Photo by By MS’s photos

No, they don’t care. What they do care about is that what little television they get to watch at home is comprised mostly (and as of late, almost exclusively) of cartoons in Spanish. And when you expose a boy to 40 minutes of “He-Man Y Los Amos Del Universo”, all he wants to do is get up off the couch, wield any broomstick or tennis racket as if it were a sword, and yell at the top of his lungs: “Por el poder de Grayskull!”. That, my esteemed readers, I recently learned is an example of what’s called “perceived need”.

Recently, I watched an impressive Google Hangout led by the brilliant ladies from SpanglishBaby where they and a group of other bilingual mothers discussed their experiences and tips for dealing with the “bilingual rebellion” stage – that point in a child’s development when no matter how much you’ve suffered to give the ungrateful little brats all your time, money, and what’s left of your wretched soul, they turn around and say: “No, thank you, I’m done talking your ridiculous foreign language”.

At some point in the conversation, Roxana talked about “perceived need” – the understanding that a child needs to develop (or be taught) about why speaking the second language is important. And as the moms discussed the different ways in which they approach this process, it dawned on me how different my experience is — as a Scandinavian recluse trapped in the body of a short little brown Colombian, I’m the first to admit that I haven’t provided as many opportunities as I could for my children to experience Spanish as a necessary language (other than putting them in a Spanish-speaking daycare, which has been great) . And being the attention starved man-child that I am, I took the liberty to share with the SpanglishBaby Google Hangout viewers my own experience: That the “perceived need” in our household is that my boys love, love, love super hero stories and super hero play, so making that hot commodity be predominantly available in Spanish, makes them surprisingly willing to play, speak, read, write, and watch in Spanish.

I realize I’ve written several times before (here and here) about this idea of play or role-playing in our family and how powerful a tool it’s proven to be to ensure that our kids practice and expand their Spanish. But it wasn’t until this week that I realized this is their “perceived need” – my boys want to play, they want to wrestle, they want to pretend they’re He-Man and Lion-O. Their perceived need came from within and it wasn’t taught or hinted at – it was kind of a happy accident. And I believe the role-playing element helps remove any awkwardness they might feel about not being as comfortable with Spanish as they are with English. It takes me back to my pre-teen years in Colombia when pretending to be Axl Rose from Guns ‘N’ Roses or James Hetfield from Metallica made me excited about learning their songs, speaking English when there was no one around to practice with, and pretending to be a bad ass rocker when in reality I was a short nerd.

So, my advice to parents trying to raise bilingual children: make the language an integral part of play: If your boy or girl wants to be Ariel, get the DVD of The Little Mermaid dubbed into the language you’re trying to teach; I’m sure you can find it somewhere on Amazon.com, on YouTube, or through other shady means. Make their favorite character an integral part of your play – pretend with them that you all are the characters from the movie, say the dialogue, expand on it, draw the characters together and talk about it, make up bedtime stories together that take characters from the story but take them to unexpected places and situations. In other words, give up your personal life and work on this, people. It pays off.

I’ll leave you with this long wacky story-telling session with my boys (they are telling me the stories). It starts with Gabe (age 5) telling me a story and running out of steam quickly, and then Sam (age 3) borrowing his brother’s characters and plot and making them his own, and then losing focus and telling the rest of the story while running laps and flailing his arms around the dinner table (not before letting us know that all children on earth will be eaten, which piqued his brother’s interest – “even me?!”). You’ll notice their difficulty with some words (where they resort to English), but overall, they perceive the language to be necessary to our storytelling, and we lose ourselves in the wackiness together.

Even in a family friendly and worldly metropolitan area like the Twin Cities, a parent can find himself in a bind. The long, dreary, cold winter can some times limit your options for kid activities, so when you’ve taken your children to the Zoo, the Children’s Museum, the Science Museum, and the indoor playground so often in recent weeks that your children threaten mutiny and the museum and the mall staff begin to recognize you and flash you a gaze of quiet judgement and disappointment, you have no option but to keep everybody home.

Photo by silkegb

But those extended periods of self-imposed house arrest can be a boon to bilingual upbringing if you can muster the energy  and mental fortitude to do the work.

Starting this past Thanksgiving, I began to notice that both my boys (especially Gabe, the older one) were resorting to English words, and even entire sentences, when speaking to me. I attribute this both to exhaustion and overstimulation as a result of the festivities, but mostly, I attribute it to the increased amount of time they spent with their English-speaking relatives and my having to be away for a couple of days due to work. So our post-Christmas and post-New Year’s breaks were catch-up time for Papá.

How does one counterbalance the influence of the mainstream language when it dwarfs your children’s exposure to their Papás wacky native tongue? — You talk a lot!

In my case, the key lies (and here is where energy and mental fortitude are needed) in engaging your kids in conversation about things they give two hoots about. I know I’m stating the obvious here, but how else am I going to fill a page today? Bear with me:

How this covert “yap in Spanish” operation plays out with my kids is that you can tell them stories about super heroes for hours on end without them getting tired (what happens to my almost middle-aged brain is a different story). And the super hero narrative can then be applied to whatever activity you come up with in your desperate state of cabin fever. So for as long as I can speak without wanting to yank my tonsils out, I will sit down with them and tell them ad lib stories about our own private cast of ridiculous super heroes (e.g. “Friendly Ninja”, “Super Photo”, “Owl”, “Soup Man”, etc). Then we’ll horse around on the rug while pretending to be the aforementioned super heroes or one of the villains (“Guadalberto”, “Neutro”), peppering the kicking, wedgying, and couch-jumping with highfalutin and grandiose dialogue that allows me to throw in some fancy words and complex dialogue (think “this is the end of the road for your sinister plan, oh wretched foe” or something like that). Once we’re all sweaty enough, we will move to our typical spear, hatchet, or spaceship-making out of recycled cardboard and duct tape, again verbally declaring our plans and intentions to crush our enemy. And if we still have time to kill before dinner and bath, we can wind down by drawing and coloring the fantastic, testosterone-fueled ubermale worlds we’ve been acting out all day.

It could be just a coincidence, but for the past two weeks, I find my boys’ Spanish to have been virtually fine-tuned. There is very little slipping into English and there is a magnified and totally exhausting enthusiasm for our cast of super hero characters. But like I’ve written before, beyond the language benefit of all this talking, reading, drawing, horseplay, cutting and taping, there is a palpable closeness that comes from our shared silly super hero mythology.

What all of this provides to an unfocused and undisciplined parent like me who doesn’t dedicate enough time to reading about parenting and about bilingual upbringing is a neatly packaged set of proven tactics that help me be close to my children while they learn my native language without even realizing it.

Time flies when you’re having fun. Time also flies when you’re parenting. And parenting is fun much of the time. Please see the diagram below for the scientific principle behind this statement, and don’t read too much into the small overlap between parenting and fun–there is almost complete overlap (some times…).

Time flies when you’re having fun and when you’re parenting

In the nine months since my last post, things have changed greatly so I’m not really sure where to begin. My last few posts included one dealing with the gut wrenching process of making our choice of kindergarten for Gabriel and how we went from my lazy assumption that our kids would go to a Spanish immersion school to a gradual realization that putting our kids in Chinese immersion instead, would position us for world domination. There was also another one about the beautiful and surprising phenomenon of two siblings enhancing each other’s bilingual skills through the mere act of playing (especially if given the right incentive), and finally, one about the ethically questionable but definitely effective tool that are sweet, ass-kicking TV cartoons in the foreign language (i.e. the incentive).

I’ll spare you the gory details and skip through the whole process of mentally preparing our kid to go to the mainstream, neighborhood  school only to find out that that the deities of Taoism, Buddhism and optimism saw to it that Gabriel makes it into our much desired Chinese immersion school, after having been 20-somethingth on the waiting list. Today, our home is one that houses a nacent trilingual family.

All the principles, beliefs, convictions, intuitions and other e-tions I had about multilingual upbringing and education have been validated, cemented, and amplified. In these short four months, our son Gabriel continues to not only blossom as a fluent English and Spanish speaker (and little by little, also a reader and writer), but he has acquired a mind-blowing degree of comfort with the Chinese language he’s learning at school. And as a result, our son Sam is also benefiting from his brother’s excitement and knowledge of all three languages, well before he starts kindergarten himself.

Last night, I found myself called unexpectedly to volunteer at an open house event at Gabriel’s school, where they wanted some parents of new students to be available to speak to prospective parents. Six thirty in the evening, in December, in Minnesota, calls for tea drinking at home in one’s robe, while catching up on one’s Netflix instant queue, instead of sitting in cold and tiny kindergarten classroom chairs for two hours. But I found myself overtaken by pride and excitement and rambling enthusiastically to nervous prospective parents about the benefits of language immersion from the perspective of a parent who has now signed up to juggle three different languages in the upbringing of his children. At the end of the evening, a couple of parents came up to me to ask me more questions, and I was kind enough to autograph their t-shirts and their forearms.

It felt great to be forced to articulate what my lovely wife and I have been at once agonizing but also gushing about: Increasing the complexity of our multilingual adventure and already seeing that our children are up to it.

Below is Gabriel’s Chinese name, created between him and his teacher – it fittingly means “New Treasure”

Gabriel’s Chinese Name: “New Treasure”

In early 1987, an eleven-year old Colombian boy sat in a deep trance for sixty minutes, his consciousness overtaken by images of  sword-wielding anthropomorphous cats, until the boy’s vital signs impressively hovered just above flatline numbers without permanent damage to nerves or tissue. At the end of the sixty minutes, the boy slowly regained awareness of his surroundings; he stood up and kissed his surrogate father (the television set) and thanked him for introducing him to the incredible adventures of the Thundercats.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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:

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.

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).

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.”

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?

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.

This post is not for the squeamish or the narrow-minded:

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.