During COVID isolation, the person that I worried about the most was my dad. Since he lives alone in L.A. and we are fairly COVID-cautious, we had not been able to visit him for well over a year. Finally, this spring, we made it happen!! We drove down the coast to Los Angeles, stayed with my dad for a few days, camped in the area, and then drove back up the coast and mostly camped along the way. We had done this same road trip a few summers before with just our oldest kid (then two years old), but this time we had two kids in tow, a more compressed time frame (only about 2 weeks total), and it was a different season of the year. I had some anxiety going in to the trip, but surprisingly, everything went off without a hitch.
Here were some things we considered in our trip planning:
In completely other news, a note on milestones! I am super proud that my son finished the first box set of Sagebooks before we left on our trip. He now can read 100 of the most common Chinese characters! While on the trip, we only briefly reviewed for about 10 minutes, one day in the car (I had prepared some sentence strips in case he was bored in the car and interested in doing Chinese practice), and it did not seem to affect his retention. We came back home and this week he seamlessly slipped back into reading new lessons. Hurray! To celebrate his accomplishment, I had made him a picture book using mostly characters he has learned thus far. It was amazing to see him opening up the picture book I made and just reading it to himself. But, the clearest testament to his language improvement was that he was both interested and able to have simple conversations in Chinese with my dad during our visit, which he had never done before! It was so sweet to see their budding relationship. My son, who can be very resistant to affection and "strangers", held my dad's hand during a short hike near the Hollywood hills. I am certain this would not have happened, if my son and his grandpa still had a gaping language barrier. It made all of the Chinese lessons we have done thus far at home feel totally worth it. Our daughter is also picking up a ton of words as she approaches her second birthday (later this month). To my delight and surprise, Chinese is still her dominant language, although she is very interested in speaking bilingually and would often say the same word in both languages. I am trying to pause to enjoy this moment -- all of us still being home, and her still being so cuddly, joyful, and sweet. (I hope that cuddliness never changes, but my son has definitely outgrown that phase?) Looking forward to longer and brighter days in the weeks ahead.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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