Here in Germany, the lockdown is now beginning to relax: the government is taking things slowly and carefully, keeping the R0 value below 1, but they're trying to get as much normalcy back as possible given that constraint.

Last week, Christina, Olive and I went to visit her Oma an hour and a half away for the first time since the lockdown began. In more normal times, we'd go there about every month, but with Corona about, we haven't gone since the winter. On arrival, Olive walked delightedly through every room, confirming to herself that all was as she remembered. It's only been a few months, but in a kid her age, that's still a substantial portion of her lifetime.

Olive's grammar has reached a whole new plateau: she's definitely mastered the notion that grammar is recursive, and that you can combine concepts like negation with subclauses. She hasn't quite straightened out all the rules for how all the combinations work, but she's very easy to understand when she says something like "I want not to wash my hair!"

The flipside is that she's a lot more reluctant to display ignorance these days. You can ask her any question you want, and if she understands the question, she's pretty definite about her answers. If she doesn't know a word or concept, though, she'll always answer "yeah". I suspect that she discovered that this works pretty well for "do you want" type questions, and has just generalized the procedure. Still, it's kind of silly to ask her "what's he doing?", referring to a show she's watching, and get back a soft "yeah...".

One thing she definitely learned from the shows on her tablet¹ is how to display excitement: arriving at her Oma's, and a few other times, she's spontaneously exclaimed "This is awesome!" It is, of course, but hearing that from her is adorable.

She's also started to internalize that she knows two languages. I'm kind of helping the process along: whenever she picks a story to read, and it happens to be written in German, I always ask whether she wants me to read it in English or German. Much of the time, she picks English; translating children's stories as I read them aloud is definitely helping my fluency! When Christina reads to her, she often requests German. I kind of suspect that she already realizes that my pronunciation in German is kind of far from ideal.

Christina and Olive stayed at Oma's this week: they took the week as vacation, and I didn't. We had a video chat the other day, and Olive was delighted; it was truly heartwarming to hear her excited "Daddy!" when the video came through. Her next words got straight to business, though: she put one hand on her hip, beckoned with the other, and said in the most imperative tone I've ever heard from her: "Come here."