Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

I am going to dive right in and start answering questions. Please feel free to keep adding to the list.  My rusty typing fingers need as much lube as they can get.

And for all of you who are so ansty for my MIL story, another few days might help me calm down enough to write it. I will share soon, I promise.

Omegamom asks:

Are you guys still thinking of moving, or is that pretty much on hiatus for a while?

Yeah, after we majorly effed up the attempt at selling our house this summer (with not one, not two, but three full price offers!), we are in a holding pattern for now.  I keep looking at houses, but we can’t afford to buy the kind of house I want right now due to Mr. A’s newish jobs and the budget cuts that were implemented 10 minutes after he was hired there.

I also place the blame for our inability to move on the stupid, overpriced, cutesy small town we live in.  I walked through an open house yesterday for a house that was a bit nicer than ours on a more pretentious street, but the price was TWICE what we paid for our house.  AND it didn’t even have a basement that could be converted into a Karaoke Lounge (one of my top priorities for whatever house we will someday buy.)

If we are smart, we will wait to sell until we get back from China in 2011 or maybe even in spring of 2012.   I never claimed to be smart OR patient.  Mr. A happens to be both smart, patient and lazy enough to never ever move ever again if I would let him stay in this house forever.  Will we actually wait until 2012? I don’t know.  I can assure you my friends who survived House Crazy 2009 are hoping so.

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Jeanette asks:

You had said at one point that you got M. an e-mail address where she could only send and receive e-mail from certain people.  What provider is that through? How is it working out?

I didn’t get M any special kind of email account. I just gave her a gmail account and only gave her my email address and my Mom & Dad’s address.  I set up the passwords and I log her in when she wants to use it.  After an initial flurry of multicolored emails, she seems to have lost interest.

It didn’t occur to me that there are special accounts for kids.  If anyone knows more about that, I would love to hear more.

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Wendy O asks:

In regards to learning Mandarin, do you all focus more on conversation or formal learning, do you work on equal character learning and understanding or favor one over the other?  The reason I ask is that M loves to learn the conversational aspect of Mandarin, but will do just about anything to get out of learning radicals and repeating characters.

Our attempts at Chinese instruction have been very piecemeal and our goals for Chinese language instruction have always been kind of vague.  I am more hopeful about some kind of actual language proficiency than I used to be, but I still doubt full bilingualism is too much to hope for.

Most of the Chinese M understands she has learned through the three private Chinese tutors who mostly work on conversational Chinese.  I have been told that M has pretty good receptive understanding (meaning she can understand a good amount of the Chinese she hears), but her ability to speak/create appropriate sentences/verbalize an idea is not as good.   This is why I am so very thrilled about M’s new Chinese class.  There is a big focus on getting the kids comfortable with talking. PLUS, they have the kids talking to each other rather than just to the teachers.  I can already tell that M’s confidence in her ability to communicate has increased in the last two months.

When M goes to the local Chinese school on Sundays, they mostly work on characters.  M doesn’t like it.  We have her do the homework, but honestly I could care less if she learns to read.   She can always learn to read later, especially because reading has so little to do with the sounds, words  and vocabulary M is learning in her other lessons.  Also, because most Chinese education is focused on rote memorization and repetition, that is a crutch for a lot of Chinese trying to teach American kids.  It is nice that M has an idea about the order of the strokes and can recognize some characters, but I would rather she use this time (while her brain is young and malleable) learning to speak and understand Chinese rather than learning another writing system.

I am reading a book right now about raising bilingual kids, so maybe I will have some new language learning ideas in the near future.  Also, M has been our guinea pig. L’s language learning process has been more streamlined and productive so far.