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 use the one-parent, one-language method at home. And though I didn’t go so far as to research it when my boys were born, we live in a major metropolitan area. I knew there were Spanish immersion schools around, and I just figured I’d look into them when the time came.

Then came the early autism diagnoses for both of my boys, who fortunately thrived in a wonderful, full-time special education preschool—Primo was there for two years, Secondo for three. I trusted the teachers and staff there completely, and the idea of leaving the school and venturing into an LRE (Least Restrictive Environment) setting in a regular public school absolutely terrified me. When the time came to think about transitioning to kindergarten a year ago, it was a Very Big Deal.

And when that time came, one year ago, I thought again about looking into our local Spanish immersion schools, but it turned out our (monolingual) home school had an excellent reputation when it came to special education. And my priorities were completely shaken up, and I knew that there was absolutely no contest. I want my children to be bilingual, to be sure. But good special education services are crucial. Those services have made a world of difference in their lives, have helped them make such unbelievable progress early on, when it is so important.

I didn’t even look into the Spanish immersion schools.

This week, my boys will be done with kindergarten. Despite some significant challenges early on and a few adjustments, they have both done beautifully. At their last IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting a couple of months ago, special education services for both of them were scaled back significantlly, and it was a move we all agreed with. I could not be happier with how well they’ve done in school, and though they face plenty of social challenges, they are in a good place, with good people and great support.

Where does this leave them when it comes to their Spanish? I am happy to say that even after a year in an all-English school (plus aftercare), they still easily default to speaking to me in Spanish. The day may come when they will rebel, but it hasn’t happened yet. I can tell that the gaps in their vocabulary in Spanish — about the solar system, the life cycle of a plant — are becoming more pronounced, due to all the English they get at school, but they constantly ask me how to say things in Spanish and we either look things up in the dictionary or find a book on the subject in Spanish. They go to a community Spanish school on Saturdays, and I teared up at the acto de clausura as they danced onstage to El condor pasa, a little lost in the choreography but willing to be led by the more tuned-in little girls in their class.

We received a survey from the school to fill out and return the other day. Primo, who leaves nothing unread, found it on the table. “What language is spoken in the home?” he read. Then he turned to me. Mama, ¡en casa hablamos inglés Y español! he proclaimed gleefully.

Proudly, I would say.

{Photo via: US Department of Education}

Secondo’s days of excessive repetitive motions involving toy vehicles are for the most part over, but he still has a tremendous passion for airplanes, buses, cars and trucks. The centerpiece of the boys’ room is a rug made up of an intricate design of roads, runways and parking spaces. It gets a lot of use, so I finally remember to throw it in the washing machine one day. I hang it up to dry, though, and forget to bring it back in.

Secondo, of course, notices immediately when we go into the bedroom to start our bedtime routine. Mama, he asks, ¿dónde está la…?—a pause as he struggles to remember the word–¿carpe–? And although usually I’m gentle when correcting mistakes, this time I interrupt him before he can even get the whole word out, because I know where this is going and he’s about to be guilty of using my biggest pet peeve ever. ¡No! I yelp. ¡Se dice alfombra! No se dice carpeta.

Secondo looks at me, surprised. No se dice carpeta, he repeats, bemusedly. And then I decide that as long as I’ve come this far, I might as well go all the way. I pull his homework folder out of his backpack. Esto es carpeta, I tell him, faux sternly. I point at the rug I’ve put back on the floor. Eso es alfombra.

And then, they both start to laugh. For about the next fifteen minutes, they laugh so hard they can hardly get the words out. ¡Carpeta es folder! ¡Rug es alfombra! ¿Cómo se dice rug? ¿Cómo se dice folder? They find the whole thing hilarious, and I’m laughing as hard as they are.

We’ve talked about Spanglish before. Hey, ¡estás hablando Spanglish! I’ll say, if they make up a word. I’ll use it with them in fun, sometimes. Eso está full. Vamos pa’ la house. And my favorite, the one I grew up using, ¡let’s gómonos! To which they’ll reply, laughing, Mama, eso es Spanglish.

Language is flexible and ever changing. Language is fun, and learning two languages means you have so much more to play with. We talk about what things mean, and other ways to say them, and how English and Spanish are different. They’re still deep in their questioning phase, constantly asking me how to say things in Spanish. I want them to remain curious about language. I want them always to have fun with it.  But I could not let the carpeta incident slide.

And while I was at it, I told Primo that actualmente does not mean “actually.”

{Photo By Robert Brook}

photo by Barkaw

They’re much milder now, but my boys’ speech delays were so very pervasive for the longest time. We went from no speech to echolalia (our own speech parroted back to us) to practicing simple requests over and over and over.  I was always somewhat amazed by other children their age when I heard them speaking on the playground, stringing together such complex thoughts so effortlessly. A friend of mine, whose daughter is two years younger than my sons, once asked me if I was tired of all the constant “why, why, why” questions. She was stunned when I replied that neither Primo nor Secondo had ever asked me a question, ever.

Not surprisingly, asking questions was made a goal in both of their IEPs (Individualized Education Programs). The questions did start coming, when they were about 5 years old. Simple ones, at first. Then Secondo began asking, ¿por qué? every time I said anything at all to him—I think he just loved the novelty of asking. And if I did start to get annoyed by all the questions, I would breathe, bite my tongue, and remember how I’d longed for this day.

The newest question, one they both ask many times a day now, is: ¿Cómo se dice? I think this is largely due to school. As their world expands, as they learn new things, as they are able to express themselves better, they have more and more to say, and not enough words to say it all—at least, not in Spanish, because they’re learning it in English. They’ve remained remarkably consistent about only speaking to me in Spanish, and they will happily chat with me about their day, in Spanish. But they struggle with the vocabulary and often stop, mid-sentence, to ask, ¿Cómo se dice field trip? ¿Cómo se dice pencil sharpener? Frost. Reindeer. Holiday. Sorting. The list of words they want to know how to say goes on and on. Sometimes the ¿cómo se dice? questions come at me so quickly that I despair—it feels like I’m bailing out a sinking ship with a paper cup.

They look to me to fill in the gaps, and I do the best I can. When I can’t, we often look things up together. They love that I have a bilingual dictionary right on my phone and that we can look words up at home on the computer, and I’m hoping that the technology angle makes it seem cool and not tedious.

For now, we continue to play games in Spanish and read books, the best way I can think of to build vocabulary. And I am grateful that they still have so much fun with the language, are so eager to learn and ask questions about it, and hope it’s a long, long time before it seems like a chore.

Editor’s note: They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so this holiday season we asked all of our regular contributors – we’re up to nine! – to just send us a photo that expresses what the holidays mean to them for this collection of Bicultural Christmas Photos. What kind of photo would you have sent in?

{Photo by: Renato Ganoza}

¨Hurry up and put your shoes on,¨ I tell my son, “or you’re going to be late for Spanish school.”

He stops fidgeting and looks up at me with a big grin. “Mama, did you know that for some kids Saturday isn’t a school day? For some kids, Saturday is a Mommy and Daddy day.”

*************

We’ve made the decision to enroll the boys in Spanish school on Saturdays. Like most parents who are raising bilingual children, I worry about the constant barrage of English they get at school–and after school–now that they’re in kindergarten. Though there is a dual-language immersion program in our area, that wasn’t an option for us, so I looked into Saturday classes and found two programs. One was an extremely reputable school with formal ties to Latin American ministries of education and an incredible curriculum–and it completely intimidated me. The very thought of putting my autistic children in a strict, Latin American-style program where they would be expected to do dictados and the like made me hyperventilate a little. Tuition was also expensive–what if it didn’t work out? And the place was far away.

The second school is, in a nutshell, smaller, laid-back (to the point of being a little chaotic), much cheaper, and ten minutes from my ouse. I knew the program would not be nearly as rigorous, but I was fine with making that tradeoff.  Really, all I want is for my sons to have some kind of regular exposure to Spanish that doesn’t involve me, that involves native Spanish speakers from different countries, and this fit the bill quite nicely. So I took them over on registration day, chatted with the staff and wrote a check.

I then talked it up to my boys.  How cool, you get to go to two different schools. And one of them is in Spanish. I joked with friends that it would all be fine until they figured out that not everyone goes to school on Saturdays, or that the boy across the street goes to karate class on Saturday mornings instead. I just didn’t expect the gig would be up so soon.

*************

My son’s comment catches me by surprise.  I feel a swift pang of guilt, and wonder if I should agonize over our decision.  I’m adding another morning of school to what is already a packed school week during the big transition to kindergarten.  They’ll be going to school instead of, say, swimming lessons. I don’t want to over-schedule them. But my son’s entire comment was in Spanish, except for the phrase Mommy and Daddy day, which leads me to believe that’s something he’s picked up at school. His statement was simply a statement of fact, not anything that should send me packing on a guilt trip.

So my boys and I sit down and have a little talk, during which, basically, they tell me that they like Spanish school because they get to have juice boxes and cheese curls during snack time. That’s good enough for me. I tell them we will have plenty of Mommy time later, and indeed, we spend the entire glorious autumn afternoon outdoors, in the bounce house at our local Fall Festival and then at the park on a playdate with a friend. And I look forward to many such fun Saturday afternoons this fall. But for now, on Saturdays at nine o’clock, it’s time for Spanish school.

{Photo by: respre}

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 shoulders as we came to the conclusion that Primo was already receiving exactly the services he needed. On the way home, I was mostly fixated on the idea of stopping for banh mi at my favorite Vietnamese place—I was hungry. His diagnosis didn’t really change anything at all.

One diagnosis, two very different little boys. One loves airplanes, pretends he is an airplane, turns every inanimate object he comes across into an airplane. One is never far from his magnetic drawing board so that he can quiz me on equivalent fractions, and asks me about prime numbers immediately upon waking, bleary eyed, first thing in the morning.

Sometimes it’s hard to separate the autism from what is simply typical. When I talk about something like Secondo and the airplanes, invariably someone will say, “Oh, my kid does that all the time.” And sometimes, hearing that is a relief. It’s a little reality check, and it reminds me that it’s not always all about the autism. Other times that comment annoys me, because I just know it’s not the same—I feel like mostly, I can tell when my boys are displaying what is just average behavior for a 5-year-old and when autism is rearing its head. And sometimes I wonder and just feel like my grasp on things is tenuous at best, because both of my boys have autism and how would I even know what is typical and what isn’t?

Rigidity is one of the hallmarks of autism, and we’ve dealt with that in many forms. (I know, what parent hasn’t?) Primo has a particularly hard time with this. If he remembers at bedtime that he didn’t have a morning snack, he falls apart. If his teacher is supposed to arrive for a home visit at 8:15 and is two minutes late, it drives him to tears (and we work on learning the meaning of the word “approximately”). If I say we turn the computer off at five, we turn it off at five, on the dot.

I was not prepared to see this inflexibility affect his bilingualism, but lately, it has. We use the One-Parent, One-Language method at home, and while I’ve talked to him about the fact that he speaks Spanish with me and English with his father, it’s simply been a note of explanation. I’ve never laid down the law or refused to speak or read to him in English. But he is increasingly fascinated by rules. Yo hablo en español contigo y en inglés con Daddy. He’s taken to repeating our informal rule over and over. It comforts him, my little boy who likes it when there is order in the world.

But then I decide to say something like, “Hey, buddy, time to go inside,” when he is riding his scooter with the little boy who lives across the street—and he is distraught. Mama, ¿por qué hablaste en inglés? There is wailing, crying, and suddenly I have a full-fledged tantrum on my hands. And I simply provide him with another note of explanation. Sometimes we speak English to be polite, because we want our friends to be able to understand what we’re saying.

We go to Costa Rica, and his Spanish skills soar. But when we call his father back home, Primo refuses to talk to him. En Costa Rica, solo hablo español, no hablo inglés. He is so committed to this rule that indeed, he does not talk to his father for the entire month. I worry for a while that when we get back he will refuse to speak to me in Spanish on the grounds that he only speaks English in the United States, and am relieved when that doesn’t happen.

Autism is very much a part of my life. Some aspects of it can be excruciatingly hard to deal with. In many ways, it has changed my life—for the better. Mostly, it is simply a part of who my boys are and it’s impossible for me to imagine a life without it. One of my favorite quotes is by Dr. Hans Asperger, who said, “It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.” It’s not essential for learning a second language, I’m sure. But right now, Primo’s autism seems to be offering him a slight advantage. And if that’s the case, hey, I’ll take it.

{Photo courtesy of Kim Lane}

I’m sitting here writing this post from my mother’s home in Costa Rica, on what is our third annual summer trip here. Our plan is to keep coming for one month every year, and I’ve been curious to see what changes I might see year to year as my children get older. Yet, as I reread the post I wrote this time last year I had to laugh because everything I wrote then applies this year, too — I almost feel like I could have just hit copy/paste and been done with it.

The short version: There was family. Friends. Good food. Soccer. Lots of TV shows in Spanish. And that just about sums it up for this year, too. Our routine is the same, the people are the same, the television shows are the same, which is actually very soothing and relaxing.

But some things are different, too. Some of the changes are subtle, so it’s taken some reflecting on my part to put my finger on what’s different from last year.

• This time around both of my boys were so excited about the trip they could hardly stand it.  I started to talk about it one month before we came, which in hindsight was a little too early because that was all they could talk about and I had to remind them every day that we were not leaving for Costa Rica until the end of June.  (It was a loooong month.)

• For the first time, I’ve felt like my boys really needed the trip this year. For all the Spanish they got at home during their first three years, they’ve just finished their third year of preschool and the constant exposure to English shows. English really is their first language now, and although they used to speak some Spanish to each other they rarely do so anymore. Though I was expecting this to be the case, I must admit I was starting to a little antsy and was counting the days until July so we could focus on all Spanish, all the time.

{Photo courtesy of Kim Lane}

• This time, they remember things from last year. We did a lot of talking about the upcoming trip beforehand, but I was surprised by how much they remembered once we got here: my mother’s house number, my brother’s car, the name of the grocery store. When we headed to the grocery store, they made a beeline for their beloved néctar de pera (that stuff is like a drug). They remembered the television channel they watch and their favorite shows, and I love knowing that all of these little things have taken up residence in their memories.

• I’m hanging back a bit more. Back home, there’s always a plan when it comes to working on the boys’ speech and social skills, details that are hammered out in their Individualized Education Program, ideas we discuss with our psychiatrist, and they all involve a lot of parental participation, modeling appropriate behavior and language and the like. And while it’s all useful and necessary, it can be exhausting. Here, I’m more relaxed. I watch as Secondo makes the rounds in the shallow swimming pool and chats people up, and though my inclination is to go help him out or at least get close enough to hear what he’s saying, I stay where I am. The other day I took him for a haircut and heard him adamantly inform the barber, ¡No! ¡No me gustan las tijeras! I decided to let him take care of that one himself — I don’t know exactly how, but my stubborn Secondo met his match in the barber, and they worked it out on their own.

And finally, they’ve gotten to know their family better. The first couple of trips here, back in the days of limited eye contact and little speech, the boys often came across as quite aloof, even to family. Now, the autism and speech delays mean that my boys can have a hard time expressing how they feel and they often have a unique way of expressing themselves when they try.

This morning, though, there was no mistaking Secondo’s sobbing as his relatives piled in the car to leave and then pulled away: Vengan aquí, por favor. Yo quiero que vengan conmigo, por favor. Me gusta que estén aquí, por favor. And then, to me, a perfectly constructed statement: Estoy triste porque no estoy con mi familia.

And I promised him the only thing I could, that they’ll be back, that we’ll be back.

I use Skype all the time to keep in touch with relatives. My kids have several keepsake audiobooks from grandparents on their shelves. I travel for work and am often in a different time zone, so I can’t talk to my kids before bedtime. So the offerings from Be There Bedtime Stories sounded like they were right up my alley.

The product is simple but very cool. Go to their site, pick a story (mostly geared towards children ages 3-8, and some stories are in Spanish). Using your webcam, record yourself reading the story. Send the link to your loved ones, and Skype-style, you will appear in the upper part of the screen, the book below, pages flipping automatically as you read.

It was all very simple to set up, and a glitch was easily resolved thanks to the user-friendly help section. Recording the story was a lot of fun, and my boys, who were watching, got a huge kick out of it (and wanted to record their own stories, which would be nice for the grandparents). My favorite part about the whole experience, though, was that not only can you preview parts of the books, once you register online you can go through the entire process of recording a story (or two, ahem) and are not charged until you are completely satisfied and ready to e-mail the link to someone.

At $9.99 per book, the price certainly seemed reasonable. As reasonable as those keepsake audiobooks that I love in theory, but that my children find frustrating when they don’t work. I think they would find having a story read to them on the computer to be a novel idea, and let’s face it, even though they’re still only five, they’re quite computer-savvy already.

Photo credit: allspice1

Sometimes it sounds like the ideal way to make absolutely sure that your children will grow up speaking Spanish: Hey, let’s move to Latin America. Spanish immersion!  Problem solved. Except, of course, it’s not a simple thing to do. There are jobs, families, schooling to consider. Not to mention the fact that if it’s a long-term move, then you shift to worrying about your children keeping up with their English. I can honestly say that it’s not an option for my family, period, for a long list of reasons.

My parents, however, made that move when I was eight. And at first, it was brutal. They started a small business, which took a while to get off the ground. My father took another job. My mother confessed to me years later that she would gaze at airplanes flying overhead and cry. Mostly, I thought it was a big adventure, but there was definitely some major culture shock.

My brother and I went to three different schools in the first three years. And kids proceeded to tease me mercilessly—often about my accent. Though I spoke Spanish when we arrived, it was definitely not my dominant language, and my nickname was Gringa. I particularly remember a time when the girls in my class would come up to me repeatedly and ask me to say borrador, because I couldn’t roll my r’s worth a darn.

I still occasionally get a good-natured ribbing from my Latin American colleagues about my inability to roll my r’s, and since I’m older, wiser and no longer in high school, I can laugh about it and it’s all in good fun.  But when it comes to real teasing, or mean comments about someone’s accent, I have no patience for that. Neither did my father. He had a very thick American accent, but his Spanish was excellent. He regularly read El Código del Trabajo in his office, he read two major Costa Rican papers every day and was my go-to guy when I wanted in-depth information on current events. Whenever someone made a snarky comment about his accent, he would flat-out tell them they were being rude.

I hadn’t thought much about my children’s accents until our last trip to Costa Rica. I had never, ever noticed that when Primo says sí, he pronounces it “sí-a.” The (older) children of a family friend picked up on it immediately and couldn’t let it go. Why does he say it that way? Has he always said it that way? Listen, he said it again. I tried to provide gentle explanations. That’s just how he says it. His teachers and friends at school speak English.

I guess it’s never been an issue here. The way I see it, if my boys grow up speaking Spanish fluently, I’ll be thrilled—who cares about their accent? Since Spanish is the minority language here, most people find the fact that my boys can speak it kind of charming. Their accent will be a part of who they are, just as my accent is a part of who I am, of my upbringing, my circumstances, my life experience.

If they’re teased about it, I suppose I’ll deal with it the way I did with my friend’s kids, by taking the chance to explain and educate. Or I could follow the example of my master teacher when I was a student teacher in her sixth-grade class. One of the English speakers in the class made a comment about one of the Spanish speakers, who hadn’t learned too much English yet. The teacher took him to task, and concluded by saying, “When YOU learn to speak two languages, THEN you can tease him about his accent. How’s that?”

Amen.

So I did, and so far, they do.  We have books on our shelves, on the floor, on the couch, in our beds.  So when I received a Scholastic “Storybook Treasures” DVD set, (My First Collection Featuring Splat the Cat), I was quite curious, and I must admit that my main question was, this looks nice, but why watch the DVD when you can read the book?  (And my feelings about “screen time” really have nothing to do with it–some days we watch several hours of TV around here, other times we go a week or two without watching at all).

Here’s the thing about reading, though, that I didn’t realize when my children were infants and I was purchasing books left and right.  Reading, in our household, has taken many forms in the past five-and-a-half years.  When my boys were babies, I had a captive audience, as I would read to them when they were in their cribs.  As they’ve grown, we’ve gone through phases when we’ve read for at least an hour before bedtime.  Other times my boys are too busy playing with their trains or engaging in whatever their current favorite activity is, and I don’t force the issue.  Right now they get stories at bedtime, but they’re not read by me.  My advanced reader wants to read them all by himself.  My emerging reader does, too, and I listen as he points at the text in a story and more or less invents his own story based on the book.

We watched the DVDs over a few days, starting with “The Napping House,” one of our favorite stories ever.  The words to the story were lit up at the bottom of the screen (an option you can turn on or off), and we listened to the story being narrated with pleasant music in the background (in most instances, I found the narration and the background music to be just right).  “The Napping House” had no animation, just close-ups of the beautiful artwork from the story at the appropriate times.  Other stories were animated (though the animation was usually low-key).  I found I preferred the older stories with no animation, but my children didn’t seem to care.

There is a good combination of old and new stories in the set.  It was nice to see the familiar ones included, and my boys were intrigued by the new ones (my own favorite was “Duck on a Bike,” by David Shannon).  They were more taken by the stories than I expected.  When we watched made a difference, though–I played one DVD one afternoon while I puttered around and they were easily distracted by all the other things there were to do on a beautiful Friday afternoon.  But then we spent one evening curled up on the couch as we watched some of the stories together, and I’d argue that that’s just how they were meant to be watched–together.  My  boys were full of spontaneous remarks–¡Pajaritos!  ¡Mira, mariposas!  ¡Un señor tocando un tambor!–much like they are when we read together.

One of the bonus features is a Spanish-language version of “The Story of Ping,” which I was really excited about watching.  I thought both the narration and the translation of the story were lovely, though I was disappointed that captioning was not an option when playing the version in Spanish.  Also, watching it only made me want more–if there were an entire set of stories available in Spanish, I’d snap it up in a heartbeat.

I do like that you can watch the whole DVD, or just one or two stories at a time (each story is about ten minutes long), to suit any attention span.  The series is aimed at children aged 2 to 6, and at five-and-a-half, I agree that my boys will outgrow it soon–the perfect age group might be more like 2 to 5.

While this DVD set will never be a substitute for reading stories together, I could easily see a place for it in our household as a nice complement to our traditional bedtime stories, despite my initial skepticism.  The music and narration are so soothing, just right for bedtime, the stories are a nice antidote to some of the shows we usually watch, and I can see us re-watching these upstairs, under the covers, while I sit back with a cup of tea. 

THE GIVEAWAY!

One winner will receive a Scholastic Storybook Treasures: My First Collection, Featuring Splat the Cat.

To enter just leave a comment telling us which of the 14 stories in the collection are you most excited about watching. You can go here to check out the full list.

That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):

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This giveaway ends Sunday, May 22nd at midnight EST and is open to everyone over 18 years of age.  Check out the Giveaway Rules.

Disclosure: We received a copy for review purposes. All opinions are our own.