Horror Hike

C-bao went on a hike in the Presidio yesterday with C-Pop.

"Tell me a story, Pop," she said while walking. Our little girl has been into fairy tales recently, and generally asks for stories with witches and wolves.

Like a teenager seeking a thrill from a horror movie, C-bao listens to these plot lines - involving either the wicked witch or the hungry wolf, or both - with both fascination and dread, and then generally hops into C-Pop's arms in case any of the fictional characters decide to step into the real world. Yesterday was no exception.

Here she is scanning the dark forest with suspicion. "Is there a wolf behind that tree? What about that one?"

Conversational

As readers of this blog know, little C-bao is a chatty 2 year old. She loves querying and opining, probing and interrogating. Here she is having a wide-ranging conversation with C-Pop about brushing her teeth, the Big Bad Wolf, the relative strength of various building materials, her health, the English and Chinese translations of different words and sundry other topics. C-Pop had to cut this video off after close to ten minutes, as this little one can sit and talk much longer than the recording capacity of any of C-Pop's devices.

Stream of Consciousness

C-Pop had night duty the other night with C-bao, meaning that he was the one putting her down after the nightly Scripture and prayer session ended.*

The other night, however, C-bao had napped only a few hours earlier, so she started chatting to herself aloud while trying to fall asleep. C-Pop had the opportunity to hear a little bit of what's going on in the little one's head, stream-of-consciousness style. This is what he heard:

1. Chinese poetry excerpts.  言师采药去，只在此山中， 云深不知处 ("Teacher has gone to pick medicine in the mountains, but at this time, the clouds and fog are so thick that no one can know where exactly he is"). C-bao has been learning some Tang dynasty poems lately, and now can rattle off quite a few. Clearly the words are floating around up there in her semi-conscious state, because C-Pop heard her repeat the above lines several times, which are of course an excerpt from a well known verse by Tang poet Jia Dao.

2. Select Biblical concepts: 仁爱还是盼望?  仁爱还是盼望? ("Love or hope? Love or hope?") C-bao apparently has been wrestling with the supremacy of certain biblical concepts, because one theme that was repeated several times while she was rolling around trying to get comfortable:  These are concepts found in 1 Cor:13 and Gal 5:22, which C-bao is able to repeat when asked...though we would be shocked if she had any idea what she was actually saying.

3. The Big Bad Wolf. 爸爸不会让大野狼进来的!爸爸会保护的! ("Daddy won't let the Big Bad Wolf come in! He will protect me!") This unsavory character shows up in many of the little nursery books C-bao has consumed over the past year, and clearly has assumed a prominent role in the little C's imagination. Luckily, C-Pop was brought in appropriately to the situation.

There were many more scattered thoughts throughout the 30 or so minutes it took C-bao to fall asleep...both encouraging and sobering, of course, is that the little one is clearly listening, all the time, and is soaking up the words around her like a little sponge. 

* Note: Somehow in the past 8 months or so, C-bao has developed a bad habit of needing a parent to be with her until she falls asleep; how it was developed C-Pop shan't say - can't throw wifey under the bus! Luckily, the little one is normally so exhausted by the time 7 p.m. rolls around that she is generally out within 60 seconds.