Amélie imite Esmé

Amélie's version:



Esmé's version (6 months earlier)

Conclusions:
1) Imitation is the highest form of flattery...
2) Trilingualism is all about patience and approximate outputs...

Amélie Rocks!

Amélie est en train d'apprendre a faire des sauts sur place, c'est marrant comme tout à voir... Une démo:

Amelie speaks...

Hi everybody, this is Amelie again...

It's been a long time since I last wrote. By now I'm getting much better with this speaking thing, although it's not easy. I have to admit that Yang-Yang at daycare is a bit of a genious to be already speaking multiple-word sentences in English and Mandarin, and a little bit of Spanish even. I'm still at "nose" for nose, and "bouche" for mouth...

But today I want to tell you something else. It's no big secret at home: I love buses! You heard it right. Ok, choo-choo trains are still my favorite (a while back my dad and I watched one go by for more than 10 minutes, I kid you not; he tried to leave before it passed, no way I told him...). Ok, back to buses. They are awesome! I love their colors and shapes, they are so fun! Mom is a little easier to convince, sometimes I ask her (you know what I mean) to drive around and around when we come back from day care so that I can see ssooooooooo many of them, it's the best!! I even convinced dad once :-)... [My parents think that a trip to Lausanne or Rio will definitely be very 'a propos', there are far more buses there than in B-Town.]

Ah, I forgot to mention that I much prefer to pronounce "bus" in French, it's much more fun to make funny faces when your mouth is more contorted anyway!!

I don't know what it means about my personality, but if you know, do tell me, ok? Oh, I was going to ask, do you love buses too?

Funny faces

Amélie is now posing for pictures... It is getting hard to catch her smiling naturally these days.

With her cute bordeaux jacket from great-grossmutti:




With her new outfit from Rio:




Posing like a star in her hot ride:




And this is the only natural smile I could catch this week:

Language update

Amélie is starting to talk more, and her vocabulary is growing everyday... Here are the high frequency utterances we have observed (i.e. the stuff she says most often):

'wertur' - she wants to pick up her blanket (couverture) and go downstairs with it in the morning. Funny fact: when coming back from daycare, she sees the blanket and points to it saying 'bankie'...

'cheal' - only with dad to ask for her cereals in the morning.

'chaussu' - shoes are still a very big source of fascination for our little one. Everytime there is a pair in sight, she points to it and alterns between 'chaussu' and 'shoes', just to make sure you get want she says.

'wawa/leau' - she loves playing with water and starts knowing that she has more changes to get to play with it when she asks mom for 'leau'.

'woofwoof/doggie' - Amélie is crazy for dogs, either real or in the form of stuffed animals. She is very attached to her 'woogies', our family stuffed dog.

'moo/vach' - she knows the name of most of the farm animals, but her favorite is by far the cow.

'do-doi' - Portuguese for 'it hurts', we all caught pink eye while in DC, and we explained to her that we all had to put drops in our eyes because of 'do-doi'. Now she uses it to describe any booboo she gets.

'cars' - Her current favorite DVD, and when mom says 'Super Amélie, cars en anglais et voiture en francais', Amélie generally responds 'woatu', close enough :)!

'jus/suco/WWWOOOOOAAAAH': last one is used when the parents do not provide the requested juice fast enough...

Her favorite word?
Não - Of course! Note that it is said with perfect Brazilian Portuguese accent... We can only conclude that the language choice for this word must be based on the frequency of occurrence... mmmh time to beef up your discipline skills mom!