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Gracias Por El Turkey

11/26/09

SAPPINESS ADVISORY: If you have a history of adverse reactions to excessive sentimentality, consult your doctor before reading on. I love Thanksgiving! For me, as an immigrant, Thanksgiving is the most meaningful and enjoyable of all festivities in this country (even if I’m forced to watch football to prove my masculinity: “Go Yankees!…oh, wait..“). The act of giving thanks for the bounty that this land continues to offer not only its native sons and daughters but also those who come searching for their individual version of the American Dream is a very special and beautiful ritual. And even though every year I have to refresh my memory on the history of Thanksgiving (thanks, Wikipedia!), and even though the history between white Americans and American…

Categories: Reflections

Spanglish

11/18/09

Americans think it’s the funniest thing to mock-speak Spanish by just adding an “o” to the end of English words (e.g. “take me in your el truck-o to the next el town-o”). And guess what? My sons are Americans so it’s kind of naive to expect any different from them. It must be something in the water… Come to think of it, Colombians are just as bad — we add “ation” to the end of Spanish words to turn them into English ones (e.g. amigo (friend) = “amigation”) I’m kidding, of course. What I want to share is simply the dreaded reappearance of Spanglish in my boy Gabriel’s vernacular. In earlier posts I wrote about how very early on, when he was just beginning…

Categories: Questions, Trivial Occurrences

Big Beard

11/16/09

I’ve often wondered if my children, by virtue of hearing me speak English to their mother and other, non-Spanish speaking relatives, will somehow adopt my sultry and exotic accent into their own English. But it never occurred to me that the same could happen as a result of other influences (and without sultriness). Gabriel and I were paging through a picture book the other day when he started talking excitedly about something called “big beard’ (this, he said in English). In my confusion, I assumed we had just flipped through a page featuring a venerable bearded man or a totally awesome pirate, so I flipped back to the previous page, but found no examples of such fellows. My boy, however, returned excited to his…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Papá’s Thing

11/14/09

There is nothing more endearing and amusing than the candor of a child. And some times, there is nothing more embarrassing. We have been trying for months to potty train our boy Gabriel but it’s been a slow go and though we’re not in any particular rush, we’re trying everything we can to make the experience, if nothing else, not a completely traumatic one. The other day, it occurred to me that if I sit in the adult potty (i.e. toilet, for those readers over 5) as we’re having him practice going in his potty chair, my boy might feel more encouragement to follow suit. And being the compulsively honest person that I am, I felt like I should exemplify an experience as close…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences