Editor’s note: We continue with our 31 Days of Reading in Spanish. Check out the book review below and don’t forget to enter our weekly GIVEAWAY of $100 worth of books in Spanish!

BOOK DESCRIPTION/REVIEW

Here’s why my kids like this book: it has a rooster, a talking goat, and a fire. (I have three boys ages 5 and under. They are easily entertained.)

However, I don’t want to discount the beauty of this simple story. It’s a Cuban folktale retold, about a bossy rooster going to his uncle’s wedding. Along the way, the rooster dirties his beak, then tries to persuade a series of characters, from fellow animals to a blade of grass and a stick, to help him clean it. No one will pitch in until the sun, who owes the rooster a favor, obliges.

If there’s a moral here  — it is a story about a bully after all — I overlook it to have fun with the repetitive phrases sprinkled throughout the text. (There’s a lot of room to imitate characters’ voices too, if you like.)

I also love the illustrations. Anyone who has lived in or visited Miami can recognize the streets of Little Havana in the background.

Like many Cuban children, the author of this book  remembers hearing her grandmother tell her this story at night in the “impenetrably” dark and quiet countryside. Her retelling evokes that same feeling, one I’m always happy to share with my city slicking kids.

    BOOK DETAILS

    Title: El Gallo de Bodas

    Author: Lucia M. Gonzalez

    Illustrator: Lulu Delacre

    Age group: 3-5 years

    Publisher/Year: Scholastic/1994

    ISBN: 978-0439067577

    Price: $4.89 on Amazon.com

Editor’s note: We continue with our 31 Days of Reading in Spanish. Check out the book review below and don’t forget to enter our weekly GIVEAWAY of $100 worth of books in Spanish!

BOOK DESCRIPTION/REVIEW

Our family is in full summer swing – weekends at the beach, bedtimes stretched until the sun goes down. But nothing makes me long for Christmas like a book my in-laws gave me a few years ago, Los Reyes Magos de Oriente.

The book tells the familiar story of the three wise men, and how they discovered a shining star that beckoned for them to follow it “across the world,” as Lluis Farre writes. What’s unique about this book is its beautiful rhyme, in addition to the illustrations. The elaborate pop-up pictures feature Moorish architecture interspersed with scenes from the desert.

Go ahead and put it on your Amazon Wish List. Get it for Christmas, read it through Three King’s Day, and hope the kids don’t pull too hard on the pop-ups so that you can read it for years to come.

    BOOK DETAILS

    Title: Los Reyes Magos de Oriente

    Author: Lluis Farre

    Illustrator: Merce Canals

    Age group: 3-5 years

    Publisher/Year: Combel Editorial/ 2008

    ISBN: 978-8498253696

    Price: $15.55 on Amazon.com

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 had recently given ourselves some real pats on the back. Congrats to us! Our twins are 5 and are still speaking Spanish! We “made it.” And yet, the more time goes by, the more I realize the quest to raise bilingual kids never, ever (ever, ever, you get the point) ends.

They grow, they learn — and they need to do both in two languages. Somehow, somewhere, between trying to raise well-mannered, confident, curious beings, between instilling a work ethic, love of books and a sense of spirituality and empathy — we’re talking basics here people, not Tiger Mom stuff — we still have to find time to ensure that their Spanish progresses.

I didn’t actually expect to reach this point now. About a month ago, I had decided that since the kids’ language skills were on solid footing, I’d dedicate 2013 to go a step further to teach them more about their Hispanic heritage. Over Christmas, I wrote up a whole plan, a timeline, links to all the books and projects we were going to tackle so that they could learn more  about la madre patria, and Latin America and the Caribbean in general.  But then came enero, and the questions from the back seat.

I am tired.

Last year, I wrote a post on six things I wish I’d known before I started raising bilingual kids.

I’ll add another: I wish I’d known this process was life long.

I wouldn’t have changed course, but I would have adjusted my expectations.

{Photo by popofatticus}

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 the Spanish classes I’d taken since I started learning the language in seventh grade.

Vocab lists for the countless types of trucks and tractors in this world? They didn’t exist either. I realized that over the years I’d gathered an extensive knowledge of Spanish, yet I was missing the vocabulary of childhood. As we began to read more books, explore more imaginary worlds, I needed a virtual dictionary or at least my husband, a native Spanish speaker, nearby to pinch hit. With time, though, my vocabulary blossomed, and each new word gave me that sense of discovery kids have when they learn something new. I played with each word as it rolled off my tongue, and tried to figure out how to weave my new expressions into more conversations and stories. Soon we were flying a cohete to the moon,

 fighting Capitan Garfio with the help of Campanita,

and learning about the licks and love of a newborn cachorrito. As my littlest learned to neigh and growl, screech, squawk and hiss, so did I.

When we first decided to raise our kids bilingual, I lamented that I’d never get to use the witty English-language sayings parents use to keep their kids in line – stored up over more than three decades of listening to my and other moms. I still have a hard time with the fact that some of my favorite children’s books aren’t translated into Spanish.

I try not to sweat it though. Truth is, I wouldn’t trade my new words for the world.

{first photo by Loren Javier , photo of puppy by  justmakeit }

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 of two people trying to preserve their grandmothers’ legacies.

Babita was my husband Adrian’s grandmother. She lived next door with her husband (named Babito, of course) raising Adrian and his sister alongside their parents. Babita emigrated from Cuba in 1962,  but she adopted the American Thanksgiving wholesale, cooking up the traditional meal — you know, turkey bathed in mojo and naranja agria (sabrosósimo) with black beans and rice. Lacking her own recipe for stuffing she found two. One she clipped from the local Spanish-language newspaper and is rich with apples and nuts. The other is thick with ham. My husband, keeper of the family recipes, now safeguards both inside a worn cookbook from his grandmother’s Havana finishing school. Each year, he pulls the recipes from La Cocina en el Hogar, makes his shopping list, then sets out to find the butcher in his parents’ neighborhood who can ground the ham  just right.

Me, I inherited my recipes from my grandmother Hazel, who grew up on a dairy farm in rural Virginia. The farm produced enough milk each day to fill a cart that the Neale kids and their horse Fancy delivered to town on their way to school. Her family’s recipes are thick with butter, cream, more butter, and a little corn for good measure. They are also sabrosísimo. It is not Thanksgiving without the Neale family, sage-infused cornbread stuffing.

And therein lies the rub. Our first years together, neither my husband nor I could imagine a Thanksgiving without our own family’s stuffing, nor a Thanksgiving with three stuffings. Our kids didn’t care — they don’t even like stuffing. But that didn’t stop the  tension. There may have been a few barbs of ‘my stuffing is better than yours’ in there, maybe. Maybe that was me. I’m not proud of it, but… entire family legacies were at stake.

One year we finally agreed: In addition to the peaches with mincemeat, corn pudding, brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes, cranberry crumble and pie, we would prepare all three recipes. Peace has reigned in our home ever since. I won’t try to persuade you which recipe is best, though I clearly have my favorite. I’ve left two of the recipes at the bottom of the post, in case anyone would like to try them. I will tell you one thing. My husband is in the kitchen right now, preparing stuffing for his office potluck tomorrow. Smells amazing. And the recipe he is using has an awful lot of butter and corn bread.

From Babita

Relleno de pan al estilo antiguo (source: newspaper)

• Una y media tazas de cebolla, finamente picada
• Una y media tazas de apio, finamente picado
• Un tercio taza de mantequilla
• Ocho tazas de cubitos de pan viejo (cortados de 1-2”)
• Una y media cucharadita de pimienta
• Media cucharadita de sazonador para ave
• Media cucharadita de salvia
• Un cuarto taza de agua
• Un huevo, ligeramente batido

En una sarten se saltean la cebolla y el apio en la mantequilla caliente, hasta que estén tiernos. Se añade a los cubitos de pan colocados en un tazón grande. Se espolvorean con las especias y se mezcla todo bien. Se añade el agua al huevo ligeramente batido y se agrega a la mezcla de pan, revolviendo con un tenedor. Es cantidad suficiente para rellenar un pavo a 12 libras. Da 9 tazas de relleno.

Babita’s second recipe for ham stuffing is handwritten, and there are a few odds and ends thrown in with the ingredients list (papel de cocina y baño) as if the paper doubled as her shopping list. We’re never quite sure on the portions, so we won’t include it here.

From Hazel

Cornbread Dressing (adapted for the modern cook, and reconstructed from memory by my mother)

• 3 boxes of Jiffy corn bread mix (made ahead)
• 4 cups of onions finely chopped
• 2 1/2 cups celery finely chopped
• 1 1/2 tbs poultry seasonings
• 2 sticks melted butter
• 4 eggs well beaten
• 2 cups of turkey stock (though good quality chicken stock will do)
• 1 1b of Italian sweet sausage, removed from casing and browned, or 1 pkg of Jimmy Dean turkey sausage in a round tube

Saute the onions and celery in butter or olive oil in a large pan. Brown the sausage.

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients and either stuff the turkey or bake in a separate pan covered at 350 for 45 minutes, uncover the last 10 minutes.

We usually make a small patty of the stuffing and fry it in a small pan to check the seasonings before stuffing the bird, so that there is time to correct.

{photo by  lookslikeamy}

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 is limited to the Scooby Doo theme song. (And ‘shut-up,’ but nobody is claiming that one!)

The one time we left him with someone other than our regular babysitter — while on vacation in Georgia — he wailed. When we returned two hours later, we could still hear his screams from beyond the door. “He was trying to tell us something, but we couldn’t understand what he was saying,” the nice young woman, who spoke only English, said.

(Me: #motheroftheyear #winning)

I am hoping his first day at school won’t be a repeat.

Intellectually, I know kids are resilient, and pick up languages quickly. I am definitely not worried about my son falling behind on his colors and letters. Emotionally, though, I can’t help but wonder how he’ll feel in those first months at school as he battles to understand and be understood.

He is a spitfire who won’t be ignored. I don’t want trying to communicate to feel like screaming into a wind tunnel.

So I called my friend, Dr. Lisa Lopez, seeking guidance on how to best prepare him (and myself) for the weeks and months to come. Lisa, a professor at the University of South Florida, specializes in dual language learning.

Here’s her advice for kids entering a classroom dominated by a language not their own:

1) Make sure your child knows a few basic words in English:  Teaching him words like “hi” and “bathroom” can help ease the transition, Lisa said. Kids in my son’s shoes go through four stages when they are in this position. First, they try to use their native language. When that doesn’t work, they enter a silent stage, as they try to assess the environment. At this point, they may act out in frustration because they can’t properly communicate, she said. It’s important to keep an open dialogue with the teacher to find the root cause of any behavior issues. Having an understanding of a few words will act as a bridge. Eventually, the students will move to mastering key phrases and then speaking more completely in the new language – which could take anywhere from a few months to a year, she said.

2) Keep pushing Spanish: Teach the few basic words, then leave the English to the school, Lisa said. At a young age, kids have a capacity for a limited number of words (for a 2-year-old, it’s 50 to 100.) The problem is, they may start increasing their English vocabulary at the expense of Spanish. To be truly bilingual, the child will need an equal input of both languages.

3) Emphasize the value of the home language: This, unfortunately, is where we have the most trouble — in  demonstrating why speaking Spanish is so important. Lisa said that kids need to know it’s useful to their lives, which you can do by  keeping up with Spanish-speaking family members, traveling, attending school or camp in Spanish — so that the value of the language is reinforced. “If kids are seeing that the language isn’t valued in the community, it’s going to be more fuel for the fire to not speak the language. That’s the most important piece.”

Clearly I have my homework to do.

{Photo via US Department of Education}

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 whole bilingual thing off — even with a native Spanish speaker for a husband.

Of course Spanish was the twins’ first – and four years later still their dominant – language.

But the journey hasn’t been easy, and I wanted to share some insights on raising bilingual kids for parents just starting out.

While many of these are lessons for parents for whom, like me, Spanish is a second language, some will resonate regardless of your fluency level.

Here’s what my family has found:

It didn’t take long to adjust to speaking to our kids in my second language

I had lived abroad, and conducted business, friendships and courtships in Spanish…but I’d never uttered a word of Spanish baby talk. I didn’t even have the vocabulary for it. So even though we had both decided we wanted to raise our kids to be bilingual, we had a late start. My husband Adrian, a Cuban-American who grew up in a bilingual household, hesitated too. We had a hard time committing, until a friend who was raising her kids bilingual in Chile made it pretty clear: “If you want them to be bilingual, you have to start now. And don’t stop.” I started imitating my in-laws’ baby talk. It took three weeks of awkward starts and stops to fully adjust, and we’ve never looked back. Now it’s awkward to speak to the kids in English.

Having a committed partner helps

I’m lucky that Adrian and I were equally committed to this. On those rough parenting days, I’m sure I would have given in to English if he weren’t there to keep me on track (and vice versa.)  In fact, when I get really mad at the kids, I resort to English from time to time. I’ve needed his support to stick with it.

Don’t underestimate the effect of your decisions on other family members

My parents, who only understand basic Spanish, are fully in support of our plans for raising the kids bilingual. That said, the process hasn’t been easy on them. For a good year, between the time the kids started talking and when they began to fully understand English at preschool, my parents struggled at times to communicate with the boys. I didn’t acknowledge that properly at the time. It was hard to realize it as it was happening, and I was so focused on the long-term goal.

I can’t control what languages other people speak to my children – not even my in-laws!

Isn’t that a universal truth of life and marriage – that you can’t control other people? Of course! But somehow, in my pre-kid, deluded head, I thought that if asked, they would unequivocally speak to the kids in Spanish. I failed to take into account that my in-laws are most comfortable speaking in both languages – simultaneously – starting a sentence in one and ending in another. I had to stop being such a control freak – and learn to cherish the Spanish poems and songs my father-in-law continues to teach them.

Don’t be afraid of your accent and grammatical missteps

I know the native-Spanish speaking moms at my preschool notice when I struggle to find the right word to say in the morning, or have a conjugation fail (which is often  – who invented the subjunctive anyway?)  But you know, despite my less than Giselle Bundchen-like body, I spend the summer at the pool in a bathing suit too. I let my flaw flag fly. The research is on my side, too, showing that more exposure to the language – even with the missteps – is a benefit.

Exposing them to English isn’t a bad thing

I went into this as a purist, considering any exposure to English as toxic. I tried to remove it from my bookshelf and my radio dial, even looked (unsuccessfully) for a bilingual preschool I liked. I was adamant. I didn’t really have to be. By surrounding them with spoken Spanish at home, we’ve been able to make it work – even with an English-language bedtime story from time to time.

Be prepared for ignorant questions

I’m lucky; I live in Miami, where raising bilingual kids isn’t exactly a novel idea. Se habla español pretty much everywhere. I’m still surprised, though, by the number of ignorant questions I get when people hear me talking to the kids in Spanish. My favorite: But how will they learn English?

Um, at their monolingual school in the U.S. of A?

I laugh at that last one, but I also know that the kids are approaching a critical moment in their language development. In January, the boys will be five. Kindergarten awaits, and the more time they spend in school, the more friendships they make in English, the harder it will be to maintain their Spanish.

I’m bracing myself. I hope in five years, I’ll be able to write again about how we made it work, but I can’t be sure.

Adelante, Adelante, Adelante. 

{Photo via sonderborgdk}