deux!!!

smiley
loving
excitable
curious
focused
shy
inventive

stubborn

decisive

observant

singer

hollerer

bibliophile

(you even "read" while you nurse!)

engineer

no-napper

picker-upper

(because you are also a champion dumper-outer)

paper-ripper

bath-splasher

moon-watcher
huggable, squeezable, kissable

putting-jammies-on-stuffed-pig

bilingual baby

who is now a terrific toddler

we love you, Griffin Brooks

(même quand tu fais des bêtises)

a playgroup that's not "effrayant"!

(effrayant = scary)

For nearly two years now, I have been aware of a French playgroup in Boulder (city just west of here), but it took me nearly one year and three-quarters to work up the courage to take Griffin.

Why? Because of stories like this, where an American takes her baby to a playgroup with French moms and discovers that she's the only one who actually nurses her child, where in fact some of the moms leave their kids at home with the nanny so that they can discuss postpartum weight loss without interruption while they smoke cigarettes and wear skirts and high heels! (Just for contrast: most of us in my moms' group show up in slouchy clothes, eat cookies, nurse without bothering with a hooter hider, and delight in the fact that our kids clearly like hanging out with each other.)

Or because a lot of the bloggers I read seem to report having trouble keeping a second-language playgroup alive--in fact, I can't remember having read any success stories.

Or because I wouldn't know a soul there.

Or because it's hard enough to get out of the house with a toddler and all of his gear, make the 25-minute-drive to the facility in Boulder hosting the group, arrive on time, stay long enough to make it worthwhile, and get home in time to feed toddler and me before grandparent arrives to babysit while I go to work. (Why does it have to be on Monday mornings?!)

Anyway, I finally stopped making excuses in December and started taking Griffin. Perhaps because it's hosted by a nonprofit parenting center and has been in existence for years, it seems to avoid a lot of the problems that can plague newer groups or ones that meet at different people's homes.

Most of what I worried about is not an issue--Griffin loves the train table and art supplies and toys there--he is neither the oldest nor the youngest child--I am not the only non-native French speaker--the moms are not anti-breastfeeding--nor do they look like fashion models.

Everyone, in fact, is friendly and open and funny and willing to respond to my endless questions about how they're keeping French alive for their kids in northern Colorado and "how do you say this in French?" and "What books do you read to him?" and "How do you manage to take your whole family to France several times a year when I can barely drag my cookies to Boulder once a week?"

And it's SO incredibly wonderful to speak French with grown-ups again, to have actual conversations that don't involve, say, naming colors and shapes or ordering a toddler to pick his pretzels up off the floor.

(Plus, it was very cool when I introduced Griffin to the group and one of the parents said, "Your son's name is Griffin? Do you have a blog? I've been reading about him!")

What have your experiences with language-centric playgroups been? What works for you? Any advice? (I would love, at some point, to have a French playgroup on my side of the county.)

Dare me to send this letter to the editor?

Disclaimer: This post has nothing at all to do with bilingualism. I may or may not actually mail this letter to the newspaper. But it sure feels good to put it in writing.

To the five ignorant, juvenile, and rude men sitting at the table next to me at lunch when I had hoped to eat a rare meal in peace all by myself today:

As the nursing mother of a 23-month-old child, I would like to express my sympathy for your wives, your girlfriends, and your children, based on the comments you made about breastfeeding in voices loud enough to carry throughout the restaurant. You were probably just trying to make each other laugh--you have probably already forgotten about the lady sitting alone with her Oprah magazine who sent you dirty looks and finally asked the waiter if she could move to a different, faraway table--but your comments were were so appalling--and offensive--and inaccurate--that I feel compelled to address them here.

First, let me summarize your discussion for our readers: according to your group, breastfeeding can be appropriate for a while, until the child is 9 months old or so, or until the mother has had a second child, which should occur around that same time. (I believe several of you use the word "breeding" here and another makes analogies to "horses." I'm suprised that you're not comparing penis size and sperm count right here over your chicken curry and saag paneer.) While you concede that mothers' milk brings with it some positive effects, like strengthening the baby's immune system and increasing the child's intelligence, this "peaks when the kid is nine months old." Some mothers stop nursing when their babies' teeth grow in; the thought of babies biting breasts is apparently very amusing! If the child is old enough to convey to his mother that he would like to nurse, he is clearly too old to be allowed to do so. On the other hand, the majority of you would like to be able to turn to your wives or girlfriends in the grocery store and ask to suck on their breasts. Most of you find this hilarious, until a colleague points out that you wouldn't want to do this to your own mothers. Another insightful man emphatically states that Anna Nicole Smith's extended nursing of her son (according to you, until he was six years old) caused the death of both of them. Imagine that!

Please permit me to address your thoughtless comments? First of all, the American Academy of Pediatrics prefers that babies be exclusively breast-fed until the age of six months. They recommend that mothers continue nursing until the child is at least one year old; the World Health Organization recommends that children nurse until age two.

Neither the AAP nor the WHO cites any examples of breastfeeding causing death for mother and child.

As for the humor of being bitten while nursing: please imagine pointy little baby teeth jabbing themselves with enough force to draw blood. Jabbing into your scrotum or penis or other particularly tender area. Repeat several times a day for several weeks. Still funny?

Nursing a child is not about giving women the opportunity to titillate you by exposing their breasts at home, at parties, on airplanes, or in public. Not even Anna Nicole Smith's breasts.

Nor, often, is nursing a child easy. It is a complex biomechanical process that rarely comes naturally to babies and new mothers, but one which brings with it so many benefits that we're willing to struggle through the pain, the frustrations, the awkward positioning, the infections, the clogged milk ducts, the twice-nightly feedings, the dehumanizing breast pump, the trickiness of expressing breast milk at work and at conferences and while traveling without privacy, the continued months of attention to what we eat and drink, the months of not taking medication because it will appear in the breast milk, and more.

My son now only nurses briefly right before bedtime. He no longer drags the Boppy into the hallway when he hears me come home from work. He hardly ever asks for "lolo" any more--and that was one of his first words! In almost two years, my son has rarely been sick. He seems exceptionally bright--his pediatrician said his language development at age 18 months was "amazing"--and he is very loving. My husband and I can't help but think that his being breastfed enhanced all this.

And I can't help but think about the women who are unable to nurse their children--like those who go back to work or school after the baby is born and whose bosses refuse to make accomodations for pumping. Those without the resources or time or money to find doctors, midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, or breastfeeding support groups who could help them figure out how to make it work. Those who have chosen to adopt children and who simply can't make milk flow despite how much they wish they could. Those living with physical diseases, mental illnesses, and other situations that make nursing inadvisable or impossible. And those like my dear friend Kelly, who had a double mastectomy several days after being diagnosed with breast cancer and whose baby screamed wretchedly when presented with formula. For weeks.

So to you, you five smug men without children who see women and their ta-tas as your property, I say you need to fall on your knees in gratitude to your mothers who welcomed your hungry little mouths and your pointy little teeth to their aching breasts when it would have been a lot easier to pour some formula in a bottle and go take a nap. Go say "thank you" to your mamas. And if your wives and girlfriends ever have children, just shut up. Support these new mothers no matter what. Whether they breastfeed or not. And try to feel a little ashamed about the days when you bachelors joked about how you were studly enough to get a woman pregnant whenever you felt like it; and about the days when you got hard-ons ogling women who nursed in public as discreetly as possible; and about the days when you made uninformed pronouncements about how long babies should nurse. Go on, try it now.

I make milk. What's your superpower?

PS: No, I'm not on the rag this week.

cavorting with Carl--but no bugs allowed!

February 2006

In the months after Griffin entered our world and turned it topsy-turvy, I missed many things previously taken for granted--the sensation of being in control of my life, the very real possibility of seven or eight uninterrupted hours of sleep most nights, theatre and dinner dates with my hubby, bras not designed for lactation. But I also missed my Thursday afternoons with Carl (born January 31, 2006).

October 2006

We would sing and play and eat and take walks, all en francais! By the time Carl first bonked me on the head and pronounced it a "tete!" (head), I was a goner. Head over heels with my nephew and with the idea of helping him learn a second language. Imagine my delight when he was regularly saying two- and three-word sentences in French at 18 months!

March 2007

I had been taking care of my nephew one afternoon a week for almost two years. (In fact, I went into labor a couple of hours after coming home from Carl's house the day before Griffin was born, around the time that the following photo was taken!)

January 2008

Watching Carl was so valuable for me on so many levels--I learned what it was like to spend hours at a time with an infant, then a toddler; I developed more patience, persuasiveness, and creativity; I became the recipient of countless beaming grins and hugs, giggles and kisses, rocking chair cuddles and silly sing-alongs. And lucky me--I experienced all this while sharing and teaching and learning in French.

March 2008

But once Griffin arrived (January 26, 2008), I couldn't spend five hours at a time one-on-one with Carl. My afternoons of babysitting stopped, and with them, Carl's French "lessons" with me (as well as my intention to blog regularly--oh well. I'm back now!). Our families saw each other less often, and Griffin was usually the center of attention when we did get together. Carl's spoken language (in English) rocketed, and he started attending preschool.

French slipped to the side, though he never actually rebelled against it or wanted me to speak English to him instead. Throughout most of 2008 and 2009, when I did see him and speak French, he showed no interest in responding in French. (Now he's at the point where he'll announce, "I can speak some French," or sing "Frere Jacques," or inform me, "Tatie, that's a camion, not a voiture" when we're playing cars together.)

October 2008

A while back (don't ask me how long--the first 15 months or so of Griffin's life seem just a blur to me now), Elizabeth (Carl's mom, my husband's sister) and I decided to try to get the boys together once a week. She'd watch them for two hours at her house, and I'd have them the next week at mine. At first, these playdates were painful: Carl was frustrated that Griffin didn't/wouldn't do what he wanted him to; I was frustrated that both boys wouldn't sit quietly and let me read to them in French; Griffin was frustrated because Carl and I were frustrated. At times I would stare at the clock, amazed that only 45 minutes had passed, dismayed that I had to keep them entertained and me sane for over an hour longer. (I remain in awe of single parents, parents of muliples, parents who have one baby and one or more other children, in fact. You guys rock.)

January 2009

I remember one morning last year in particular, when Griffin was walking and talking and Carl was a preschooler. In a fit of optimism brought on by a rare full night's sleep and a pang when thinking about my days as a full-time university instructor, I planned out a French lesson for the boys, all about bugs. I gathered books about bugs (La chenille qui faisait des trous, a nonfiction imagerie called Les insectes), my hand-made puppets for teaching The Very Hungry Caterpillar, bug toys (a hand-me-down stuffed butterfly that giggles, a wooden caterpillar, a butterfly teether), nursery rhymes featuring bugs ("Elle a des pois sur son manteau"), songs about butterflies ("Papillon vole, vole, vole gracieusement" by Muriel), and so forth. Envisioning watching the boys "fly" around the house while chanting my favorite French rhyme about ladybugs...

Elle a des pois sur son manteau
Et deux antennes sur son chapeau
Des petites ailes
Pour se faire belle
C'est Madame la Coccinelle!

...thrilled me. I was going to be able to continue to teach French to Carl after all! Carl and Griffin would grow up speaking French together!

Well, that one morning flopped so spectacularly that I haven't deliberately tried to teach Carl anything since! He wouldn't even color the pictures of insects I had prepared, much less repeat vocabulary words after me, make the toy butterfly soar whenever he heard papillon in the butterfly song, or sit still while I read the caterpillar book aloud.

Still, Carl doesn't protest when I speak French to him--and he was visibly surprised and indignant when he realized that Griffin understands words and phrases that he doesn't! (Like when the three of us are reading together, and I ask where a certain thing is in the picture, and Griffin will point to it right away while Carl's still trying to figure out what I mean.)

April 2009

So I'll keep trying to make learning French fun but keep the didactic bits low-key around Carl for now. As Elizabeth has noted, something's working, because he does speak French (or talk about speaking French) now and then. If anything changes, I'll let you all know!

October 2009

I want my, I want my, I want my Sesame Street videos

Despite the American Academy of Pediatrics' and our librarians' recommendations, we occasionally let Griffin watch some television. (Screen time is strongly discouraged before age two.) Fortunately, he is content to watch the same six music videos over and over on his daddy's laptop!

Of the six, one is pretty typical: Taylor Swift's "You Belong with Me"; Griffin calls out "football" and "bye-bye" and "pretty" at the appropriate places and can watch it again and again and again. And again.

The others, however, are not anything you'd see on MTV. (Does MTV even broadcast music videos anymore? We don't have cable, but I've heard that the music programming has shrunk considerably since the days when I would watch it after I put my brother to bed when babysitting and then quickly change the channel to Nickelodeon when my parents came home.)

Anyway, we recently purchased Sesame Street Playground. It contains songs from Sesame Street shows around the world and includes a bonus disc with five music videos.

Ever wonder what the theme song to this beloved show sounds like on the Indian subcontinent? Not a thing like the familiar sing-songy "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street" in a major key!

How about a jolly, rotund man named Ronnie cheering up a hyper girly Muppet by singing a song in Hebrew with nonsense words like "En Den Dino"? (It's very catchy--Griffin claps and sings along. In fact, so do his mother and father!)

My husband was pleased to recognize a few words from his college "Russian for Reading Knowledge" classes in the video of five young male Muscovite street sweepers, all wearing overalls with one strap unbuckled, channeling American boy bands from the nineties while they serenade us about the people who work in the city.

Then there's the South African anti-pollution song about picking up litter, where myriad Muppets sing earnestly in English and something else (Afrikaans?). The English is so highly accented to our American ears that if we hadn't read the subtitles we might not have realized that it wasn't a foreign language! The video features one of Griffin's favorite activities (putting stuff in trash cans) and lots and lots of Muppets (all of which he calls either "Elmo" or "Cookie Monster").

My favorite tune from the DVD, however, is yet another educational song: a song from Mexico about the importance of eating fruit. It features another jolly, earnest, round-faced guy surrounded by humongous singing and dancing tropical fruit. I didn't even recognize all of the fruit, even with the English translations provided in the subtitles. Thanks to my Oxford English Dictionary, now I know, for example, that a "pitayo" is a fruit that grows on a cactus!

So while not all of the videos reveal much about the culture of the countries where they are aired, they still give us a glimpse of what music, kids, and Muppets are like around the world, and they expose Griffin to other languages.

Griffin gives it two sticky thumbs up and a hearty "more week! more dino! more Elmo!"

Stay tuned for more reviews of language-learning videos and DVDs that we've shown Griffin. Feel free to click on "comments" and share your recommendations for toddler viewing!

Griffin the Songbird

Griffin is starting to sing along when he hears familiar music--he even sings on his own now! Sometimes the words are clear but the tune is fuzzy; sometimes it's the opposite. Occasionally he'll do hand and finger movements to accompany himself. (Then there was the one time that he got on his hands and knees and started kicking his feet into the air; we finally decided he was imitating a donkey, which he must have learned at daycare because the most my husband and I have ever attempted is a "hee-haw" now and then.)

Anyway, this post is more for me to try to keep track of what he sings. Here goes:

• The Wheels on the Bus (in English and in French, with new verses like "The mamans on the bus say 'je t'aime...'", "The Griffins on the bus say 'more, more, more...'", and "The Carls on the bus say 'no Griffin, no Griffin, no Griffin'").
• Ring Around the Rosie (which he refers to as "pocket")
• Frere Jacques
• Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
• Do do, l'enfant do (a French lullaby in which he usually replaces the generic l'enfant with the name of one of his stuffed animals, my name, or even his own name)
• The alphabet song in English and French (but he loses the lyrics near the end, yelling out "Now I know abcdcdcdcdcdcd!")
• Tape, tape petites mains
• Eency Weency Spider
• No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed
• Old McDonald
• Bits and pieces of songs in other languages from Sesame Street Playground

And quite a few more; I'll consult with Ed for help brainstorming the rest of the list.

Griffin's "uh-oh" book

This delightful little tome, Blue Hat, Green Hat, by the ever-popular, always-silly Sandra Boynton was the first book that Griffin asked for by name early this year as he was learning to talk. As you can see from the illustrations, it tells the story of a turkey who just can't quite figure out how to get dressed. The other animals wear their clothes on the appropriate body parts, but not the turkey. Each time he shows up with, say, a shoe on his head or fully clothed to dive into a swimming pool, we see the word "oops" above him.

Since I didn't know how to say "oops" in French, when I read this book to Griffin and Carl, I would substitute "uh-oh," a word that Griffin loved to announce (occasionally even before he threw the toy out of the crib or the food off the high chair tray, thereby serving as a useful warning).

(Note: I have since learned that the French word for "oops" is, well, "oups.")

Anyway, Griffin quickly learned to chime in on the "uh-oh"s when I read this to him, and he soon began pointing to it and saying "uh-oh" to indicate that he wanted to hear it again. What a thrill to see my one-year-old requesting a book by name, even before he could say much more than "no" and "more" and "bear" and "lolo"!

Blue Hat, Green Hat, is also the first book that Carl "read" out loud in French, since he knew the names for colors and articles of clothing, and he'd crack up every time he came to the "uh-oh"!

PS: I really, really wish I could find the French equivalent of Sandra Boynton--board books for toddlers that rhyme and tell stories using goofy pictures. (We do have a lot of kids' books in French for Griffin, but most of them are nonfiction and serious, not fun and funny.) Any recommendations?

PPS: I even emailed Ms. Boynton to ask if we can ever expect any professionally-translated versions of her books in French! As Adriana points out in the comments below, several have been translated into Spanish, including Doggies, Moo Baa La La La, and our beloved Blue Hat, Green Hat. Here is the response from Pam Boynton:

"Sandra Boynton's books have been translated into Spanish, but not into French. I believe this is a decision that is made by her publishers. I will let her know of your interest in French translations and we thank you for writing!"

Maybe if all my francophile readers write in and request French translations, Ms. Boynton's publishers will reconsider! If you wish, please contact her at info@pfboynton.com and leave a comment below letting us know. On behalf of Griffin, Carl, and French-speaking children around the world, merci beaucoup!