Sunday, October 13, 2013

This week's plans

So my flight to Colorado leaves on Thursday morning. Why did I choose a six A.M. flight? Oh, yes. So that I could spend as much time as possible with my dad instead of spending the day traveling. I will try to remember that when my alarm goes off at four on Thursday morning...

This week I have a couple of goals.

1 - I want to catch up on my language reviews. I have been doing fairly well keeping up with my Japanese reviews but Chinese has been dismal. Truth be told, I'm not extremely motivated to learn Chinese after reading (from multiple sources) that the vast majority of adopted children come to the U.S. and promptly reject their first language. Some children want to remain fluent in their first language but most kids just want to be American. I have no idea which category my daughter will fall under, but the odds are that she will only want to speak English. Thinking of that, I lose most of my motivation to learn her language. I love the Japanese language and eventually want to become fluent. Learning Japanese is for me; learning Chinese is for her. I need to find my motivation again so that she knows I cared enough about her before we met to learn a bit of her language, even if she chooses not to speak it after becoming part of our family.

2 - Book reviews! I have several books in progress that I would like to finish and review on Goodreads before leaving town. This includes several review copies. Finishing these books will allow me to come home to a clean slate and have fun picking out new books from the library. Today I finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and need to gather my thoughts on it. Then I can complete the other books that are in progress.

3 - Finish writing letters to my sponsored kids. I recently printed some fall stationary and need to finish writing the last several letters. That way all of my kids have letters coming. I hope to visit the Compassion International headquarters while in Colorado but am not sure I will be able to convince my dad that it will be worth taking the time to visit. His wedding comes first; I'm just hoping we have some extra time to drive the half hour to Compassion and tour the mail room. I am eager to see how they manage all of the thousands of letters that pass through their office before making their way to the children around the world.

I think these three things will keep me busy until Wednesday. Tomorrow is our eighth anniversary and my husband's birthday. He requested homemade pizza and pumpkin pie for our dinner. Sounds good to me!

4 comments:

Julie Fukuda said...

Yes, kids can be different, even in the same family. My eldest switched to English right away when we moved to the states during my husband's job move. The second daughter hung on to her Japanese until she had perfect English then switched. The third daughter is still fluent in both. They all kept enough to work during college at Japanese restaurants or return to Japan for summer jobs and speak with relatives here. Their school did them a dis-service by insisting they take the JNL ...Japanese as a National Language...in HS instead of JFL (for foreigners), causing them to fail before they could be switched and turning them off to language study. My twin was an expert in Chinese and I speak lousy Japanese ... but I can get myself into trouble and back out.

Anonymous said...

Happy Anniversary!

Anonymous said...

Until yesterday I had no idea how long I'd been away from "blog land", I had no idea about your upcoming adoption. In fact I went back and glanced through old posts I think I haven't been around since April or May. Congratulations. Oh and happy anniversary and Happy birthday to your husband. (I tried to comment yesterday but had some bogger issues). I think it is wonderful that you are trying to learn Chinese and as you are talking about an older child you may be more proficient in Chinese than she is in English for some time and while she adjusts to life in the US your knowledge of Chinese could be quite useful. Also I am sure that she will appreciate that you have made an effort to learn her original language and country. In my experience children who move to a new country and language after 7-10 years of age usually retain an accent even into adult years (my friends all have), despite being completely fluent in their new language. So just enjoy learning and think that some time in the future you may be able to share "private jokes" and a "secret language" allowing you to bond in an additional way. I have 3 languages (plus a little Italian) and being able to discretely say something privately to a family member in a group frequently comes in handy - often it only needs to be one word to convey a message. For example clothes shopping with an over eager assistent nearby, switch to another language and say to mum/daughter that the outfit is hideous and you can move to the next item without offending anyone.

bekahcubed said...

I know it was mostly a side note, but I'm appreciating that you mentioned Dorian Gray. I've been feeling like a pretty awful slacker in the bloggy-book-club department and it's encouraging that there's still someone reading along with me even though I haven't been reading along with others very well so far this year.