Daily Blog

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! We hope you’re enjoying the holiday surrounded by those you love! We are so thankful for many, many things this year, but especially for the awesome bilingual and bicultural community you’ve helped us create. ¡Gracias! I’ve been wanting to write this following post for a while and then I realized today’s the day because the Thanksgiving menu lends itself perfectly for this. The variations in the Spanish language have always interested me. As I’veRead More ...

I posed the following question on our Facebook page last week: Do you think it’s rude to speak the minority language with your children when you’re around people who don’t speak it? What do you do? These are a sample of the first responses we got: I kind of new what to expect, but I was still curious to get a feel for how you deal with this situation which doesn’t seem like a big deal when you have babiesRead More ...

Mexico has been very present in my life lately.  From the continuous buzz regarding the Bicentennial and tomorrow’s Centennial celebrations, to next week’s environmental COP16 summit in Cancún, to the planning of our family trip to spend la Navidad with my husband’s Mexican family. We haven’t celebrated the holiday season with family at all since Camila was born three years ago. So, this trip will be special in many ways.  In an odd way, even though I was raised inRead More ...

Thus far, I have written a lot about my struggles and successes in speaking Spanish with Isaiah, but very little about his use of and exposure to English. While there are distinctions in his life between the people with whom he speaks each language, he has a peculiar mix of input methods because he has two houses with two distinctive language setups. Last year, when Isaiah and I moved in with my mother, he began getting daily exposure to English,Read More ...

Editor’s note: This post was originally published here on Nov. 11th, 2009. While I was registering to get the H1N1 vaccine this weekend at the local high school, the lady who was taking in the forms very politely asked if I’d rather get the information in Spanish. (I guess she’d overheard us while we were making the line.) I, also very politely, answered that it didn’t matter because I was bilingual. I don’t know if, at first, she didn’t understandRead More ...

“If you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language.” –Gloria Anzaldúa (Scholar of Chicano Cultural Theory) “We don’t use Tex-Mex here.” —Those were the words that were uttered to me (and Sabrina) at one of the pre-school centers I was checking out for next fall. As the woman continued to tell me about their wonderful school and the taught curriculum I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, “How can she say that? She doesn’t even know me. WhatRead More ...

My daughter, Vanessa, loves languages. Nothing could make me happier because I love languages too! We’re about a little over two months into our Trilingual Adventure with Little Pim – our journey to expose Vanessa to her third language: French, and I’m happy to report that things are going much better than I expected. I try to speak to her in French every single day, even if it’s not for an extended period of time. We either listen to LittleRead More ...

Like many of you reading, I had it all planned out.  I had read about One Parent, One Language and knew that was how I wanted to raise my children.  It was what my parents had done at home with me.  My husband was completely on board.  Making sure my children learned Spanish was important to me for many, many reasons. And then they were born and it was just the strangest thing–I found that speaking to my babies inRead More ...