Posts from the “Trivial Occurrences” Category

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

Improv

01/05/11

This blog update is not part of a new year’s resolution to revive my withering blog (though can I claim in retrospect that it was a new year’s resolution and that I followed through for once? ). It simply occurred to me that I should share with you this lovely moment with my boy Gabriel as an example of the double-fun of bilingual parenting: Add to the magic of watching your children flourish and develop into the most fascinating people in the world, your constant awe at their ability to do it in two languages. My wife and I rotate bedtimes with each of our two boys. Sam is still a bit too young for a formal bedtime story, but with Gabriel, we read…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Big ‘Farma’

10/12/10

Heard about the recent US State Department apology to Guatemala for medical experiments done on their people in the 1940’s? Good, because such sordid topics are beyond the scope of this goofy blog. A while ago I wrote about the rarely comical, rarely cute practice in the English-speaking world to invent Spanish words by taking English words and adding an “o” at the end of them. Because we’re talking about my boy Gabriel here, I will deem the following trivial anecdote an example of a super advanced and actually cute variation on that practice (adding an “a” at the end to create the feminine version of a noun): Gabriel was intrigued by the picture on the tub of sour cream we had on the table, showing a woman milking…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Growing Up, Reaching Back

10/02/10

Carrie, from Tiki Tiki Blog interviewed me and other Latino parents for her great article in Café Magazine. Read the article at the Café Magazine website. And go to Tiki Tiki Blog (www.tikitikiblog.com) to see Carrie and team’s online magazine about Latino/bilingual lifestyle.

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Car Talk

09/30/10

Every car you see on the road is like a small, semi-private universe where people’s lives unfold, in motion. Some times that universe is not so small (if you drive a 25 ft tall SUV to haul firewood from the sequoias growing in your backyard) and some times not so private (if you’re someone who likes your radio’s bass cranked all the way to 11 and then need to roll down the windows so they don’t shatter in your face after your head explodes), but most Americans spend so much time in their cars that this Colombian-American feels obliged to make the most out of the experience. Now that I’ve changed my work schedule so I can leave work earlier, beat traffic, and pick…

Categories: Reflections, Tips, Trivial Occurrences

Terminated

06/29/10

With increasing frequency, when I finish a blog post, I look back on it with amusement, then with shame, and then I realize that while my blog is supposed to be about bilingualism, what I’m learning and sharing with my audience of 4 is really a set of basic and universal principles of parenting. But I already paid a whole two years of web hosting in advance so I might as well keep writing. One of those basic and universal parenting principles (or facts, rather) is that, just when you think your child is on his or her way to mastering something, they throw you a curveball. You’ll be bragging to your friends about how your toddler has the sphincter and bowel control of…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

The Code’s Been Broken

06/24/10

I’m so busted! And busted on something that I wasn’t even aware I was doing: I had been taking advantage of my wive’s limited knowledge of Spanish to allow myself to get lazy in my parental discipline without her finding out about it. I didn’t count on my beautiful lady’s brilliant mind and overlooked the fact that in these last 3 years that we’ve been parents together and I’ve been speaking Spanish around the house, she has developed an understanding of the language beyond my expectations. And that’s of course wonderful and admirable, but it sucks for me at times. The other day, when we were all sitting in the porch and Gabriel was starting to fall into that whinny-tired-toddler zone where it becomes almost…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences

Authenticity (or “Damn you, Fleet Foxes!“)

05/24/10

Am I a caucasian, middle class, liberal arts-educated, urban hipster? Definitely not (refer to previous post describing my upbringing in agrestic and anachronistic working-class Colombia) Would my taste in everything indicate otherwise? Definitely yes. Do I find it obnoxious and patronizing when people ask themselves rethorical questions and then answer them? You betcha. Does that keep me from doing it? Hmm. Music is important (indispensable, even) in my life and by extension (read: by imposition), in our family life. A random sampling of an afternoon soundtrack in our house could yield tunes by Elliot Smith, Andrés Cepeda, Depeche Mode, Silvio Rodríguez, Café Tacuba, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, The White Stripes, Helenita Vargas, Alci Acosta, Soda Stereo, Led Zeppelin, Pixies, Juanes, Juan Luis Guerra, Carlos Vives,…

Categories: Reflections, Tips, Trivial Occurrences

Spay-dar (Spanish Radar)

04/20/10

[Apologies for the failed attempt at cleverness with the title. I welcome suggestions] Assuming things about people is a dangerous thing, but it’s human nature. I’m sure there is some evolutionary-psychological explanation for why we form opinions about people when we first look at them: group survival, territoriality, escaping potential mates going through midlife crises and carrying tons of emotional baggage, fear of commitment, and credit card debt. And as much as I consider myself an open-minded person, I too assume things about people all the time and I don’t like it, because it diminishes my ability to learn and appreciate. Because of this, I’m also careful to raise my children with as little exposure as possible to any racial, ethnic, political, social, sexual,…

Categories: Trivial Occurrences