoughts, and thoughts of anyone being superlative to another for any reason is wrong. We talked about how our different skin colors, and those of friends and family, are like beautiful rainbows. Then she went to sleep and Anthony and I stayed up late talking about what had happened. I regretted the conversation, but he thought it was really important that she hear it for the first time from us and not from others. This tiny, Asian, girl is going to have to be very strong in this society to fight against others' stereotypes and perceptions. I'm sure we have many, many uncomfortable conversations ahead of of us.
