Photo by kiz

We’re celebrating a tremendous milestone today: our first year!

It seems really hard to believe that we’ve been around for a whole year and, although we can’t deny it’s been a lot of work, we couldn’t be more thrilled with what has happened in these last 12 months. I have no doubt saying the most gratifying accomplishment has been the extraordinary connections we’ve made with readers from around the world who—like Ana Lilian and I—have embarked in this amazing journey of raising bilingual and bicultural kids. We always meant for SpanglishBaby to become the kind of online community where parents who’ve chosen to gift their children with more than one language and one culture could come to ask, share and explore this alternative way of life. We humbly think we have.

In the last year, SpanglishBaby has become exactly what we originally envisioned: the place to ask and get peer and expert advice, plus honest answers to all those conflicting opinions about raising bilinguals. It’s also a community where you can share your stories, tips, concerns and even recipes with other parents on the same mission. But more than anything, it’s a space for you to explore this rewarding way of parenting.

New Look + New Features

As you can see, we’re celebrating our anniversary with a brand new look. It rocks, ¿no creen? Although our look is completely different, you can still find all the same useful information. We hope you take some time to take a look around so you can get to know the new SpanglishBaby. In the meantime,we’d like to highlight some of the main changes we’re implementing this second year.

For starters, we’ve merged SpanglishBabyFinds with SpanglishBaby, so now you can find all the awesome and useful reviews and giveaways you’ve come to love in just one site. In fact, in honor of our first anniversary, we’re having a different giveaway every day this week.

Another big change is the addition of our Directory. We’re working on putting together a comprehensive directory that will make it easy for you to find the resources you need to help you in your mission of raising bilingual and bicultural children. We’re going to make it easy for you to search for a local language school, a bilingual activity, a local bookstore or website that carries bilingual books, a speech therapist, music lessons in Spanish, etc…

In terms of where things are, every time you visit our Home page, you’ll always be welcomed by our featured articles. You’ll be able to read our latest review in our SBFinds section and to keep you up to date on our on-going giveaways, we’ve added a specific area just to the right of our Daily Blog. If you scroll all the way down, you’ll find one of our most popular categories, Ask an Expert, which will always be on our Home page for easy access. Right next to it, we’ve added a new category: Your SpanglishBaby. Send us a picture of your child and we’ll feature him or her on our Home page for a whole week. For more information on how to do this and what we need, go here.

As we announced last week, we have added five regular contributors to our family. Each of them, as you found last week, brings a completely different perspective on raising bilingual and bicultural children. You can expect to read their weekly posts on Thursdays. We are so lucky to have them!

There are some other changes we haven’t implemented yet, but that you can look forward to in the near future. One has to do with my very probable journey into raising my children trilingual. We’re still undecided, but my daughter has shown an interest and I think I can’t ignore it. The other one has to do with vlogging—or video blogging—books and reading. We’ll let you know more soon…we promise!

Same Great Content

We do want you to know; however, that even with all these changes, one thing you can continue to count on is our great (if we do say so ourselves) content. Our articles are organized into categories, making it simple to find the topic you’re interested in:

• Daily Learning: What our kids teach us everyday and what we learn through others on the same mission.
• Ask an Expert: Readers get their questions answered by a panel of experts with varied backgrounds.
• Must Reads: Informative posts about bilingualism and relevant topics.
• The Culture of Food: Recipes we find and share. Food brings us closer to our culture.
• Traditions + Culture: Ways of keeping our native traditions alive at home.
• Your Story: We invite you to share your family story with us. How are you doing it?
• ReadMe: A monthly exploration + giveaway of a children’s bilingual book and in-depth author interview.
• Directory: Comprehensive and searchable bilingual resources directory (currently a work-in-progress.)
• Forum: The place where our readers connect.
• La Tiendita: Our online store where you can find bilingual and Spanish books, music, movies, toys and more
  

Ok, enough with the explanations. Go explore! But before you do, we’d like to say MUCHAS GRACIAS for making this a remarkable first year. We couldn’t be happier with the results and we know we couldn’t have done it without you. As you can see, we have a lot of awesome changes and additions in store for this second year and we hope we can continue to count with your loyal support. Finally, as usual, we’d love to hear what you have to say about our new look and all our changes, so please leave us a comment below or send us an email. You know we value your opinion!