I'm doing a lot better health-wise
That's good to read.
not quite well enough to do everything I'd like to, which again is probably as you'd expect
There is never enough of anything, to be able to do as much as we would like to, is there?
I can still remember the moment when I realised this.
Oh, do you? Can you tell about it?
I still remember the first word I read in English. We learned some of the letters, and I knew already nearly all of them, but no words yet. It was a Saturday afternoon, I remember exactly where I was sitting at my parents' old apartment, on which couch, and I had a newspaper in my lap. One of the advertisements had a picture of a bottle of some sort of body-oil, and even though it was all in Hebrew, the bottle had some words on it in English. I recognized the "B", then the "a" and suddenly I realized I was reading the word "baby", the letters just ordered themselves in a word I already heard before, and now suddenly could read. It was magic.
We have to do the "discuss it when he's in bed" method.
The father of the family I stayed with in NYC during shabbat is a linguist, and he knows a double-digits number of languages (when he told me I pronounced my English well, it was a huge compliment. Also, of course, he insisted talking Hebrew to me, which created the strange situation of me answering in English to Hebrew, so that the other people in the house could follow). Anyway, when his eldest daughter was young, he taught his wife Swahili, so that they'd have a language to talk in front of the girl without her understanding. However, the languages talent runs in the family, so they had to abandon that method when the daughter started answering them in Swahili. They resorted to Fiona's method by then.
[Edited because I can't spell. In each post I brag about my English, I'm bound to have mistakes in it]