More than twenty-five years later, that boy would go on to write a blog post justifying parental laziness under the guise of proactive and resourceful bilingual parenting.

Image by flux.org.uk

OK, I’m back. Had to take a quick YouTube detour in the middle of writing this to go catch another episode of the Thundercats on YouTube.

My wife and I pride ourselves on a house filled with love, play, books, togetherness, music, and conversation.  Television is a seldomly used appliance…that is, seldomly  used before 7:31 PM, but heavily used after we’ve read our boys their respective sets of books and put them to bed, so we can run back downstairs and go through our Tivo backlog of episodes of the various Real Housewives franchises and allow our brains to turn into silicone.

Like most well-meaning parents, we hold ourselves to a different standard than our children, but that’s exactly why (in all seriousness) mankind keeps getting better. And like most well-meaning parents, some days we’re fried and unable to muster the energy or patience to read books to equally tired children with their known propensity for emotional meltdowns that make a simple accident like dropping a paper bookmark on the floor worthy of a child’s kick to your stomach.

For me, as the “minority language” parent, this situation is particularly problematic because I have to make a concerted effort to compensate for an environment where English is the predominant language. So in addition to my natural desire to be an engaged and interactive parent, I have to find ways to enhance or magnify the language experience through any means I can: music, wordplay, ad-lib storytelling, some times to the point where my interactions with the boys become a bit forced and unnatural. And lately, since we’ve reached the milestone set by the American Academy of Pediatrics for TV watching, I have been resorting to my old surrogate father, the tube.

The rub in my situation is that I happen to have two boys who in addition to being sensitive and smart are, after all, quintessential boys, with their predilection for everything heroic, aggressive, muscular, explosive, and weapon-loaded. So sure, they’ll sit patiently through an episode of PBS’ “Super Why” or any other appropriate, educational program for children, but they sit there, quietly. But play them an episode of the Thundercats from YouTube (dubbed into crisp, clear, and proper Spanish, to boot!) and they will not only become invested in the show, but they’ll ask me questions and provide verbal reactions to every explosion, every chase, every sword fight, to the point that we get to hear only about 37.3 % of the dialogue. But that’s good enough for me.

The propensity to guilt of a recovering catholic is a chronic condition, but my guilt over resorting to television out of sheer exhaustion is allayed by seeing my kids discuss “pirámides” (pyramids), “momias” (mummies), “galaxias” (galaxies), “fortalezas” (forts) in our excited conversations about Lion-O and his gang of heroic cats.

I definitely don’t want my boys to have the same relationship with television that I had as a child, but I am grateful for the access we have today, at our fingertips, to good programs that meant so much to me as a child and that are beginning to mean so much to my boys. We are bonding personally and linguistically, and at least I’m sitting in the room with them, ready to turn the TV off and go outside with them to play with plastic swords as soon as the show is over.

“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.

Photo by jenny downing

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 ratify the notion that being bilingual is nothing but good. The benefits range from enhanced analytical and mathematical thinking, wiring of the brain that delays the onset of dementia and Alzheimers, to the comedic value of sounding like Ricky Ricardo when you’re yelling at your mama on the phone. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find out next week that being bilingual is equivalent to eating five servings of raw blueberries and kale for breakfast.

Obviously I appreciate the value of such reputable, visible, and constant validation for something that’s such a part of who I am and of who we are, as a family. After thirty-five years of struggle, I’m finally cool.

But the real validation I get is when my boys wow me — from a purely scientific point of view when I see them negotiate the differences and similarities between the two languages; as a parent when their intelligence confirms that they are the best thing to happen to mankind since Plato and Aristotle.

The other day, as Gabriel and I walked to the house from the car, he told me (in Spanish):

“Papá, a ‘trunk’ is this part of a tree, but it’s also the part of the car that you put stuff into. But in Spanish, the tree part is ‘tronco’ and the car part is ‘baúl’”

I was so proud and impressed I blacked out for about thirty seconds and as I regained consciousness in time to stop my wife from dialing the paramedics, I told my boy: “That is quite the perspicacious observation, there, Junior”

So there it is – The deconstruction of the language as a system. The same skill I hope will come handy to my boys when learning reading, writing, math, geometry, physics, the deciphering of the codified female language.

And once again, I relive through my children my own past fascination, as a young second-language learner, with the seemingly whimsical (though in reality very meaningful) way in which different languages seem to have or lack terms for certain words. I recall the arguments I would get into with non-Spanish-speaking co-workers trying to explain why it makes sense to have the terms “dedos” (fingers), and “dedos de los pies” (fingers of the feet, a.k.a. ‘toes’), or what a huge diservice it is to the English language to lack a single punchy word for “stinky feet” when the very enunciation of the word “pecueca” can trigger a person’s olfactory nerve endings even if they don’t know what the word means.

It doesn’t surprise me that the learning of language, the coming together of people to understand and appreciate one another, makes us smarter. Because knowing, appreciating, and understanding one another, is smart. And cheesy. And good.

Photo by chickpokipsie

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 our household has been to turn off most electronics devices during important conversations, state my agreement (blink once), disagreement (blink twice), or neutrality (close my eyes / doze off) about the ideas being discussed, and let the wife do the hard work. And hope that a $12 bouquet of flowers every 3.25 weeks makes up for it.

So while my proactive and responsible wife was busy researching all educational options for our children and refining the logistics of our every weekday for the next 7.5 years, I was resting on my laurels, assuming that the invisible hand of the market would somehow take care of things and turn my boys into the 21st century’s Wright Brothers.

Until one night a couple of months ago, when my wife posed to me with a mixture of excitement and trepidation:

“What about Chinese Immersion?”

My answer:

“天啊” (Translation: “Ay, Dios mío!”)

There I was, a champion of multilingual and multicultural upbringing, a promoter of diversity, open mindedness, and understanding among all of God’s children, feeling like I was about to wet my trousers in fear of the prospect of raising children who would be educated in a language I know nothing about.

Once I overcame my initial shock, and  began to realize that my wife wasn’t just trying to consider all options but was, in fact, quite serious, I opened up, if only a little bit. It took me weeks of self-evaluation, reflection, and meditation, and 17 minutes of Googling, to learn that:

1. I had been hypocritical about my professed belief in multiculturalism –  I expected my kids to live my culture
2. It’s not that my kids couldn’t handle it; it’s that I felt like I couldn’t handle it
3. Helping my kids become tri-lingual would be challenging but it would be completely attainable, not to mention quite an amazing gift to give them

Mostly, it hit me like a ton of wonton that for the first time, I was coming close to understanding how my patient and loving wife must have felt for the past four years, living in a bilingual household where she doesn’t fully understand the other language that’s being spoken. So we decided to pursue enrollment in the local Chinese immersion school.

The tour of the school was both impressive and intimidating. During a demonstration of a classroom experience that lasted about 20 minutes, I watched my son Gabriel sit patiently with flushed cheeks and a mystified look on his face as the teacher vigorously pointed at a card she was holding up, depicting a yellow chicken, and speaking words none of us had heard before or could correctly pronounce.

A couple of weeks after the tour, we submitted our names to be added to the very long waiting list of parents anxious to enroll their children in this highly-regarded Chinese immersion school, only to find out another couple of weeks later that our boy might be able to enroll only if the 30-some people ahead of us on the list suddenly developed an inexplicable aversion to all things Asian.

At the end of this process, we feel good about having given it a try and about having gone through the mental and emotional exercise of imagining our boys and even our entire family, pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone and preparing to exemplify the openness and love of learning and culture that we so often and passionately profess.

Circumstances and opportunities upped the ante and we called its bluff. And I got off easy.

As for what our plans are now – stay tuned. It’s a long story, I’m tired, and my California-designed, China-assembled iPhone says that I finally got a Tweet from a real person.

Photo by Kalexanderson

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 to each other almost exclusively in English), I snuck out of the bathroom and into the kitchen (did I wash my hands?) intending to eavesdrop, but the boys mysteriously switched back to English.

A few minutes later, as I prepared to experiment with combinations of edible matter and concoct something that could be defended in a court of law as “breakfast for my kids”, I heard the boys speaking in Spanish again. I paused and listened for a few seconds and at some point in the conversation, I heard them addressing me (still in Spanish) and actually asking me a strange question; something along the lines of “Papá, where are you going?”. I walked to the dinning room and asked the boys what they were asking me. My son Gabriel answered:

“No, Papá, we are playing with Lego guys,” he said. “This one is you, this one is me, and this one is Sam. We were asking the Lego Papá where he was going!”

I laughed, caressed both my boys’ beautiful faces, and went back to the kitchen with a big stupid smile on my face, thinking: “I’ve got to make a note of this.”

If the boys are speaking to “Lego Papá” in Spanish, we’re doing something right…as long as Lego Papá doesn’t become their proxy Papá for everything else, because that would be just creepy and hugely concerning.

As for having abandoned my blog for months, like a ripe fruit that was left out in the sun? Let’s say my blog is a sun dried tomato. Or a raisin. Aged but still edible.

Photo by Jerrold

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, being the engaged and emotionally available father that I am (while hypnotized by Twitter on my iPhone) as my wife was helping the boys wash their hands for dinner. The 0.3 % of my neurons not taken up by cleverness from the Twitterverse were being alerted of some sort of argument breaking out by the bathroom sink. My son Sam (age 2) was emphatically telling my wife, over and over, something she couldn’t understand because of his some time incomprehensible two-year-old enunciation. And the more perplexed she acted, the more frustrated he became until he was on the brink of tears (or potentially, whining, which can be more lethal). In walks my son Gabe (age 4) to assess the situation and very maturely fill his distracted father’s role:

- “Mamá, he is saying ‘poquito’ because you’re opening the faucet too much” explained Gabriel.

“Poquito” (“a little bit”) is one of the many words that Sam still says exclusively in Spanish. I’ve written before about how it seems like, for the first two years or so, the vocabulary of bilingual kids is influenced by the context in which certain words are learned. For Sam, the context for “poquito” (“a little”) and “mucho” (“a lot”) has been his drill sergeant father sternly teaching him the “just right” amount of water one needs to wash one’s hands. Yes, I have set up a “college/therapy savings account” for my boys.

Once again, I’m delighted by these signs of both languages taking strong hold in my children and I hope that as years go by, they won’t be people who speak Español only “un poquito.”

Photo by nettsu

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 friend, right?

Sam: [chuckles]

Gabe: You’re my best friend, right, Sam?

Sam: [chuckles again]

Gabe: No, Sam, say yes!

Sam: [chuckle]

Gabe: You’re my best friend, right?

Sam: YEAH!

Gabe: [chuckles with satisfaction]

But when my wife relayed this to me, did I embrace her and shared with her a lovely moment of mutual congratulations for raising such loving and caring little boys? Oh, how naive you are and how little you know me. Read the blog, darn it!

No, my first reaction was to ask whether they were speaking in English. The answer was yes.

Of course, this is not surprising or hugely disappointing, but it’s happening sooner than I expected. As always, it just takes for me to get done describing how the boys speak this language or the other in such and such situation, for my boys to change it up and pull the rug from under me.

But at the same time that English is becoming the predominant language in their conversations, Sam’s vocabulary continues to explode and I can confidently claim that the boy has formally entered the world of bilingualism (again, let’s see if I’m changing the story again tomorrow).

Sam now understands tens, if not hundreds of words in both languages, speaks tens (not quite hundreds yet) of words in both languages, and is beginning to string together cute little sentences (albeit, sentences that only his loving parents can understand) in both languages.

And even more exciting: we’ve seen him catch himself and self-correct when he uses the ‘wrong’ language when addressing one of us.

So we have this interesting dichotomy between Sam’s older brother, his role model and hero, leading him down a path of predominant English communication, and Sam beginning to grasp the dynamics of bilingualism and hitting that stage where the floodgates of vocabulary acquisition bust open.

Is it time to isolate the brothers and drive a permanent wedge between them for the sake of molding their language habits to my liking? Hmm, tempting! But no, it’s time to learn and continue enjoying this fascinating journey. And according to my clock, it’s time for me to call it a night since the freaking sun will be shinning through my window at like 4:00 AM. And if I wake up early, hopefully I’ll catch more cute dialog between my boys through the baby monitor.

Photo by Lovro67

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 or economics?), that when we were growing up, she would regularly purchase a bag of “menudencias”, the discarded parts of the chicken, and make with them various chicken-infused forms of soup. Us kids would get our respective portions of chicken feet, gizzards, and other unrecognizable organs (though I became proficient at identifying, and came to prefer, the liver). But the main prize always went to my mother: the chicken’s head. I can picture my mother turning that lifeless, featherless skull between her index and thumb as she tried, with closed eyes and a look that combined delight and concentration, to consume as much as she could of the birds facial muscles.

Please know that I’m not trying to shock you (or at least, that’s not my only intention). I’m just recording what I think is an important aspect of my upbringing that has gone quite dormant in my adult, American lifestyle, where we believe that a chicken nugget comes from a cute and clean square little muscle on the animal, rather than from a monstrous grinding machine that turns flesh into paste and then cubes. Yum again.

So as my American boys grow up, it’s important to me to instill in them a similarly realistic (albeit crude) understanding and appreciation of where food comes from. And it’s also important to me that they don’t become picky, squeamish, or wasteful. My culture and my economic situation growing up were hugely valuable in that regard.

No, I don’t plan to reincorporate chicken feet and heads in our daily menu (maybe only on holidays?). But there are other, less drastic tactics that are beginning to stick:

- Eating the skin of the mango. In my fifteen years in this country, I’ve seen mangos go from being a rarity (at least in Minnesota), to being almost a staple available in most grocery stores. But it still amuses me to see the look on the faces of my American friends when they see me take voracious bites out of a slice of mango without taking the skin off. “Isn’t it really chewy?” they ask, and I say: “Yes, aren’t those Cheetos really messy?”. What kind of a question is that? But the beauty of getting your kids to do stuff when they’re young and before they get corrupted by the mainstream, is that I can serve my boys big fat slices of mango with the skin on and they don’t know any better so they eat the whole damn thing with gusto and in the process, consume like 900,000 grams of extra fiber and vitamins without complaining or giving me attitude.

- Eating really ripe bananas: This is one where even my amazingly intelligent and open minded wife struggles. Ripe bananas are the bomb! There is nothing like a nice, brown-spotted cavendish that you start to peel and the peels start falling appart they’re so thin and fragile. If you find a banana that’s almost totally brown on the outside but still beige and firm on the inside, you have reached Nirvana. No, banana bread is not its only possible use. My boys understand this. They will sit down to that banana and a glass of milk before the enemy swoops in and tries to turn it into some fattening banana bread or my name is not Ruben Gonzalez.

I could go on all night (i.e. until I fall asleep in 7 minutes).

I will leave you with one that I’m still mustering the courage to lobby for with my wife: orange peel wars. Here’s a male bonding activity that comes as close to recycling and composting as you could get without making a boy call you names and run for the hills. After you’re done eating an orange or a tangerine, grab the peels and chase your friends around to try to squeeze small pieces of the peels so the juice squirts into your friend’s eyes. It stings like a motherf****r, but you prove your manliness and you can take alternating turns laughing and crying. And the old wives tale was that the juice was actually beneficial to your vision (tell that to the Costco Eye Clinic clerk who last rang me up for $250.00).

Obviously, every culture has its incredibly disgusting culinary traditions, from fried animal sexual organs to fermented fish. But those horrible things exist for a reason, and they’re worth preserving (at least as long as animals are being treated humanely and the practice is sustainable).

All this talk about yumminess is making me crave some morcilla.

(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)

Google's translation of a misspelling of 'nonsense'

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 of everything awesome to be humble enough to admit when occasionally it can’t find what you’re looking for?

This past weekend, I was all gung-ho, looking forward to siting down with Gabriel to do real-time translation in Spanish of any book in English he wanted to put in front of me, confident that no rare Alaskan fish, no obscure two-headed dinosaur could escape the boundless reach of Google’s knowledge.

So Gabriel busts out the dinosaur books, and we start off great — all we have to do is speak the name of any critter into the iPhone and before you can say “you’re jamming your elbow into my rib”, we have a Spanish translation for the word, complete with a small speaker icon you can click on to hear the word spoken in a trust-inspiring female voice with a Castilian accent. It was a thing of beauty, until the skeptic lobe of my brain came back online and tempted me to try to stump the app.

I start garbling the words I speak into the app to see what happens, and wouldn’t you know it, Google Translate just goes ahead and says that the translation in Spanish for the made up word is nothing other than the word itself! And when you click on the little speaker icon? The sexy, trustworthy Castilian lady speaks the word back to you with a very convincing Spanish pronunciation that makes you think you’ve subconsciously fed the app a word that actually exists.

The image here is a screenshot of what you get if you misspell “nonsense” and ask to translate it into Spanish. When you click to hear the Spanish word spoken, you hear a very graceful and natural “noneh-senseh,” which to a less-informed Spanish speaker may sound like a viable term to refer to people who were born in the province or country of “Nonesenlandia”.

Of course, I’m not claiming to be so principled that I won’t use the app at all anymore, but the tool has certainly replaced a knowledge gap with a big hole in my confidence in Google.

Google – you already know everything about me. Would it kill you to start being honest with me? I will continue to love you despite your imperfections. Don’t give me that nonesense.

(Not me - I once was that young, though I never developed a square jaw) - Photo by Liam Kearney

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, plus the blue collar slang I grew up speaking, plus the Colombian equivalents of Mexican terms my kids hear from their teachers during the day, lately I’ve been  feeling compelled to teach Gabriel the English words for concepts that strike me as important. So we’ll be talking in Spanish about transcendental ideas like “honesty”, “friendship”, or “Netflix”, and immediately I feel like if I don’t teach him the equivalent words in English, the next time one of those notions comes up, he will have to go through unnecessary and redundant ramp-up with whomever is teaching him that concept in English.

I realize my new compulsion is a tremendous diservice to my boys, but as always, it is not my own will power or common sense that’s helping me break out of this bad habit. It is the children themselves who prove to me, time and time again, how little credit I give their beautiful little minds. Gabriel will start talking about the difference between right and wrong and all I have to do is allow him the occasional English word interspersed with his Spanish dialogue, and marvel at the fact that he obviously has learned things from Mama, Granddad, and the rest of his English-speaking family and is able to transfer that knowledge over to his Spanish vocabulary. Then all I have to do is point out that “robber” in Spanish is “ladrón”, and we’ve had ourselves a meaningful and didactic chat.

Add to the above the fact that if I keep teaching my boys words in English, I start to lose credibility and consistency as the Spanish-only parent. Nothing like fear to keep one’s spirit focused (ever heard of ” The Spanish Inquisition”?).

A few days ago, we were all sitting at the table eating lunch and Gabriel started to tell me about something his Mama had made him for breakfast earlier that week. Towards the end of his charming story, as he prepared to conclude with “that’s what Mama made me for…..”, I could see his eyes begin to wander and could hear him getting tongue-tied – he had forgotten the word “desayuno” (breakfast). After two or three failed attempts, he cleverly said “for the meal that I eat every day before school!”.

I laughed with joy and pride. Those are the moments when I feel like I can let those balls I’ve juggling fall on the ground and we can all just enjoy watching them roll.

Photo by PK + Koduri

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 obvious and romance-language-friendly “Brontosaurio” and “Tiranosaurio”?

What’s ironic about this hole thing is that (I believe) most dinosaur names are derived from Latin, so (I believe) you can pretty much replace “saurus” with “sauro” and “ph” with “f” and you got yourself a whole catalog of Spanish names for these monsters. But by the time I figure out how to break out 23 syllables to speak the name of one of these, my boys have already turned the page to a meaner-looking reptile with horns on its tail and tongue (and even horns on its horns).

Don’t get me wrong, playing with dinosaur toys, reading dinosaur books, and watching dinosaur videos are great opportunities for discussing nature and science (and for inoculating my boys against the incursion of Creationist ideas) in a fun, interactive way, not to mention I’m actually learning stuff I didn’t learn as a child. But it does exemplify the compromises you have to make in order to have a flowing, natural relationship with your children in the little time you have with them every day. Google on the iPhone have been lifesavers for me when I find myself in a pinch and need to look up how to say “blueberry” in Spanish. But pausing five times on every page to try and translate the names of dinosaurs would be hugely disrupting and it would take the fun out of just learning who was eating whom during the Jurassic period.

Now, if one of my boys chooses to become a paleontology professor in a Latin American university, then perhaps we can sit down together and pour over volume after volume of dinosaur literature in Spanish. Or I can sit paralyzed by anxiety over whether they’ll make enough money to live on and repay their student loans. That’s parenting for ya.