Baby Smarts

My Aunt and Uncle from Omaha came to Taiwan for vacation and me, Annie, and Mimi had dinner with them 2 nights ago at a Beijing Restaurant at the Westin Hotel. We had to special order the Beijing duck in advance and it was very very good. One of the best thing about eating Beijing Duck is that like chicken the best part is the skin, well Beijing Duck basically 80% of it is just skin. So health-wise it is bad for you but it tastes oh so good.

This is the first time my uncle has met Mimi so we were doing the usual introductions in which we had Mimi perform a lot of the cute things we taught her to do for the pleasure of the adults she meets, Mimi's monkey expression has always been a hit wherever she goes:-).

Mimi is at the age where she talks quite a bit in actual language. During the dinner my aunt commented that Mimi understands a lot and is really smart. Of course as a father I automatically agreed because to me Mimi constantly amazes me with what she knows and what she can do. To me she is the smartest child in the world, but of course I am obviously furiously biased towards her. However if I look objectively at Mimi and compare her to other kids I have met, here are the things I noticed about her.

Mimi understands a lot more then the usual child. Her ability to mimic and to demonstrate words through movement is incredible and her understanding vocabulary is just amazing. However her pronunciation and speaking is just so so. Actually I think this is more me, Annie's, and also Minnie's fault since in our household we speak 3 versions of Chinese and 3 versions of English. Annie's Chinese is of course excellent, Minnie's Chinese has very good vocabulary however heavily accented, and me...well I just speak like a 3rd grader. This tends to confuse Mimi and so her pronunciation turns out to be not quite standard. However despite the confusion she can say a lot of words already and she can effectively communicate with us even though I swear at times she looks at us like we are complete idiots.

So as a project I am going to list the words that Mimi can say by age 2. The words might not be exactly the right pronunciation however it must have a direct meaning. I will continue the list, for I am sure I will not be able to remember it all at once, until 3 weeks from now 5/15 which happens to be Mimi's 2nd birthday. This way I will always remember this many years from now.