After laolao went back to China, our daughter suddenly became attached to stuffed animals. For several days, she always wanted to have one to cuddle.

Meanwhile, she has taken her first baby steps -- in the handbag section at Burlington Coat Factory. She then repeated the feat, with some extra flourishes, at my parents' house over the weekend.

She is going to the same daycare provider who cared for Michael from shortly after his first birthday to shortly after his third. In other words, Michael started with her as a baby and left as a kid. This happened in just two years. Now mei-mei is already starting to seem less baby-like. Instead of onesies, she's wearing little dresses and her Robeez, and of course she is also upright most of the time, cruising and getting ready to walk.

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My 41st birthday came and went. I felt pretty indifferent about it -- 41, 42, who cares? However, it gave me a reason to buy something I've long wanted: a premium subscription to Chinesepod.

Lately I've finally started to get a handle on tones, one of the most difficult aspects of Mandarin. By "get a handle" I mean that my brain has started to accept tones as an element of meaning -- it is starting to feel more natural. In the beginning, I just tuned them out and sort of hoped one could be understood without them. Unfortunately...

Chinesepod had a great example of a situation where the wrong tone can lead to saying something different from what you mean. If you're at a restaurant and want your food medium-spicy, you say "zhong-la". But if you want it extremely spicy, you also say "zhong-la". The difference is in the tones:

Zhòng-là (falling tone) = mouth-burning, stomach-vaporizing spicy
Zhōng-là (high level tone) = moderately spicy

Luckily, as the podcast hosts pointed out, most Chinese restaurants assume foreigners don't really want extra spicy and will serve you the mild version no matter what tone you use.