One Child’s Language: at 47 months

Social notes: Her two favorite teachers (and actually best friends) at school are leaving for more gainful employment this month. She’ll miss them, but she is much more willing now to get to know new people. She is still very teacher-oriented, playing the role of teacher at home: directing games and circle time, asking for [...]

One Child’s Language: at 42 months

Intellectual notes: Of all the Sesame Street characters, Rachel used to resemble sweet, innocent, and imaginative Elmo the most. But now she’s turning into the Count, whose greatest joy in life is to find something to count. She counts steps, parking meters, people on the bus, bites of food, and sips of water. She can [...]

One Child’s Language: at 40 months

Physical development: Rachel’s handwriting is much smoother now. She doesn’t have to have little dots to mark the angle-points in A, M, Y and other letters. She has even got S and C down pretty well. She can also write quite small and has done a few exercises at school writing numbers. She jumps well [...]

Lind on Patrician Do-gooder-ism vs. Populist Producerism

Old-style Democrat Michael Lind asks a timely question in a Salon essay entitled Can populism be liberal?
There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama’s White House — and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires’ club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives [...]

One Child’s Language: at 39 months

Social notes: Ever since Rachel moved to the bigger kids’ room at school, she has assigned herself a new role in life. She always reminds us of what a big girl she is and almost never goes into the little baby routines she was so fond of before the move: “Look how fast Rachel can [...]

One Child’s Language: at 36 months

Social notes: Rachel was very generous about taking toys to donate to her school before we left China. But she displayed almost no emotion on her last day of school, when her principal (and favorite auntie) was teary and her mama was too choked up to say anything. It was only after we got to [...]

One Child’s Language: at 32 months (and abroad)

Social notes: Rachel is experimenting with social graces now. She plays with using please and thank you sometimes, and is working up to saying xiexie (‘thank you’) and zaijian (‘goodbye’) aloud in Chinese. Her strategy seems to be to listen and repeat to herself for a long time while she is mastering something new, then [...]

One Child’s Language: at 30 months (and abroad)

Social notes: Rachel is a full member of the family now. She has her own independent moods, desires, habits, hobbies, and insights. Her many observations intrigue and delight us and her usually buoyant mood lifts us when we are feeling cold and discouraged. She is more and more articulate about the specialness of our family [...]

One Child’s Language: at 27 months (and abroad)

Rachel’s command of Chinese is growing. She still doesn’t volunteer to speak any, but she understands simple Mandarin and Cantonese at school. Her teachers teach her Chinese and she teaches them English, correcting them if they make mistakes. In Chinese, she can count quickly to ten, and knows basic body parts, items of clothing, and [...]

Earl M. Finch Tribute to Windward Oahu KIAs in World War II

Back in February 2009, on a sightseeing trip with my mother-in-law, I stopped at Castle Junction in Kane‘ohe, Hawai‘i, to photograph the Kane‘ohe Ranch Building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Nearby was a small monument I had seen many times without stopping to examine it. I was curious about the relationship between [...]