One Poo Pee

Jason is still three, and his mother speaks Thai but his father speaks English, so his poor little brain is confused, but he does pretty well.

I always tell Poo: "I will speak to him in English but you speak to him in Thai." That's the theory; this way he will hear proper Thai and proper English. I don't want him to hear that broken Thinglish that his mother speaks, and when I speak to him in my flat, atonal, mid-American "Thai", he just looks at me like "huh???"

Poo always jokes that Jason's pronunciation in Thai is very bad: "it's because of his long, farang tongue," she says, "he needs an operation to trim his tongue because he cannot say Thai words properly."

It's true, not only in Thai. His tongue is very long. And if the word has a complex consonant combination, he can't say it. For example, instead of sweet dreams he says peet peem.

But now I think it is not the fault of his tongue, but of his mother. Today, Poo was helping him take off his shirt. She should have said; "one, two, three . . . "

But instead she was saying "one, poo, pee . . ."