Creative

You are 20 months old. After your bath today, you wanted the sponge. When I gave it to you while your mummy was drying you, you squeezed it in the middle and said "ba". "Ba" is the Mandarin word for 8, which a squashed-in-the-middle sponge looks like. However, you still say "ba" for a butterfly, which I've been trying (especially in the last couple of days) to get you to say the whole word for (and you've done so very well). I asked whether you meant "butterfly" and you replied "ocho" (Spanish for 8). You are not only multilingual and creative, but able to adapt to what you understand my perception of what your understanding is.
Your mum has called you a genius for a long time. I have been more cautious (babies learn lots and fast). Today I thought your mum could well be right. You can count to 10 in 4 languages and know colours and body parts in the same. We use your the names of your "teachers" to get you to speak different languages. For example, "What colour is the sofa?" "ojo" (your "R" is not very good, yet). "Ayaka (your Japanese teacher) iu to?" and you answer "aka". We just need to keep the stimuli going. You are doing amazingly, son.

Multilingual

Your mum and I had a chat about languages tonight. We've both heard that if one person does not consistently speak a single language (ie if I speak to you in English, Spanish and Japanese) you will confuse them all. I've always thought this was a myth and that's exactly what multilingualchildren.org says. As long as you get enough language input, you should be able to pick up 3 or 4 languages and it is better to teach them all together rather than wait and do one after the other.

We agreed we would make sure there were enough books in Spanish and Japanese for you and also that we would only let you watch certain films (animation for kids) in languages other than English (Mandarin, too, of course). In the meantime, I decided I need to step up my own language study as both need polishing up. We'll encourage you to learn other languages at school, too.