About: Marika

Mami, hoy es January? That’s my 5-year-old asking from the back seat. I’m thrilled — finally the kids are getting the hang of time — the difference between seconds, minutes, days and months. But his question is also a harsh reminder. He is learning most of these new concepts in school. In school, they teach purely in English. And now the corollary — my husband and I, their only Spanish teachers, will never be able to keep up. We hadRead More ...

Handy Manny was the first to render me speechless. My twins were toddlers, and my mother-in-law had given them a Handy Manny tool box for Christmas. Awesome gift, hours of play time ensured. We ripped it open, started in with all of Manny’s tools, his martillo, his…his…. A whole set of toys were splayed before me and I didn’t know the Spanish word for any of them. El serrucho y el destornillador - somehow those words never made it into theRead More ...

The biggest fights in the early part of my marriage revolved around a recipe. A Thanksgiving recipe. For stuffing no less! It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me now, typing those words out loud — and frustrating that we wasted so much emotion over an innocuous mass of old bread and drippings. But then, it really wasn’t a battle of corn versus white bread to begin with. If this fight had a name it would be Babita v. Hazel, the battle ofRead More ...

Ask my mother-in-law about U.S. Geography and she throws her hands up in defeat. In her elementary school, geography was taught in the third grade — the year she arrived from Cuba. Instead of memorizing state capitals, she was busy learning a new language, culture and city. Academically, third grade was a bust. I’ve been thinking a lot about that story recently as I prepare to send my youngest to a preschool. He’s a rambunctious child whose English vocabulary isRead More ...

When my twins were 18 months old, and I was waiting for them to turn babble into words, I still wondered: would they say agua or water? Más or more? Thinking back, it was a preposterous thought. My husband Adrian and I had spoken only Spanish to them since they were three months old. Having English-speaking toddlers was a linguistic impossiblity. Yet I, an Irish-American who learned Spanish as a second language, doubted whether I could really pull this wholeRead More ...