Countdown ~ 5, 4...

Hard to believe, but we are now down to leaving in less than a week. Wow!!! We leave this Friday, just 4 days away.


Things seem to be moving so quickly right now, and we still have so much to do. The Ladybug and I will be doing a ton of packing today. Time to take all of those loose ends around the house and finally get them into the suitcases.

The Bug is thoroughly excited to be and the end stages of waiting to travel. Each night she crosses off another day on the calendar. This ritual has really helped with her understanding of when we are leaving, and has saved me from the daily question of, "Mom, when are we leaving for China? Are we leaving yet, are we leaving yet???" Part of the reason that this calendar has helped is that the concept of time is one that the Ladybug has struggled with for a little while. To give you an idea, here is an excerpt from my husband's blog about the Bug and time:

You’re still confused about the term yesterday, which you still take to mean “sometime in the recent past.” However, I should point out that while your temporal vocabulary remains pretty limited, your temporal understanding is improving. For example, you’ve taken to using days of the week as modifiers for “yesterday” as in “Yesterday Monday I did X” or “Yesterday Wednesday I went to Y.” I am always impressed by the cleverness of your solutions to linguistic problems.

Over the course of the month, however, I’ve discovered that while your cognitive understanding of past is detailed and multi-layered, your vocabulary for it is somewhat more limited, consisting of exactly two* phrases, namely:
When I was a baby, which refers to those things that happened to you between your birth and, say, the time you started getting teeth, and
Yesterday, which pretty much means everything else.
That latter term can be a bit confusing, especially when applied to sentences such as “Yesterday when we went to Mount Rushmore I had a hot dog, and then yesterday at school I also had a hot dog, just like I did yesterday,” in which the first yesterday might more accurately mean last month; the second yesterday might literally be yesterday, and the third yesterday might, in fact, refer to ten minutes ago. I’ve occasionally tried to broaden your temporal lexicon from time to time, though each attempt usually ends in the same failure. A typical exchange might be:
You: Hey! Dad! Remember yesterday when I got my floss from the dentist?
Me: I do remember when you got you floss, but actually, yesterday you went to school with your friends. You went to the dentist last week.
You: I didn’t go to the dentist yesterday?
Me: No. Yesterday was just one day ago. You went to the dentist… nine days ago now.
You: Oh…
You: …
You: Hey! Dad! Remember when I was a baby and I got my floss from the dentist?
Chronological conversations with you might be accurately described as “acutely dependent on context and shared memory,’ although “confusing as hell” is equally correct.

As you can tell, the Bug has struggled a bit over the last couple years with the comprehension of time in the past, so you can image how difficult the idea of things in the future are for this little girl. After many failed conversations with her trying to explain how many days will still have left to wait until we leave, the calendar has been a life-saver. Now, to get back to packing...

Yup, just four more days to cross off, then we leave!

~~Aloha~