Daily Blog

As a Spanglish baby myself, exposing my 2 year old daughter to the measure of Spanish necessary to develop a respectable level of fluency has been daunting. As her primary caregiver, and sole Spanish speaker in our home, my own weakness in fluency is ever present. But as I continue to expose, communicate and deposit our second language into my mini Latina, an entirely new question has been posed: can she even be considered a Latina? My Alina is aRead More ...

Every time I come to Chile I am reminded of how lucky and priveldged I am to be able to travel and actually have a relationship with my family, that culturally I am well connected and most importantly that I speak the language, without that, I would be lost. I know that many who have come to the US have not been able to visit their country and if they have, maybe it’s once every few years. Growing up, IRead More ...

As many of you know, cooking is not my forte. I know how to make a few dishes and between those and the ones my husband makes, we manage to feed our family of four. Unlike most Latina women I know, I didn’t grow up in a household where women cooked and passed on their skills to the next generation. I grew up in an atypical Latina house where my father cooked because my mother (and her mother) where neverRead More ...

Enjoying the first few days of summer? I sure hope so! We’ve had record-breaking temperatures in Denver and so we’re spending a lot of time by the pool. Here’s some of the reading on bilingualism I’ve been doing while lounging  . Enjoy! Experts: Undocumented students could fill bilingual teacher shortage from KVUE-Dallas — Fifteen percent of bilingual and ESL jobs go unfilled in North Texas schools. Many times administrator have to turn to Mexico to recruit teachers. But Obama’s newRead More ...

I hold the following quote by the linguist, Tove Skutnab-Kangas, dear to my heart and one that is always resonating with me during my day-to-day endeavors to raise a multilingual child. Linguicism includes the “ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” This includes the languages we choose to teach our children and the ways we chooseRead 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 ...

We all have such clear ideas about how we’ll raise our children, even before they’re born. Breast vs. bottle. Co-sleeping vs. crying it out. Homemade baby food. Screen time. And though in some areas I was able to stick to my guns, I was humbled by the fact that many things really didn’t work out the way I’d planned at all. The same was true when it came to raising my children with two languages. I knew we’d probably useRead More ...

While I don’t really have to worry about Vanessa not reading during the summer — she’s a bookworm, just like her mom — I must say I do love the idea behind iVillage PBS KIDS Summer Reading Community Challenge, which starts tomorrow, is free and lasts six weeks. The way it works is pretty simple. Basically you just sign up and you’ll start getting daily emails with literacy-building tips and activities from experts at PBS KIDS and Scholastic, two ofRead More ...