Surprises

The growth of a child kind of creeps up on you. You just all of a sudden notice, for example, that the kid you were once able to comfortably hold with one hand and your forearm is now so big that you can't hold him up high enough to keep his feet of your chest while playing on the bed. (You also find out that the kid you used to be able to toss around like a baseball now throws your crippled back when you try it. I learned that the hard way this week.)

It's the intellectual development, however, that sneaks up on you the most quietly, especially in the pre-vocal stage. Its difficult to spot what the child is learning because there's no quick feedback like you'd get if the child could talk.

We got some feedback from Lucas this week.

A long time ago we got this flashcard/book type of affair with pictures of animals in it. Patiently his grandmother, his mother and I would show him pictures and say the name of the animal. (In Chinese at this point. Starting next month he gets the same treatment in English.) At first Lucas was uninterested in them (except for wanting to eat them). After that he just wanted to play with the cards, fanning them out from the rivet that binds them all in one corner, bending them and generally being his destructive self on them. He also enjoyed touching the pictures and running his finger along the edges. There was, however, no sign that he understood the language at all. (That pre-vocal thing and all that.)

Then the hammer dropped this week. While playing with Lucas, Joan asked him (in Chinese) "Where's the dog?". She was, of course, referring to his favourite pal, the Snoopy-like stuffed dog. The cards, however, happened to be out and fanned open and the picture of the dog (a dalmatian) was exposed. Instead of pointing to his favourite pal, Lucas reached across and pointed at the picture of the dog. This sent a wave of excitement through the family and poor Lucas was pestered for the entire length of his attention span (roughly twenty seconds) with "where's the lion?" and "where's the tiger?" and "where's the elephant?" and such questions. He very ably identified the animals (even some of the more difficult ones). He'd confuse the lion and tiger quite often and sometimes got the chimpanzee mixed up with the monkey. But overall his comprehension of those words was better than my Sweathogs' would be given the same vocabulary.

These are the kinds of surprises I like in my life.