Henry loves to jump off daddy’s back. As strange as that sounds, it’s true. Daddy forms a bridge on the bed; Henry climbs up, gets to his feet, and then leaps onto the bed from heights of about 70cm. Mummy’s job is to film and take photos, which has given us some great shots. He’s a thrill-seeker for sure, and not frightened of heights or similar norms. Qilin is still petrified of snakes, and can also get pretty uneasy when just about to play hide-and-seek, although he loves it when the game starts.

Early in his life and before he could talk, when Henry wanted something he pointed and grunted. Mummy saw the need for speech, and taught him to say ‘gei mama’ which was very useful at the time. This means ‘give it to mummy’, which she would then give to him. It stuck, and he still uses it today when he wants something. Obviously it causes a few problems because he should really say ‘gei Henry’, or ‘gei Qilin’, but regardless, Henry is now pretty good at saying his own name. He can answer questions asked in Chinese about his name, and now also his age, although he says ‘two’ and puts up one finger.

An interesting thing Henry picked up is the ability to complain about one parent to the other. After having been told off - usually by daddy - he will run to mummy and make furious hand signals whilst repeating daddy’s name.  But he will do the same to daddy is mummy has been too serious, so he isn’t really choosing sides yet. It’s very funny to watch, and makes a serious point hard to uphold.

The similarity between Henry and the photos of daddy at his age are startling. When shown a photo of a young daddy, Qilin refuses to accept that it is anyone but himself. He will argue and dispute until you change the subject. Whether or not he understands that daddy was once also a boy, the resemblance is certainly uncanny.

Henry throws everything he can get hold off. We have tried for months to stop him, but he’s still going strong. He vents boredom and frustration in this way, which takes up a lot of his day. The thing is, he will actually go out of his way to find something just to throw it. Qilin has been known to throw everything off the spare bed, ask for them all back, and throw them off again. He loves it, and he’s pretty good as a result. He’s also getting better at putting them back after we tell him off, so everyone’s happy.

Henry has also started putting words together. His latest thing is adding colours to things, and making two word combos. We taught him about the colours of cars because he loves everything about them, but recently he has started making up his own pairs. After watching a cartoon, he said ‘yellow moon’ without any prompting. He has also formed the habit of speaking aloud before he goes to sleep. We think this is because we all sleep in the same room, and usually talk whilst he goes to sleep. We found it’s a great comfort to him, and he drops off quicker when we do. So if we don’t, he usually revises his words alone until he nods off, normally less than 10 seconds later.

Because Henry is learning words at an astonishing rate, I have decided to start listing the words he uses after the normal blog entry. He knows far more than he can say, but we want to improve his speech and so recording spoken words should give us an idea of how we are doing. You might also note that he has a wider Chinese vocabulary than English, mainly because for the last couple of months mummy has been looking after Henry alone whilst daddy goes to work. This has been hard work for mummy, who has been working hard to give Qilin a solid foundation in Chinese before we move back to the UK.

New words he can say (plus translations into English)

• Gan lan (olives)
• Ban ma (zebra)
• Kuai (quickly)
• Fei ji / airplane – he always spots them with excellent eyesight
• Bird / niao
• Tu zi / bunny
• Da fei ji (big plane)
• Er duo / ear
• Where?
• Peng qun / fountain
• Kuai lai (come quickly)
• Gan bei (bottoms up) – this has to be done with everything
• An mo (massage) – this has to be done to get him to sleep… future problems!
• Tong (painful)
• Yang (itchy)
• Chou (smelly)
• La (spicy) – he uses this and bing bing (cold) a lot to describe food. He likes spicy food.
• Ye zi (leaves)
• Bei zi (duvet)
• Bei zi (cup)
• He (seed)
• Star (xing xing) – he loves to look up into the night sky
• Peng you (friend)
• Yue liang (moon)
• Yue bing (moon cake)
• Down / up – used mainly to talk about the difference between a waterfall and a fountain
• Yellow – his favourite colour, sometimes confused with blue
• Ma (horse)
• Qi ma (ride horse)
• Apple
• Tree
• Chu qu wan (go out to play) – he uses chu qu to ask people to go away