Posts from the “Trivial Occurrences” Category

Get Smart

03/28/12

Referring to the inherent difficulty of managing multiple languages in your brain: “But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.“ – ‘Why Bilinguals are Smarter‘, The New York Times, March 18, 2012. Had I known about the whole “brain resolving internal conflict” part earlier, I would have started learning a third language years ago and saved hundreds of dollars in copays to my therapist (damn you, Dr. Carlson!). But let’s not go dark so quickly into the post. Many fellow writers in the bilingual upbringing blogosphere have written thoughtfully and eloquently about this and other articles that…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

The Bluff

03/14/12

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” – Confucius You must learn to see opportunity in every time every time your assumptions are challenged and life turns the tables on you. Oh, I just realized I made a typo on that last sentence–I meant wife turns the tables on you. For the four and a half years my beautiful bride and I have been parents, I’ve been following the tacit plan that our children will go to a Spanish immersion school. As a non-stereotypical male who’s not, however, free of a few stereotypically male traits, my modus operandi when it comes to big decisions about…

Categories: Questions, Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Still Going

03/07/12

It’s been months since my last blog entry. I’ve made many mental and electronic notes about our evolution as a young bilingual family and I hope that those notes will, one day in the not-so-distant future (i.e. 3/9/12), evolve into a coherent account of our learning and our happy evolution in the midst of the crazy experience that’s parenting. For now, I give you this anecdote, which might give you a sense of the current state of things: Last Saturday morning, I was in the bathroom looking in the mirror at my happiness-worn, leathery face when I heard my boys speaking with each other at the dinning room table in what sounded like Spanish. Trying to avoid spoiling such rare interaction (the boys speak…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

He Said, She Said

08/05/11

With immigrant families, one hears all the time about children translating for their non-English-speaking parents or grandparents. In our bilingual, bicultural household this paradigm doesn’t apply cuz I talk English real okay and my mother doesn’t live in the USA (that rhyme could be in a Violent Femmes song). But with two languages flying around all the time, and with three people (my wife and my two boys) developing their bilingual skills (my skills are on the decline on account of my tired, aging brain and having misplaced my Omega-3s), one should expect a certain amount of translation going on (i.e. me torturing my boys, drill sergeant style, when they use English words with me). Recently, I was sitting at the dinning room table,…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Monitoring

06/16/11

In the era of warrantless wiretapping, geo-location tracking, and 24/7 electronic surveillance, why should the Gonzalez household provide its youngest dwellers with any form of privacy? Especially when the surveillance not only alerts us when the mocosos are playing instead of sleeping so we can yell at them from the bottom of the steps, but also makes us privy to cute and tender moments between brothers? Early one morning a couple of weeks ago, before the damn sun began to rise at 5:00 AM and screw up our boys’ biological clocks and ruin our lives, my wife heard the following exchange between Gabe (our older son) and Sam (our younger son) coming from the baby monitor in their bedroom: Gabe: Sam, you’re my best…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Chicken Soup for the Soul (but don’t throw away the head….or the feet)

06/15/11

This post is not for the squeamish or the narrow-minded: Still reading? Ok: Chickens are cute for about two days after they’re born. Then they start becoming these gnarly little monsters with red flaps of wrinkly skin dangling from the sides and top of their stupid tiny heads. That’s why we must pay homage to the first human who (one would have to assume, in the midst of a hallucinogenic trip) decided to take one of these winged monsters and combine it with some boiling hot water, a smidgen of salt, cilantro and oregano, a couple of potatoes and green plantains, and gave mankind the wondrous invention that is sancocho. Yum. But you know who really loves chickens? My mother. She loves them so much indeed (was it love…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

In Google We Trust (Or Used To)

04/24/11

I have been accused in the past of sounding confident and convincing, even when I don’t know what I’m talking about (there are a few examples in a blog I write called “Love, Translated”). But Google has me beat. (Note to Google, the search engine: Please don’t take this personally and don’t lower my ranking as punishment for the criticism…you know I love you) With its new, ridiculously fast and user-friendly Google Translate app for the iPhone, Google seemed to bring our family into a new era of complete and uninterrupted language learning where the language gaps that I wrote about here and here and here would become a thing of the past. But would it hurt Google’s standing as the world’s preeminent maker…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Juggling

04/20/11

The frequent reader might find a recurring ball theme running through this blog – lots of ball analogies, several mentions of my boys saying the word “ball” only in English initially, not to mention the fact that three out of the four protagonists of these stories are male (the oldest being the most juvenile). And here I go again: Raising bilingual children is a serious juggling act; a joyous challenge of commitment and focus where I nervously try not to drop any balls. Here’s the new ball I’ve been barely keeping in the air these days: In addition to feeling obligated to teach my children each and every one of the 88,431 words logged in Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language,…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Dinosaurs

02/15/11

Albertosaurus, I can manage. T-Rex, a slam dunk and pretty much the baddest of bad asses. Stegosaurus and Triceratops begin to push it a bit. Quetzalcoatlus? Forget it, I give up. I postulate (based solely on anecdotal evidence) that childhood obsession with dinosaurs is a quintessentially American thing. To a Colombian parent trying to raise his children bilingually, this obsession makes for hours of educational entertainment, but it’s also a huge linguistical challenge (“Hypsilophodon”, really? cut a guy some slack!). Not only do I have to read out loud these mouthfuls to my kid about a hundred times a day, but I have to pause and face this ethical dilemma: Do I bother to figure out the Spanish names for these creatures, beyond the…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

When You’re Strange (Faces Come Out of the Rain)

02/13/11

Being weird is cool and fashionable. By the way, I was into pretending I was weird waaaaay before it became cool. Is that weird? Good. The thing is: being stuck between cultures and languages will inevitably make you a bit weird or at least be perceived as such. When I first arrived in the US, one of the several jobs I was hired to do despite lacking qualifications was as a daycare teacher (scary, I know). Such was the exuberance of the mid 90′s. So with my foot fresh off the boat and my English language skills just a notch above adequate, I was put in a position where I needed to exert the confidence and authority that I lacked as an immature individual just learning the cultural…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences