Ohio

As we've been listening to NPR in the car lately, there's been a lot of talk about the upcoming primaries in Texas and Ohio. Generally speaking, Mantha isn't too keen on listening to the news -- she'd rather listen to her kid-music CDs. But she does get excited when NPR mentions Ohio. She practically jumps out of her car seat and repeats it very loudly.

It took me about a minute to realize that she thinks they're saying "Ohayo," which is Japanese for "good morning." It's a phrase she hears often on her beloved Shimajiro DVDs.

What's in a name?

Samantha is learning to say her full name, and the most difficult part is Shiroishi. She seems to have gotten the hang of it now, but for about a month she liked to pronounce it as "Shiro-oishi-neh."

"Oishi" is Japanese for "tastes good," and with the "neh" on the end it becomes a rhetorical question, like "This tastes good, doesn't it?"

Walk Away

At Cal-Tot (Samantha's school), kids are told to "walk away" when they're doing something wrong, like making a mess when they should be cleaning up, or trying to wrest a toy from another kid. I don't know how often Mantha is told to walk away (hopefully not often), but she has picked up on the meaning of this phrase and she uses it at home, mostly on Mark.

Lately Mark has been trying to teach her that if she insists on carrying her blankets around the house, it's much safer for her to ball it up first so she doesn't trip on it. When she puts one down, he often folds it up for this very reason. She doesn't like this one bit. One morning, after Mark had left for work, she found a blanket folded up on the sofa. She looked at it and said, "No, no, Daddy. Walk away Daddy," even though he was nowhere in sight.