Baby Ro is nine months old. He has been babbling for a while now, but the other day he looked me straight in the face and said mama! I’d always heard that bilingual children can be late talkers, but mama is pretty much the same in Chinese and English, so it probably doesn’t matter. On the other hand, we have been using both 爸爸 and Daddy and there’s no baba or dada in sight. My husband prefers 爸爸, so we’ll have to be careful to be more consistent from now on.
In terms of other vocabulary, he gets a wider variety of words during the day with our nanny, so the only words I’ve noticed him understanding so far are in Chinese. He has stuck out his tongue in response to 舌头 and has shown me a frog in response to 青蛙.
He’s enjoying stories in both languages and loves flipping through books, but I am having trouble finding Chinese board books in that nice thick cardboard suitable for babies his age, especially books that are stories and not just educational and that are written by Chinese authors, rather than translated into Chinese.
Etymology Adventures 