When one of my daughter’s first words was D-d-d-dora I knew there was something special about this character. As a new mamá, I am watching children’s programs for the first time, getting to know what they are about and trying to figure out which are best for my daughter, Little L. Although she just turned 1, I do rely on some TV to help me with raising her bilingual. Little L’s exposure to Spanish is limited, and as I am away from most of my family and my country I appreciate all the help I can get — even when it comes from a 7-year-old cartoon character.

When it was time to plan her first birthday party and pick a theme, it was a no brainer: Dora the Explorer.

Not only does Little L adore Dora, I think she is an incredible role model for adults as well. Dora loves her familia and is proud of her culture; she is a great team player, cares for others, she is forgiving, adventurous but cautious, and is always trying to save the day. The fact that she is not only Latina but also bilingual just makes her even more extraordinary and a perfect example for Little L. I want my daughter to grow up with a kind heart like Dora’s and to be proud and confident to speak English, Spanish and why not Spanglish as well.

As a Latina food blogger I pay a lot of attention to the food I serve, so for this fiesta, I created a menu that was kid-friendly and that represented our Latino heritage. I took this as an opportunity to tell a story of our culture and language. Regardless of planning a Dora theme or not, we can all use food as a channel to engage and enrich our guests. To make the celebration and the menu more personal, I suggest you look into what matters most to you, what makes you unique and what you want to share about it. In this case, it was all about representing a side of Little L’s background that is friendly, lively, colorful, vibrant, diverse and welcoming. I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and although that is what I am most proud of about my heritage, I realize Little L is going to grow up in a country where she will be mostly seen of Latino descent not just Dominican. So I incorporated a menu that was going to give a tour of the Americas including other Latin American countries and the U.S.

The idea was to use the menu as a map (Dora’s map) for guests to go around the party almost like on a scavenger hunt looking for dishes and food items listed on the map. The labels for the food served were written in español and in English. We encouraged guests to try to read and say terms they were not familiar with out loud, can you say ‘agua’?. This exercise became a fun part of the party and fostered great discussions and lots of learning from both sides. I think it’s an idea that can be applied to any party, so I want to share the menu I created for you to use at your next Dora or Latin inspired theme party.

In this HungryFoodLove post, I have included recipes, ideas and a printable PDF version of the map for you to download. Enjoy!

To check out Melissa’s post with a printable of the map mentioned above click here

Five years ago today, my husband and I brought Camila into this world. She was healthy as can be, active and awake from day one, and loved and taken care of with an obsession characteristic of first-time parents.

Every year she’s hit her milestones right on target and continues to mature into an intelligent, creative and loving girl. Every year on August 18th we celebrate her life with a party of some sorts — cake, a piñata, friends, games and plenty of gifts. What we never do is really and deeply recognize just how incredibly blessed we are to have these annual celebrations with her.

Until  now.

Thanks to Shot@Life and the United Nations Foundation, I’ve learned that, unlike my daughter, most children in developing countries never make it to celebrate their 5th birthday because they lack basic medical care and the routine vaccines that we have ready access to and may even, in radical cases, take for granted.

The exact and overwhelming figure would be that 1 in 5 children around the world lack access to life saving vaccines. In fact, immunization saves the lives of 2.5 million children every year.

To put the above statistics into perspective, it means that the number of kids that die every year from preventable diseases in developing countries is nearly equivalent to half the children entering kindergarten in the U.S.

Now that really brings it home for me because, not only is my daughter turning 5 today, but she’s also entering kindergarten on Monday. She’s one of the lucky ones around the world that has access to vaccines and has gotten to celebrate all her 5-years-of-life milestones.

Today I ask you to make your comments count and help me celebrate my daughter’s birthday. Help me create with this post a living testament that Camila’s 5th birthday will be one to be remembered, because the real gifts she receives will be your comments and the joy to know each one left here through the end of August will be matched with a $20 donation* — what it costs to give one child four life saving vaccines and help them on their way to celebrating their fifth birthday and first day of kindergarten.

Your comments in the last three and a half years have meant the world to me. You’ve been part of my girl’s evolution as a bilingual princesa. You’ve held my virtual hand when it’s gotten tough. We’ve laughed together at the nuances of our shared challenges. You’ve celebrated our triumphs. Now, I ask you to celebrate my daughter’s life with a comment and a shout out to your friends to join the party. A simple “Feliz Cumpleaños” left in the comments below will not only light up Camila’s face now and for the years to come when I show her this, but it will also become a $20 donation that will give one more kid a real Shot@Life.

You know we all like a good fiesta, let’s make this a huge and memorable one!

And if you want to make it even bigger, once you’ve commented here, head over to Jenny Eckton of Formerly Phread who passed the Blogust baton to me with her inspiring post “Help the Child, Help the Mother.” Then, follow the relay tomorrow over at Ilina Ewen’s blog, Dirt & Noise.  Every comment here, there and on all 31 posts until August 31st will count towards our goal. You will make it count.

¡Gracias!

*This post is inspired by Shot@Life, ​an initiative of the United Nations Foundation that educates, connects and empowers the championing of vaccines as one of the most cost-effective ways to save the lives of children in developing countries.

During Shot@Life’s Blogust: Blog Relay for Good, 31 bloggers, one each day in August, are writing about people from our communities who have inspired us. Every comment on this post and the 30 other posts will be matched with a $20 donation (up to a maximum of $200,000). That’s 10,000 comments. And 10,000 children. $20 is what it costs to give one child four life-saving vaccines to help protect them against measles, pneumonia, diarrhea and polio. A child dies every 20 seconds from a vaccine preventable disease. We can help stop this.

You can learn more about Shot@Life by joining their email list, following them on twitter or liking them on Facebook.

Want an easy way to share and help us reach our goal faster? Just click to tweet this:

Each comment @SpanglishBaby #Blogust post counts as $20 donation to give 1 child 4 life-saving vaccines @ShotAtLife http://bit.ly/Sz13jT

Editor’s note: In honor of Dora the Explorer’s 10th birthday this month, here’s a post we originally published back on October 29, 2009 based on an interview with the co-creator of the Latina character with whom so many of our niños identify. ¡Felicidades, Dora!

FYI: Be on the lookout for a pretty cool Dora giveaway coming up very soon on our Finds section!

Her original name was not Dora and Latina she was not.

More than 10 years ago and after working with outside creators to come up with new ideas, Nickelodeon’s Valerie Walsh Valdes and Chris Gifford were given the opportunity of a lifetime: to develop their own show. This is what they thought up: a show about a preschool girl who has a bunch of animal friends and goes exploring every day. Her name was Tess.

But the network’s executives had other ideas. They had just come back from a conference which dealt with the fact that Latinos were the most underrepresented minority on television. What to do about it? Convert ‘Tess’ into a bilingual Latina girl called Dora. The problem? Neither Gifford nor Walsh Valdes were bilingual. So they hired a Latino writer and several Latino-savvy consultants, including Spanish language experts, and Dora the Explorer was born.

“We wanted to give an authentic cultural identity to the character, but also to the world around her,” said Walsh Valdes, the co-creator and executive producer of both Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go.

Making the character a 7-year-old bilingual Latina was Nickelodeon’s response to the lack of positive Latino roles in the media.

“The idea was to make learning a second language appealing,” explained Walsh Valdes. “We were trying to make that [being bilingual] into a positive, something you should be proud of.”

But the idea was also to make Dora universally appealing.

“We didn’t want to alienate audiences who don’t speak another language, who are not bilingual,” said Walsh Valdes.

Which is the reason why Dora the Explorer is not really about teaching Spanish, it’s more about a little girl who goes on a different adventure in each show and happens to be bilingual in English and Spanish. However, since learning at this stage of a child’s life is something fun, the creators of the show definitely take advantage of that, according to Walsh Valdes.

Preschoolers are introduced to a new Spanish word or phrase which Dora uses repeatedly throughout each particular episode. Although Walsh Valdes said they’ve never “claimed to be teaching Spanish,” countless parents around the country credit Dora the Explorer with helping their children learn lots of vocabulary in Spanish.

The show is not only insanely popular in the U.S. – according to Nickelodeon, it’s the top preschool show on all of commercial television – but also at the international level. And it might have to do with the fact that bilingualism is a pretty normal way of growing up in most of the rest of the world.

“It’s not just kids who speak Spanish that identify with Dora,” explained Walsh Valdes. “Other bilingual kids see themselves in her.”

The co-creator of this show credits its unthinkable success to a couple of reasons. The first one is that each show presents “really great stories for that age group” – universal stories that appeal to preschoolers no matter their background. The second one is the “interactive” nature of the show. In other words, the fact that Dora always asks for the audience’s help so the adventure can move along, hence the short silent period right after a question is asked.

Although my daughter, Vanessa, didn’t really start “watching” TV until after she turned two – meaning it’s only been about a year – I have noticed how much more motivated she is to respond to Dora’s request now that she is a little older and has a larger vocabulary.

Gifting her daughter with bilingualism

Ironically, even though Walsh Valdes is not bilingual – despite taking four years of high school Spanish, as she says – she is raising her 2-year-old daughter to be, thanks to the creation of Dora the Explorer. Remember the Latino writer they hired back when Dora was being created? She married him. So now, thanks to her Cuban-born husband and their Latina nanny, Walsh Valdes is experiencing first-hand the amazing ability of children to learn two languages at once.

“I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m learning more from my daughter than I ever did in high school,” Walsh Valdez shared. “My husband says she is as verbal in Spanish as she is in English, which is amazing!”

Photo by AndrewEick

I absolutely love summer…for a lot of reasons, but mainly because my daughter is a summer baby which means we get to celebrate her cumpleaños outdoors in the melting heat (as opposed to indoors hiding from the snow.) In fact, both Vanessa and Camila were born pretty much in the middle of the summer, so both Ana and I will be celebrating their birthdays pretty soon.

This got me thinking about a little tradition we have at our house regarding the songs we sing when it’s someone’s birthday. It all started even way before Vanessa was born almost three years ago. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my husband is from Puerto Rico and I’m from Perú, which means we sing completely different songs when celebrating birthdays.

My version goes something like this (to the beat of Happy Birthday):

Cumpleaños feliz,

te deseamos a ti,

cumpleaños (fulanito),

qué los cumplas feliz!

My husband’s version has nothing to do with the original Happy Birthday song. It goes something like this:

Feliz, feliz en tu día

amiguito, que Dios te bendiga

que reine la paz en tu vida

y que cumplas muchos más

We always sing the traditional Happy Birthday and then since our friends are pretty much from all over South America, we kind of go around the table asking each one to sing their version. It takes a while, but it’s fun to hear everyone else’s interpretation.

And, even if there are no Mexicans in the house, we ALWAYS sing “Las Mañanitas“. One, because I like it and two because I spent part of my childhood in México and I just got used to it. In case you don’t know the lyrics to that one, here goes the first part:

Photo by JAG Photography

Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David

Hoy por ser día de tu santo, te las cantamos a ti.

Despierta mi bien despierta

Mira que ya ameneció

Ya los pajaritos cantan

La luna ya se metió.

If you want to know what other countries – not limited to South America – sing around the birthday cake, check this out. I thought it was pretty cool.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to cumpleaños…there’s the whole other topic of  the different names we have for the birthday “cake” in Spanish (pastel, torta, bizcocho, queque – for starters), as well as the different ways we actually celebrate one. So why don’t you please share your traditions with us so we can all learn something new