3.5 year old update

Hello! It has been a while – where to start?

Ro is now three and a half. He has been going to daycare for 2 years now. Up until pretty recently, I would have said that his fluency in Chinese and English were about the same. However, I recently went away for my first work trip in over a year, and for the 4 days that I was gone, I suspect that Chinese lapsed in our household. I came back to a very chatty, full-on English-speaking Ro using more complex sentence structure than I had ever heard.

I am more fluent in English than I am in Chinese, so met with an English speaker, it takes a lot of effort to pull my brain out of English mode and into Chinese mode. After a couple of days of my being back, though, Ro is back to speaking some Chinese at home. I did realize that his grammar is not as sophisticated in Chinese, not surprising, since he gets much less input in this language, in fewer topics, from fewer people.

Lastly, we have baby number two now! Em is 10 months and not talking yet. She won’t be getting the benefit of a Chinese speaking nanny for a year of her life, so we’ll see how things go with her.