This was an actual conversation between Edgar and I. We had just finished raiding all of the clearance racks at Target – we always do; we can’t leave the store without doing so – when a kid about his age walked by us talking in perfect Spanish to another child. […]
bilingual
Raising a Bilingual Kid: “Can You Súbele Un Poquito Please?”
Every time we get in the car it’s almost always guaranteed that Edgar will utter this phrase: Can you súbele un poquito please? He’s been doing so for as long as I can remember, and until just this past weekend, I had never even really though about it. I’ll admit, usually […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: Television En Español
Just the other day we were sitting at my parents house watching Sal y Pimienta. If you’re not familiar, it’s one of those wickedly addicting and hilarious celebrity gossip shows that Univision airs regularly on their national network. They’re hilarious because the hosts and guests on the show spend the […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: Easy, Breezy – Fact or Fiction?
My parents never pressured us to be bilingual. We had to be… because our worlds took place in English and Spanish. At home mamá y papá would not understand us if we used our English. In school, even though most us kids spoke Spanish, we just preferred el inglés to […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: Teaching the Value of a Dollar
El dinero cuesta. Hay que ganarse la vida. If money didn’t grow on trees, it certainly didn’t grow on anything else near our home at least. No matter how hard my parents worked we never seemed to have enough of this green currency to go around. Our life was a […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: ‘One Doesn’t Last Forever’
My mother used to say uno no va durar para siempre all the time when we were kids. It was one of those signature lines that we all knew by heart and all rolled our eyes at every time it slipped out of her mouth. We were young and as […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: Getting Your Kids to Buy Into español
He tries. He really does. We all do. It’s become an entire family effort to maintain Edgar’s bilingual skills. Even more so to ensure he is fluent in Spanish. Inevitably, as much as we try to avoid it, we always end up talking to him in English instead of Spanish. […]
Raising a Bilingual Kid: Time Out vs Chancletazo
As children we did not know there was such a thing as time out. Instead, we knew that when mamá or papá gave us that look we had better stop doing whatever it was we were doing, or else. The or else could have been anything from un manotazo, to […]