tigers and monsters and letters, oh my!

So far, so good....my nephew Carl continues to be adorable and become more adept at crawling up stairs. He's making more noises these days and perhaps even imitating sounds that he hears. His mom dressed him as Tigger for Halloween and he came trick-or-treating to our house (but we had to eat his candy for him). Definitely the cutest, most cuddly tiger we've ever seen.

Tutoring the four- and five-year-old girls in French is going a bit more smoothly than it was when I started a couple of months ago. We're tackling the alphabet now: singing the ABC song, drawing letters on white boards and on cookie sheets covered with flour, identifying which animals start with which letter. To my surprise, the girls learned the alphabet more quickly than their mom (who is also taking private French lessons from me twice a week). The French vowels don't faze them at all (I in French is called E, for example), nor do the letters J ("zjee") and G ("zjay") (which are basically backwards to anglophones). They've also started petting Hubert (my monster puppet who speaks only French) instead of hitting him.

Otherwise, not much else to report from here except that I'm buried in paper grading and haven't had time to do any interviews or book reviews or catch up on the listservs where I find some of the info that I post on this blog! It's that time of the semester....