我们回国。

我跟娃大概待1.5-2个月。所以暑假眼看就没了。。555

前几天在 NY Times 看到的文章说为啥双语的人比较聪明，之前有朋友和我说， 现在教娃认中文也是白认，长大就不会了，看来我还是要坚持下去阿。 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task. The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving. Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page. The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompea Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not. Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset. Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

嗯，双语得老年痴呆症的比例低这条我以前也看到过

我儿子他们蒙校的summer camp 不怎么样，所以我目前打算让他去Goddard school（去年考察过）。那边活动确实多，每周坐车带出去玩，游泳、各种球类，适合大一点的孩子，当然价格也比较贵。。。

为啥我现在对回国没什么动力呢，一想到飞机上这十几个小时，又待不了几周，然后回国孩子倒时差，我喉咙还会痛，逛街又没什么东西可买的。。。我倒宁愿让双方父母过来住着舒服。谁能给我点动力？！

我一是因为工作的原因回国有事。第二，我娃特别愿意回国。心心念去姥姥家。早就说了，今天吃完早饭我们去姥姥家好吗，晕的我。。。要那么好去早就去了。我去年带他回国他十分享受，话也多，跟亲戚很容易就熟了。我也很想念国内的大家庭的氛围。去年也有一些不习惯的地方，空气交通等等，不过还好吧，能克服。

孩子啊，all about 孩子啊。我觉得孩子在整个过程中还是很受stimulated的。我现在去哪里旅游，都当成一桩任务的。

我家儿子2岁半回国一次，倒时差就一天的事情，比娃爸还快。

两种方言呢？算不算？

我儿子三岁多回国的时候也很开心，毕竟国内小孩子好玩的地方多，所以我就觉得能待上一个月以上还是值得折腾一回的。不过我听好多大孩子的妈妈说，孩子越大越不太愿意回去，可能是很多事情有自己的想法了吧！

我小时候就很喜欢大家庭的感觉，可惜现在亲戚都分散在全国各地，聚不起来了，唉！

你这娃是天使！我儿子上次回国倒时差至少5天，每天早上全家人4点多被他折腾起来陪着玩；下午呼呼大睡，噩梦。飞机上出鼻血，下飞机的时候哭哭啼啼吵着，我再也不要坐飞机了（之前是多么的想坐飞机）！

这种带出去的SUMMER CAMP你们都是多大参加？我娃马上三岁，我想让他这个暑假去玩玩，但有点担心安全问题，怕他不听指挥跑了，老师又没注意到。

收藏好久，舍不得下手。。。