Er, hi. I mean, bonjour! Yeah, that's it. Bonjour.

What, another apologetic post about not posting?

Er, yes.

All is well.

Sorry for not writing, not reading, not answering your emails, not doing my column for MLL, not posting pictures of our growing Griffin.

Griffin's vocabulary at fourteen months:
Mama
Dada
Uh-oh
Hi
No
Yeah
Yay (means "yes"--perhaps a combination of English "yes" and French "oui"?)
Doh (means "open the door," "open the gate to let me climb the stairs," or "let's go outside and play")
Arf

He also does a monkey call and puts his hands on his hips in imitation of a monkey (he can't quite manage to scratch his armpits yet).

Carl's vocabulary:
In English: It has absolutely exploded! He is amazingly articulate.
In French: He rarely speaks in French, but still understands a lot of what I say. And from time to time, he announces, "Tatie speaks French. I speak French a little. Why do I speak French? Why does Tatie speak French?"

Sarah's vocabulary:
I make mistakes ALL THE TIME in French now.
(Of corse, I also make mistaks in Englesh too, I is still sleep-deprived. Durn baby.)

More later....

mon secret

At times like this, late at night, with a contented Griffin sleeping on my lap or sighing on my shoulder after a drowsy middle-of-the-night nursing session, I speak to him in English. Sweet baby. My sweet, sweet boy. I stroke his head. You're beautiful. You drive me crazy and I love you like crazy. I drink in his milky scent, his baby shampoo hair. Sweet, beautiful boy.

I have to say this, like an incantation, a prayer, a promise, aloud, in English, not to him, but to me, just for me to hear while I hold my splendid son.

a Very Big Check

Good news for the reading enrichment program that I coordinate at the library: we won the $1000 grant we had applied for this summer! Because so many of you nominated us, we had a very strong chance of winning the drawing. We really appreciate your support: in this predominantly grant-funded program with an annual budget of $12,000, $1000 makes a big impact, extending our funding into 2009 and helping us help more kids get excited about books. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Here we are with the Very Big Check:

remember moi?

Yikes--has it really been almost a month and a half since I posted anything? I don't have any significant reason--just a combination of working overtime, various illnesses (colds and an ear infection for Griffin, colds and strep throat for me), fatigue, and a renewed commitment to put my family first, which means assigning lower priority to activities like blogging. And then inertia kicks in, and I'm embarassed about not having kept up with reading and commenting on the blogs I used to read regularly (and not replying to the emails that readers have sent), and it's easier just to say "I'll work on the emails and the research and the reading and the writing when I have a nice long stretch of time to get caught up and be thorough and enjoy it."

Then I remember that I have an eight-month-old baby, which means that I won't have a "nice long stretch of time" for quite a while, unless I stay up late at night, which I've promised myself to stop doing. (I'm currently breaking that promise.)

But all is well chez nous, and I finally have new ideas that I want to write about and new materials that I want to share. And as soon as Griffin and I return next week from a trip to Indiana to celebrate my grandmother's 94th birthday, I'll be ready to spend some more time in the blogosphere. Thanks for your patience. See y'all soon!

yum yum yum

Why do babies respond so well to baby talk? Why do they seem to say the same sorts of things in baby talk themselves? Here's a very short article about a study that concludes that babies' brains are hard-wired to prefer repeated syllables like "mama" and "dada." (Thus explaining why Griffin can babble "mamamamama" but not yet say "Kindly remove that foul, pasty rice cereal from my mouth, Mother, and replace it with puréed butternut squash, stat!")

Top Ten Ways to Annoy Your Professor

In honor of back-to-school month, I'd like to share a list I created for my cousin Luke, who is beginning his freshman year at the University of Colorado. Nine years of language teaching at the college level have informed my thoughts on this subject! Feel free to share your own suggestions with Luke and all the others headed off in pursuit of higher education.

10. Plagiarize a writing assignment either by not citing your sources, by purchasing or copying a paper by someone else, or by swiping something from the Internet. Next, say with big sad eyes and an injured tone of voice, "Of course I wrote this myself! I would never, never, never copy someone else's work," or "What do you mean, 'cite your sources'? No one ever told me to do that before. No, not my college composition instructor. No, no, I never had to do that in high school. Why? Is it important?"

9. Assume that good attendance, decent test scores, and completing most of the homework mostly on time is all is takes to get an A or a B. (The presence of a warm body with eyes open holding a pencil is not sufficient.)

8. Read the campus newspaper. During class.

7. Answer your cell phone when it rings. During class. (Bonus: Say "not much--how 'bout you?")

6. Ask for extra credit; also, get offended when you find out that your lowest test score will not be dropped. (Bonus: Say, "But we got to do that in high school!")

5. Get in touch with your professor thusly: Use an email address that doesn't include your real name, begin your message without a greeting, ask about the assignment without specifying which class it's for, don't say "please" or "thank you," don't bother with capital letters or punctuation, and don't sign your name. (Bonus: Try to make your email address sound sexy. I have actually received messages from students calling themselves "mesohott18" and "unequaledphantasy." True story.)

4. Present a note from the hospital written in pencil on an index card to excuse your absence. (Bonus: Don't bother to use the name of an actual doctor from that hospital--just make up a name.) (This is also a true story.)

3. Eat one or more of the following: (a) a crunchy food (b) a pungent food (c) something delicious and chocolatey, especially if it's around lunchtime and your prof teaches three classes back to back from 11:00 to 2:00 and has to skip lunch those days. (Bonus: Eat tuna noodle casserole topped with potato chips from the cafeteria; époisses, reblochon, or other stinky cheese; or marijuana brownies.)

2. After you have been absent, ask your prof, "Did I miss anything important?"

1. Call your prof at home to ask him for an extension on a paper due the following day because it's your birthday and your friends are throwing you a surprise party. (Also true--but alas, this time I was the perpetrator!)

big bucks for bilingual babies in Boulder

Would you pay $480 for a twelve-week class? One that meets twice a week for an hour at a time (ie, $20 per hour)? What if it was a class for your child? What if your child is only six months old?

Really, the question is whether I will pay $480 for Griffin to attend a French class for babies in nearby Boulder, Colo.

• His baby swim class is $36 for eight sessions (and a ten-minute walk away).


• Attending this class would require about an hour of driving (round-trip). I don't like driving. Or paying for gas these days.


• Adding another regular activity into my life might make my head explode.


• Griffin is only six months old, for pete's sake. He doesn't talk yet.


• And finally, as my mother matter-of-factly pointed out to me, I speak French to him all day long--for free.

Still, I'm going to attend the free sample class tomorrow to see how a native speaker engages kids up to 2.5 years old for an entire hour with no English at all. Maybe I'll be blown away and decide that it would really help Griffin (and me). Maybe it'll help me refine my idea of someday offering French classes for kids in my home using music, theatre, cooking, games, art, arts and crafts, and storytelling. Maybe they're looking to hire more teachers!

Or maybe I should just find (or organize) a free French playgroup and make sure that Griffin and Carl spend more time together as Griffin becomes more interactive.

Stay tuned--I'll let you know what the sample class is like. Any advice, especially in regards to what age Griffin and Carl should be for French-language classes for kids and whether it's important to have a native speaker leading such a class?

I want to be a kid again and spend my summer here!

I stumbled across the website for A La Vanille, a French-language day care in San Francisco, and fell in love with their summer programs for kids. It sure sounds better than any of the summer day camps I ever went to! Too bad nothing like this exists here in the Boulder area.

Maybe I'll have to start my own French-language day care for Northern Colorado! Seriously, I do think about some day offering French classes for children at my home (once we finish the basement and have space for kids to move around safely and room to store all the materials and supplies that such an enterprise would require). But it had never occurred to me to organize week-long themed programs like A La Vanille's French garden and others. Brillant!

Does anyone know of other foreign language preschools or daycares or camps? Share the link or tell us what they do!

(Of course, if your children are old enough for sleep-away camp, send them to Concordia Language Villages for remarkable language immersion experiences. I can't praise these programs enough! Located throughout Minnesota, the villages are amazing: they are summer immersion camps for 14 different languages for kids through 12th grade. In high school, I attended Sjolunden, the Swedish village, for two weeks, and Lac du Bois, the French village, for a month (and then got credit for a year of high school French because it's so intensive). They recreate the country where the language is spoken, right down to exchanging your money for the other country's currency, feeding you food typical of that place, and taking away reading material in English when you go through "customs." All the activities, from sports and meals, are centered on exposing the campers to the target language and teaching them about the target culture(s), and there are formal language classes several times a day as well. It's all extremely interactive and high energy with great communicative activities. (Plus I can still sing songs from both camps 15+ years later!) I would recommend these camps to any child learning any language they offer (from Spanish to Arabic and Korean), even if the child is a complete beginner. Oh, and last year, one of my former students worked as a counselor at Lac du Bois! I was thrilled.)

hooray for Multilingual Living Magazine!

What? You're a regular reader of this blog but you don't subscribe to the fantabulous online magazine Multilingual Living? You're interested in raising children with more than one language but you're not a subscriber yet? You love learning about other cultures but you're missing out on this magazine?

Well then, what are you waiting for? Subscribe for only $12!

By the way, my regular column in the magazine needs a new name: "Tatie Teaches a Toddler" no longer works now that Griffin has joined our bilingual adventure. I've added a poll in my sidebar--please weigh in on what sounds best to you! To suggest a different name altogether, click on "comments" below and type in your ideas. Thank you!

French films that aren't freaky

The woman whom I'm tutoring in conversational French hesitated when I suggested that she watch one movie in French a week to practice her listening comprehension and to expose her to slang and contemporary culture. "Yes, but…" she began, "French movies are just…weird. They're so talky. There's lots of strange sex scenes. Nothing else really happens. Until people die."

And she does have a point.

To those of us who grew up on Hollywood action films, nuance-free blockbusters, and insipid predictable romantic comedies, yes, French films can seem abstruse and pointless. It's taken me a while to learn to appreciate the subtle, slow-paced, oft-disturbing fare that French cinema tends to offer. (My husband still proclaims Amélie to be the only decent French movie in existence.)

But that's not what we're here to debate! I've started to search out "user-friendly" French movies appropriate to American viewers who want to improve their language skills and enjoy the diversion (rather than be embroiled in something intense and/or uncomfortably sexy and/or "huh???"-inspiring). These aren't necessarily films you'd want to show to children without vetting them first yourself, but this list is a place to start. What other French-language movies fitting these criteria would y'all recommend? What about ones appropriate for kids? And movies from other francophone countries?

Comédies:
Amélie (a whimsical and touching people-pleaser)
Mon meilleur ami (genuinely funny and touching, restrained instead of over-the-top)
Le dîner des cons (funny and farcical with a touch of cruelty)
Le placard (funny and farcical, a little sad, a little predictable)
Paris, je t'aime (twenty short films, one set in each arrondissement, by twenty different filmmakers, including some American directors and actors)
Trois hommes et un couffin (the inspiration for Three Men and a Baby)
Les visiteurs (broad comedy about a medieval knight and his servant who arrive in the 20th century)
L'auberge espagnole (mildy funny comedy about a group of foreign students sharing an apartment in Spain; very popular among the college students I knew, but I didn't think it was that great)
Les poupées russes (the sequel to L'auberge espagnole; it takes place quite a few years later; I liked it better than the first film)

Classiques:
La gloire de mon père (beautiful depiction of Marcel Pagnol's Provence in the early 20th century and the people who live there)
Le château de ma mère (sequel to La gloire de mon père--almost as good)
Jean de Florette (also set in Pagnol's Provence, but less idealized when it comes to human nature--a great story)
Manon des sources (sequel to Jean de Florette--just as good)
La belle et la bête (1946 black and white version of Beauty and the Beast)
Argent de poche (story of children in 1976)

Drames:
Train de vie (a feel-good--until the end--movie about an entire eastern European Jewish village escaping deportation to a WWII concentration camp; surprisingly funny)
Les choristes (people-pleasing story about the music teacher at a boys' school)
Au revoir, les enfants (beautiful autobiographical story about friendship and growth at a Catholic boys' boarding school during WWII. I taught the script of this movie in my second-year French classes for a couple of years; despite reading it and watching the film repeatedly, I still love it and cry at the ending. It's that good.)
La môme (English title: La vie en rose--the recent biopic about Edith Piaf; fascinating in a depressing way)
Le festin de Babette (tale of a brilliant French chef in a dour small Danish town)
Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (story of an unusual friendship in Paris; very good despite a disappointing ending)
Le gone du chaaba (based on the autobiographical novel by Azouz Begag, now a minister in the French government; it's about growing up in the immigrant slums in the 1960s)

Films historiques:
Cyrano de Bergerac (1990 version with Gerard Depardieu--well acted and swashbuckling)
Camille Claudel (based on the life of artist Rodin's long-time lover who was a sculptor in her own right)
La veuve de St. Pierre (love story set on a French-speaking island off Canada about a prisoner condemned to the guillotine)
Le hussard sur le toit (very swashbuckling)

Documentaires:
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (about gleaners, people who scavenge in fields after the harvest, those who go dumpster diving, etc., with very interesting narration)