Aliens No More!

I'm proud to announce that Emily and I are now PERMANENT residents of the UK (That's us with our visas in the photo). I'm blogging about it b/c I want the world to know! It has been a gruelling process, I must admit. My husband and I are both very relieved it's over. We are truly a multicultural family! One wouldn't think there would be that many, if any, cultural differences between an American and a Brit but believe me there are (including language)!

Our ultimate goal will be to acquire British passports which is the last and final step in our immigration process. I look forward to the day when Bunny, Emily, Leyla and I can all go through the same immigration line at the airport in London - the one that reads "EU Residents Only"!

"Does Leyla say any words?" is a common question I'm encountering from friends and family, almost, I hate to admit, daily. Each time I'm asked this, I doubt my decision to raise my children bilingually more and more.  One person even went so far as to imply that if I had only been speaking English to Leyla for the passed 16 months she would be saying more at this point!

It's intimidating enough when we are out in public in our monolingual society to consistently speak Spanish to Leyla but now I feel as if everyone is watching to see her development!

According to what I've read, a 15-month old should have a vocabulary of 3-6 words. Leyla's vocabulary consists of: gato (cat), agua (water), mama, dada, baba (which I think is supposed to be her pronunciation for "biberon" - bottle), mas (more), no and bye.

Consequently we have a total of 8 words; 3-4 Spanish, 2 universal ("mama"and "no") and 2 English ("dada" and "bye)". So really, she is ahead of the game with 8 words.

The bottom line is I'm not concerned about Leyla's language development, I'm concerned about Emily's. I can provide Leyla with a language rich environment each day by not only speaking to her but reading, singing and sometimes watching tele in Spanish. But I can't provide the same for Emily.

Why? Probably because Emily has no interest in singing "Brilla, Brilla, Estrelllita" (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star), nor does she want to read La Oruga Muy Hambrienta (The Very Hungry Caterpillar) or Buenas Noches, Luna (Goodnight, Moon) and she DEFINITELY does not want to watch El Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street) in Spanish.

I'm also fairly certain Emily is not interested in Spanish b/c I overheard her ask her friend yesterday if she was taking German. When her friend replied, "yes", Emily retorted with, "I wish I was taking German it looks so fun! Spanish is so boring."

I could not believe my own flesh and blood would prefer to learn German over Spanish!!

After I pulled the dagger out of my heart I realized I had a very important and challenging task in front of me; motivating my eleven year-old to WANT to learn Spanish.

I hate to admit it but I fear she may have peaked over the summer. Now that we are back into our routine, I find myself using less and less Spanish with Emi and lazily falling back into English.

The task that lies ahead is a challenging one, but hey, I love a challenge! Achtung!

En el café

En el café

In my desperate attempt to get out of the house this morning after being on house arrest for three days due to Leyla’s illness, we meandered across the street to Sainsburys, one of our local supermarkets.

Before buying the one very important item we went to Sainsbury’s for, I decided to go to the “café”[1] in Sainsbury’s to fill up on caffeine and cake.

While munching and laughing, here is the vocabulary that Leyla and I used during our little outing:

La Magdalena (the muffin)

      El café con leche (coffee with milk)

La servilleta (the napkin)

                        El plato (the plate)

                         La mesa (the table)

la silla (the chair)

Research shows that in order to commit a vocabulary word to long-term memory you must listen to, see, hear and/or repeat it 80-100 times. Fortunately for us that means many more café trips!

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[1] I use the term “café” loosely here as it is in the supermarket therefore completely devoid of any “café” ambiance

Summer Holiday

October is upon us, summer has come and gone, our trip to America has become a distant memory and I can't believe this is my first blog in two months!

Welcome to my new (and hopefully improved) blog (thank you Emily for the name) where I'm 110% dedicated to blogging about raising my two beautiful girls bilingually, as a non-native speaker of Spanish (almost forgot to mention that).

I had big plans this summer on the language front. They were the following: Emily and Leyla would be immersed in total Spanish due to the fact that not only would I only be speaking Spanish to both girls, we would be in America and be surrounded by a wealth of Spanish.

In addition, my mother, a native speaker of Czech, would only speak Czech to the girls. Consequently, we would return to England with two trilingual daughters.

Of course this didn't happen. Nor did we come close. Obviously 7 weeks of language exposure  was not nearly enough.

However, what did emerge were the following sentences constructed by Emily, in Spanish:

Leyla, ven acá (Leyla come here)

Estamos aquí (we're here)
Estas cansada (you're tired)
Tu eres muy mal (you are very bad/naughty)
Tu es diablo, which later became, tu eres un diablo (you are a devil)
Dale un beso (give her a kiss)
Dame un beso (give me a kiss)

And my proudest moment was when she put together this sentence: tu chupete es muy mal (your pacifier/dumby is very bad).

Granted, Emily's Spanish sentences are not all grammatically correct, (nor courteous) however, she makes me proud!