Daily Blog

My six week trip home to Chile is coming to an end. This is by far the longest I have spent here in many, many years. In my last post I mentioned how happy I was to have my son hearing Spanish everywhere, improving his vocabulary and really practicing the language. But I also realized, that I a native speaker have also benefited from a complete language immersion. Spanish 100% of the time. No English whatsoever. No Spanglish, no fillingRead More ...

Why English Is No Longer Enough from The Huffington Post — Not that we need to be convinced, but it’s always nice to hear others saying it. Interesting read! Bilingual Fluency & Disparities in Fluency from Latinaish.com — Our friend Tracy López writes about the differences in her children’s levels of fluency in Spanish. I’ve always found this topic super interesting because in my own household growing up my siblings and I all had different levels of fluency in SpanishRead More ...

Two or three weeks ago, my boys and their father went on a much-needed road trip to visit family in Kansas City. When they came back, I overheard Primo and Secondo talking about how they’d eaten rice and beans while they were away. “Rice and beans?” I asked my husband. “Where did they eat rice and beans?” “At my brother’s,” he answered matter-of-factly. My husband’s Midwestern family traveled to Costa Rica for our wedding nearly ten years ago. They’d neverRead More ...

A huge ¡Gracias! to Lovereading for creating this amazing infographic for us and for you to share, print, pin, email and love! Of course, we can’t agree more that “Bilingual is Better” for all! ...

When my eldest daughter and son began to read in kindergarten a couple of years ago — in English— I was ecstatic. I love books, and had been reading to them in both Spanish and English since they were little. And then, it hit me. When would they begin to read in Spanish? Being able to read in Spanish is not just an advantage during travel in Latin America or Spain. It’s so much more! Reading (and writing) in SpanishRead More ...

A few months ago I was texting back and forth with my good friend Melanie of ModernMami and she came up with the excellent idea of getting our girls to become pen pals. Although they’ve only met each other once when we visited Disney last year, we figured it’d be a good way for them to keep in touch and practice their Spanish at the same time. Plus, I have such fond memories of my own pen pals growing up (IRead More ...

Not a lot going on this week, but here are a few interesting links you might have missed! The July Carnival is Here! from Non-Native Bilingualism  — I love the monthly blogging carnival on bilingualism because it introduces to so many other parents who, like us, are doing everything they can to raise bilingual (or multilingual) children. The best part is that these are families all over the world and even though the language pairs they use are different than ours,Read More ...

I am one of six children. Like so many Latino families, we look like a spectrum of skin colors from very light/white to dark brown. Unlike some Latino families, we all have dark hair and eyes. Some of us get confused for middle eastern or european. My hair, with it’s big curls, is generally what helps people place my ethnicity as Latino, much more than my light skin. When I had a Salvadoran passport, I had to check either “negro”Read More ...