What the sisters are saying and reading...many months later...

Polly: "Happy!" (skipping away); "Hurray!"; "I go mi-ma's hou" (that's grandma's house, with the uniquely Polly way of saying grandma, and the missing "s"); "I'm hungi...I eat"; "Mama, read mei mei"; "You want cup tea?"--"More?"; "This one."; "This one?"; "This one mei mei; this one cher cher."; "Milk, peas [please]"; "I love you Mama"; "I don't like ice kim"; "Hawo Teacher"; "Mei mei... bao bao... mama"; "Bye bye, I go skoo!"; "Don't read cher cher; read mei mei." (sigh :) Polly can actually intimate many words nowadays. At this stage, however, even her closest caregivers struggle to decipher her MANY utterances--save for her top 20. Polly is highly animated at times, and often sings, tells stories, role plays... "Night night mama, night night cher cher." (Papa comes to bed later, and the girls will have wished him goodnight earlier on)

Pepe, well, she says so many things these days, it's hard to keep up, especially with my extremely infrequent updates. She is, it must be noted, taking on quite a bit of Singlish--probably the influence of schoolmates and our wonderful helper Ira as well. It's interesting that she shows some ability to code switch; sometimes though I sense that her grammar is sometimes worse these days than before!! :)
Pepe (on Papa who went to Oxford for a conference in early September): When is Papa coming home today?
Mama: In the afternoon. Papa's still in the air.
Pepe (with a cheeky smile): I hope he did not get into the air that we breathe.

Just today:
Pepe during her role play/story-telling mode: The magic egg told (something I can't remember)
Mama: The egg can talk???
Pepe: That's why it's a magic egg. (quite emphatically; I could almost hear the 'aiyo' tone)
(Thereafter, for the rest of the conversation based on her story which included 22 magic eggs on board a ship to Tarshish, the magical nature of the eggs became the standard explanation for just about anything :)

Some really good recent picks from the library:
The Grump, and Manfred the Baddie by John Fardell
Old Bob's Brown Bear by Niki Daly
Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes
The Cozy Book by Mary Ann Hoberman
Scribbleville by Peter Holwitz
Some of Polly's current faves: the local series Bubbles the monkey ("..gets a toothache"; "...plays with fire" -- good cautionary tales); Nancy Carlson's Loudmouth George series, Old Bob's Brown Bear, and Berenstein Bear's Junk Food.

Pepe's slowly learning to read, with some resistance still at times, but clearly getting more interested (e.g. read all the words in the speech bubbles, and looking at the words as well as the pictures). She gets a thrill from being able to 'read' aided by memory very simple words in speech bubbles, such as "No no, too kind, too kind," (Manfred the Baddie) and "Go!" and "I can't b-b-b-bob!" (Dexter;s Journey).