adoption day 2

This is day two for us with the boys. Already we are falling into a routine, which is a good thing. Connor continues to behave like a wild-man, Ben (BingHui) mimics him (or instigates the action himself) and John (FengHong)quietly watches. John smiles a lot, but doesn’t say much. Of course, he knows that no one understands him. It was funny, this morning over breakfast when the kids tried to converse,Ben kept talking and talking to Xiao, and Xiao couldn’t understand him. Xiao said that Ben spoke with a different accent, or maybe it was gibberish.Young kids sometimes just say stuff that doesn’t make sense. But Ben kept trying to get Xiao to understand him, and he spoke louder and louder. It was cracking us all up. John, Cheng’s parents and Xiao all said that half the time what Ben says they can’t understand, but the other half of the time he’s really smart and speaks clearly. At lunch yesterday he raised his glass and exclaimed “Gombay” (sp?) which means Cheers. When we went to the Natural History Museum today, every time he saw a dinosaur he would exclaim in excitement and call out the dinosaur’s species (according to Xiao). Ben also told Cheng’s dad, “Those are dinosaur eggs. The baby dinosaurs come out of them.” Yesterday, he was counting in Chinese, and Connor was trying to teach him how to count in English. Today, in the pool, he said, “Ready? Set. Go!” They were playing a game and I had been saying “Ready, Set, Go” for awhile. He also tries to say his ABC’s (gets up to F, but says B twice).Ben is still obsessed with the camera, and he’s taken hundreds of photos, some of them actually printable. Right now, Connor and Ben are wrestling and yelling, and John is watching TV. It’s going to take John awhile to warm up. Not that he’s cold, by any means, just a little shy. At the museum, John and Connor were playing straw, straw, straw, shoot, and also a game where you have to push each other until one relents. Connor was also teaching John how to swim today in the pool. John is now putting his face in the water and holding his breath. One thing that surprises me is that John and Ben don’t try to talk to each other much. Maybe it’s because there is such a large age difference, or maybe it’s the fact that Ben speaks with a different accent half the time. I was hoping that they would be able to retain their language through conversation with each other, but so far they ignore each other most of the time.