People often ask about how quickly Ben is picking up English. It's been seven months now and he's talking like a native speaker. He still has some issues with tenses and, strangely, gendered pronouns (he consistently mixes them up), but otherwise, to hear him, you'd never know that English wasn't his first language.

However, like any four-year-old, he doesn't have a firm grasp of the finer points of etiquette. For instance, Ben doesn't yet understand why a beer-bellied man might be offended when asked if he's carrying a baby in there. We're also having to watch our reactions to some of his comments. When frustrated, he's taken to saying, "Pete's sake!" and just this past weekend, Kari got a "Whatever!"

In general though, we're proud to say that he's a pretty polite kid. Luckily, he's also got other role models besides us. For example:

The downside is that Ben is losing his Chinese. We wanted to encourage him to keep it up, but when someone tries to speak Chinese with him, he clams right up. He seems to have no interest in speaking a language that we don't understand (which he's actually come out and told us). We hope that he will be able to pick it back up quickly. I wanted to through the Pimsleur audio training, maybe Ben can help me on my pronunciation.