Tyger! Tyger! · 6 March 2010, 22:41
Since Josh’s arrival, Caleb has begun to treat his stuffed animals more like babies — covering them with a blanket, putting them down for naps in Josh’s carseat or crib, and giving them diapers. He still likes doing the usual — pretending to feed them with a spoon, offering them Cheerios, giving them sips of water, etc.
He has become particularly fond of a large stuffed tiger that wonderful friends of ours gave him a few weeks ago. When we see pictures of tigers in his books, he likes to talk about them (his words for ‘tiger’, ‘tractor’ and ‘daddy’ sound pretty much the same, though they’re slowly becoming more distinguishable), and eventually he gets so excited that he goes and gets his tiger from wherever it might happen to be — even if it’s on a different floor of the house — and brings it back to where we were reading.
I have started trying to talk to him more in Korean; it surprises me how little it fazes him when all of a sudden everything is called something else — we started with his picture books featuring animals, since I know many of those in Korean. I say in Korean the same sort of thing I say in English — “Where’s the {dog, tiger, cat, etc.}? — There it is!” and I point to it — I try to use full sentences in order to alert him that these are Korean words, rather than English words, and so he can start grasping the grammatical features of Korean. So far, he definitely understands dog (멍멍이) and tiger (호랑이); he’s starting to get elephant and butterfly, and possibly pig and horse.
— Jennifer
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