Daily Blog

Editor’s note: We’re dedicating this whole week to Back to {Bilingual} School. We have a variety of posts that we hope will make the transition easier regardless of what your kids’ schooling situation is. We hope you come back all week to read the posts by our amazing guests and to enter the awesome giveaways we’ve put together for you! Unlike most parents who feel that the start of school actually means a step back in their children’s ability toRead More ...

By tomorrow, the majority of school-aged children in this country will be back in school. My daughter has already been back for more than a month, since her school follows a modified school calendar which means she gets more time off during the year and has a shorter summer. Most kids went back in mid-August, but many of them are relishing their last few hours of summer break. While back to school tends to make a lot of moms –Read More ...

We always get asked if there’s a window of opportunity when it’s  the ideal age to raise bilingual kids.  There are actually several windows, or critical periods, for language learning when our brain is more adaptive to absorbing the new language(s), the broadest being from 0 to seven years of age, even before we learn to talk. Bilingual Baby Project–a study presented by researchers of the University of Washington and the University of Texas at San Antonio–concluded that the earlier weRead More ...

This past year I have experienced a transformation many of the SpanglishBaby readers are all too familiar with; I became a mother. Sure, it starts while pregnant, but the real transformation, in my opinion, occurs during the first year of motherhood. There are parts of myself I had to let go of and other parts I had to reinvent. I had to let go of the way I was used to traveling and I was forced to reinvent my idealsRead More ...

There we were, trapped on a rowboat in the middle of a lake in China. The man rowing the tourist boat refused to take us any further without a large bonus payment. Instead of giving in to his demand, my husband and I emphatically motioned for him to return us to shore. As we disembarked, he launched into an angry tirade that didn’t need translation. Just then, a mother and her young daughter strolled by, slowing down to watch theRead More ...

My son Secondo was diagnosed with autism in late 2008. There were unfamiliar doctors bearing clipboards, lots of tears and tissues, and I remember riding home from the hospital in a haze, feeling fragile and powerless to stop the bottom from falling out of my world. His diagnosis changed everything. My son Primo was diagnosed with autism late last year. The appointment was more of a formality with a doctor we know and like, and we all shrugged our shouldersRead More ...

I’m not sure at what moment it hit me, but this summer I was determined to take my three kids, ages 9, 6, and 5 abroad for a cultural immersion experience. I wasn’t sure where we were going yet, I only knew that I wanted to be immersed in either the French or Spanish language and culture. Why did I want to do this? Well, 34 years ago I was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to a Mexican mother andRead More ...

My plan was to write about a completely different topic today, but something pretty amazing has been happening the last couple of days with Vanessa in her Kindergarten class. When I informed her teacher that Vanessa is bilingual, she told me there were two kids in her classroom who also spoke Spanish, but are not bilingual yet and so they are attending ESL classes. I wanted to ask who they were and if I could meet their parents, but IRead More ...