Growth

A year ago, C-bao would look on helplessly while sister quite literally danced circles around her while reciting Tang Dynasty poetry.

The below is from August 2013, when C-bao was not quite walking:


My how time flies. These days, not only is C-bao running almost as fast as her sister, and speaking in full paragraphs to boot, over the course of the summer she memorized a good 9 or 10 Tang poems. In fact she can recite two or three that her sister still has trouble with.

Here she reviews a subset of her favorites (and burps loudly while reviewing how hard the farmer works while planting rice):

Here she is doing the March & Chant:

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.