April 9, 2006 return to main 2006 page

We spent 4 days in Washington visiting Nana. We hit all the spots on Felix's "most wanted" list: the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, the Apollo landing capsule and the Space Shuttle at the (multiple) Air & Space Museums, the baby giant panda at the National Zoo, and the sculpture garden. The long flight and jetlag were hard on Milo, but other than that, he loved going places and meeting people.

Milo has gotten amazingly physical and strong. He is always jumping, climbing or throwing things with infectious enthusiasm. His joy for life is wonderful to witness and makes even casual onlookers smile. This boundless energy is also just starting to show up in some X-treme tantrums. There's only been a few so far. He hurls himself into the air, screaming and thrashing, and lands in every odd angle imaginable. Quite impressive.

When Felix learned to talk, some words came out in French and some came out in English, but he only had a single word for each thing. For example, he would always say "bateau" and never "boat", even when singing ("row row row bateau"). And he'd never repeat after us: for example, if Lucie asked him to say "grenouille", he would reply "frog", translating instead of repeating.

Milo is taking a different approach. He is eager to repeat after us, or at least give it a good try. Some words exist in different languages in his vocabulary (he says both "merci" and "thank you", "cheese" and "fromage", etc). Furthermore, he knows when to use which language. He asks Dean for a "book", but asks Lucie for a "livre". His Spanish-speaking nanny reports he says "comer" when hungry, which he never says to us. His speech is still mostly single words, with only the occasional two-word sentence.
 

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