With Knowledge Comes......

a greater understanding of what the boys have been thinking about this past year. Their language development continues to progress in fits and starts but something we've noticed, particularly this past week, is that the words they are choosing in conversation are getting more complex.

There are questions that they have begun asking recently about a whole realm of things that have occurred in the past year. Why, how, who, relationships, fears, jokes, etc.

I have to say that this is probably one of the positive things that older child adoption carries with it especially since they had almost non-existent English a year ago. Now we are able to fill in the missing information for them as well as have our questions answered for what was going through their heads this past year. I'm sure this will eventually lead to filling in the questions of their life in the Philippines of which we have very few answers.

For everyone who has "survived" my constant use of a camera. We go back and look at those pictures, the boys remember each of the situations but ask questions outside the frame of the shot. They are filling in the missing pieces, much in the same way they fill in their missing English knowledge.

Sitting around in the evening after supper, showers and study time, I'm amazed at what or better yet how they are learning to pose questions and speak in English. Sometimes when we are modeling correct English, in what seems to be every other sentence, we frequently feel, "are we making any progress." And then we find ourselves in the middle of a fairly complex conversation with one or the other of the boys and it's the wake up moment that says, yes the work (theirs and ours) is taking hold.

Sometimes its hard to see the forest for the trees or in this case to hear the accomplishments they have achieved. The forest of their knowledge is growing and for anyone who may think they speak with a heavy accent or aren't able to understand the occasional word, I say look back to a year ago, when Lucas and Eli couldn't understand any of us at all and you could understand only 1 in 10 of their English words. Miracle Grow has nothing on Lucas and Eli.