Then He Tsh Bomb!

Whenever Ace is excited, he will tend to speak quickly and because he is speaking quickly, sometimes his mind goes faster than his mouth and he has this train of thoughts that he just cannot seem to find the words to express it fast enough...

As a result, many of the conversations he has with me involving him trying to tell me some exciting thing that happened in school goes like this..

"Mummy, today hor, A did something funny... He run run run and then he zhi ba bom... and then he eh.... eh... and oh no!"

Sometimes I can decipher it.. like in this case, it means something like A ran very quickly and almost banged into something .. He was trying to stop in time but he couldnt..."

But sometimes, when the conversation is something like " Mummy, today in school hor, R eeeee bomb! And then W came and eee eee eee.. and then he tsh bomb!" At times like that I will have three droplets of sweat running down my forehead and lots of questions marks popping out of my head!

Initially I thought it was because he had lousy vocab but then as I thought about it.. it shouldnt be the case since he speaks english in school all the time and his friends are all ang moh...Plus, Ace reads alot! I am very proud to say he has been steadily reading like 2 thick story books without words a week!:) (I should video him reading his school books... ang moh slang one..)  And I realized that he actually speaks very good english when he is at the playground! Then I realized it was because he was speaking too fast to translate the thoughts or images in his mind into words!

So now when he does that, I will remind him to please speak slowly and use words.. not sounds.. because I get confused when all I hear are sounds....

Max tried to help him understand how we feel when he talks like that by repeating what we heard from him to him.. and then we ask him, "Do you understand what we just said?" "No.." he replied while giggling.. "Yeah, neither do we.. we totally cannot follow your story..." we remind him and then he makes an effort to try again.. When he slows down, he is able to tell the story quite decently...

On top of using sounds to replace words, he also likes to use his own words to replace words/phrases tat seem to elude him... For example, instead of "ceiling", he will say "up".. instead of "floor", he says "down". I will remind him the proper terms to use and I have to remind him that when he speaks like that using his own code words, no one can understand him except mummy because mummy has heard it before and knows what he means...

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