My darling niece, my ray of sunshine, my little chatterbox.
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Even though she was born in South Africa, in October 2000, I have been fortunate enough to share chunks of her life before. When she was six weeks old, my sister flew to America to stay for the remainder of her three month maternity leave. At 19 months, they returned for a month's visit. And at 2.5 years, I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to South Africa during Spring Break.
Each of these wonderful but all too brief visits showed me how much I was missing of her life. She has been a full-time part of my life now since December '03, when they came to live with us while her Mamma goes to school here.
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When she came here she could basically speak only Afrikaans. The sum of her English was those words which are used as part of everyday slang in Afrikaans.
The people at pre-school were so supportive, not fazed at all at having a little one with whom they could not communicate freely.
Within a month, they had no trouble understanding her, and vice versa. In less than three months, she was fluent in English. Sometime after that, she stopped speaking Afrikaans.
We still speak it to her; in fact, now we are making a concerted effort to use only Afrikaans when speaking to her. She understands it well enough, and will translate a word on demand from Afrikaans to English. But ask her to translate the same word from English to Afrikaans, and she is stumped.
When we sing children's songs in Afrikaans, she will start replacing words with their English counterparts, spontaneously. She is like a little processor: Afrikaans in, English out.
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She loves balls and balloons, her soft puppy, Dora the Explorer, horses (any type, stuffed, real, carousel or cartoon) and names every horse she comes across Betsy, after the one she got to ride at the tulip farm.
Ketchup is the greatest thing on earth, bread is a big hit, honey needs to come from the bear-shaped bottle, she loves Marmite, and her hit parade includes popcorn, koekiespap (Weetabix cereal) and chocolate milk.
And currently her attention gets divided between Emily Elizabeth and Lila Laxmi, her two soft-bodied baby dolls.
