neither here nor there, ici ou là, acquí o allí

Sometimes carving the time out to read and write about raising my children bilingually is easy, familiar, fun, like slipping a spoon into soft-serve ice cream, each new idea and discovery and resource and online kindred spirit a colorful sprinkle that I devour.

(My husband is continually astonished by the number of websites I can have open simultaneously--but I can't close a page until I'm done thinking about it!)

Other times, carving out time to blog is the equivalent of scraping sheets of frozen ice off my car in a Colorado winter, a millimeter at a time, until I decide it's not worth it and just walk wherever I was headed (or more likely, decide the errand wasn't that urgent and go inside and make a new cup of tea).

my favorite gift to give this year--I love this book as much as my kids do!

You'd think that I'd know by now that for me, the month before Christmas (and several weeks afterwards) tends to be the latter.  Decorating, buying and wrapping and shipping presents for everyone, designing and sending cards, coaching the children through their handmade gifts, making my own handmade gifts, figuring out and following through on tips for those who have earned them and end-of-year charity donations, digging all the special once-a-year recipes and awkward appliances out of storage, plus all the shopping, holiday-party-and-church-service-attending, entertaining, traveling, hosting, and the packing and/or extra cleaning that traveling and hosting entails, not to mention working my paid and volunteer jobs, of course, plus the feeding, bathing, dressing-in-clean-clothes, cajoling-to-do-homework-and-practice-music, breaking-up-fights-between-siblings, scrubbing-sharpie-stains-off-the-dining-table, lulling-to-sleep that has happen, every single day, with small children….

small, beautiful children, to be sure

…all of which, fortunately, brings with it lovely quiet moments with family in front of a glowing tree decorated with memories, boisterous joy from happy kids on vacation, connecting with friends and relatives far away (I always leave their holiday cards up till spring break), cathartic sob sessions about friends and family who are gone, and a very good excuse to eat mountains of cookies and rivers of melted cheese.

Christmas Eve tradition inspired by my year in the Alps: raclette (melty cheese grilled tableside and poured over potatoes and ham)

Thus, blogging doesn't happen very often for me in December!

And it probably won't in January, not just yet, because I've fallen so far behind at work, and I still have a pile of Christmas New Year's cards to write and mail, plus thank-you notes, plus a massive pile of decorations and ornaments and wrapping supplies in the basement to organize and hide for the next eleven months, but right now, this very afternoon, I have carved out 1.5 hours to check in and tell you what blogworthy stuff is on my mind.

Like the successful completion of Carol's and my first French class for kids at Grandrabbit's, followed by our being hired for a new class this semester, accompanied by the worry that the manager isn't doing enough to publicize it.

Bricolage (arts and crafts) in French class!  

And trying to rework my weekly lesson with a five-year-old private tutoring client, whose dad is French, whom I want to challenge more while still keeping our time together fun for her.

Or how about the new games I've discovered or developed to enhance Griffin's and Gwyneth's French at home, the fantastic books we've been reading together, but also my reluctance to push Griffin to read and write more in French at home (he gets cranky about it after 7.5 hours in school every day).

And, oh my goodness, speaking of school, how freaking awesome it is that my kids are learning Spanish--really understanding it, even three-year-old Gwyneth with 11 hours of preschool a week.  Griffin is even writing one- and two-page narratives in the past tense, sprinkled with transition words, dialogue, and clear explanations of why the event he's describing was ¡fantastico!

And how freaking scared I am that the Spanish they and their friends are immersed every weekday in will supplant their French.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
Fruit and cookies for Santa on the potty chair.

myth-ing the point

For the last Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival of 2014, Annabelle, the host, challenged us to explode the myths that many people hold about bilinguals--are we truly confused?  Are our kids condemned to a childhood of code switching and strange looks from their classmates?  Will our efforts isolate us from our monolingual in-laws?

Nope.

Well--maybe.

But not really.  (So if any of those things do happen, don't blame the second language!)

Here's the best list I've encountered which enumerates and quickly dispels common myths about bilingualism, courtesy Prof. François Grosjean, author, linguist, parent, and all-around expert in this area: Myths About Bilingualism.

For today, I'd like to address the intersection of these two myths: "bilingual children experience language delays" and "being bilingual requires equal fluency in both languages."

Once upon a time, I was a French teacher, an aunt, and a part-time babysitter.  My sister-in-law had suggested that since I knew French, I might as well speak French to my nephew, Carl, while taking care of him one afternoon a week.  So I made the effort to learn vocabulary that had never before appeared in my French conversation or reading ("bouncy chair," "put the pumped milk into the bottle warmer," "what in the world is that foul odor?", "Can't I just cut the onesie off him after a diaper blow-out?") and spent many happy hours reading and singing and taking walks with Carl, all in French.

Tatie and Carl, 2006

And, by golly, at 18 months that brilliant baby was regularly making two- and three-word utterances in French. (I'm not exaggerating even a little bit--I took careful notes each time I was with him, which led to his first four-word sentence at 18 months: "Tatie écrit stylo livre"--Auntie is writing with a pen in her book!)

Clearly, being exposed to two languages from infancy didn't delay his language acquisition (nor did it impede his English ability).

Now, let's take a look at the other end of the spectrum: my daughter Gwyneth.  She's almost three and a half, and her speech in English is often nearly as unintelligible as her French.  

She has a lot to say, mind you, but chances are a stranger would have trouble deciphering it, what with the consonants she mispronounces ("ewewewatow" for "elevator") or drops altogether ("et" for "yet"), the sounds she transposes ("smoothie" becomes "soomie"), her occasional French words ("I a loup and my brover a loup"), her occasional missing words ("I no" which means "I don't know"), her even-less-frequent Spanish words (mostly numbers and bits of songs that she picks up at her Spanish immersion preschool) and the family-specific ideas she tends to reference (such as zerberts, sleep-unders, and tuck-tucks).

Gwyneth, 2014

Thus, when Gwyneth announces, "My wittle eye sawt wit wew!", we know (but no one else does) that she wants to play I Spy.  (She's heard her brother say "I spy with my little eye something that starts with B" and "I spy with my little eye something that is red," so she makes a valiant attempt to express "I spy with my little eye something that is vert," green.) 

See, we know what she means because we speak English, French, and Gwynese.  My wittle eye sawt wit wew.** (Doesn't that just make you want to give her a big squeezey hug?!  So cute.)

Given the fact that she was barely talking at 18 months, and not saying much as a two-year-old, I might characterize Gwyneth's speech as "delayed" (or perhaps just "confusing"), but there's no reason to attribute it to her hearing two languages from birth.  And for the record, both her pediatrician and her preschool teacher have reassured me that her language development is age appropriate, if perhaps on the low end of normal, and she did have an auditory test earlier this year just to make sure that she's hearing her consonants correctly.

Griffin's linguistic development, on the other hand, fell somewhere in between his sister and his cousin--neither astonishingly early nor a little late.  Again, I don't think that had anything to do with the languages he was hearing at home.

I did hear a lot of code-switching from Griffin as a toddler, though, particularly with nouns.  His sentences usually consisted of pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions in English, plus nouns in French.  I'm sure that this is because the majority of books he knew were in French, and we encounter words in books--volcano, hedgehog, leprechaun--that tend not to appear regularly in conversation.

(Code-switching, by the way, is neither a myth nor improper speech, but a normal stage in language development.  It doesn't occur because kids are confused, but rather because some words are easier to access in a certain language and those are the ones that come out first.  Later on, code-switching can be a deliberate choice when a person wants to use a word or phrase in the other language for emphasis, humor, or to identify herself as a member of a group.)

Griffin, 2012

Both of my children understand French as well as English, at least in the situations I've observed, although they both have a clear preference for English.  When prompted, Griffin will speak French, but haltingly.  (Unless we are discussing a book we're reading together, and then his French feels more organic, probably because the phrases and ideas from the story are surrounding us.)  As for Gwyneth, she usually refuses to do anything we ask her to do, so I've stopped encouraging her to reply to me in French, saving my requests for important things like brushing teeth and wearing pants.  (Hey, maybe I should start telling her she has to speak English from now on!  She would almost certain embrace the language just for the sake of rebelling against me.)  

(By the way, the thought of Gwyneth the teenager terrifies me.)

So I can't say that Griff and Gwyn are bilingual, right?  Despite my efforts and their passive understanding of French, they simply are not as fluent in their second language.  In fact, I often suspect that my own French isn't strong enough to be considered fluent--talking on the phone can reduce me to caveman-like stammers, I miss a lot in movies when the characters are speaking fast, using slang, or not facing the camera, I can't engage in political discussions,  some of the literature I studied in grad school reduced me to tears, and my accent immediately betrays me as a Anglophone.

I learned not to dwell on these perceived inadequacies, however, when I started speaking exclusively in French to my infant son.  I didn't want to feel self-conscious, so I kept reminding myself that even if my kids ended up speaking a second language imperfectly, that would still be much better than only speaking one language, period.

G&G, 2014

However, it appears that Dr. Grosjean would disagree, would insist that the fact that my kids and I are not equally fluent in both languages does not detract from our bilingualism:

"Some bilinguals are dominant in one language, others do not know how to read and write in one of their languages, others have only passive knowledge of a language and, finally, a very small minority, have equal and perfect fluency in their languages.  What is important to keep in mind is that bilinguals are very diverse, as are monolinguals."

In other words, non-native speakers like me can achieve fluency in our second languages, and we can proudly call ourselves--and our children--bilinguals.

ma famille, 2011

*Note to Griffin and/or Gwyneth: "Condemned to a Childhood of Code Switching" would make a great title for your memoirs one day.

**Whereas an autobiography called "My Wittle Eye Sawt Wit Wew" probably wouldn't make the bestseller lists.

moms like me at the carnival

Maria of Trilingual Mama is hosting the June edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival, and her theme is monolingual or non-native parents and their bilingual kids!  Drop by for a visit.

caca, communication, conundrum

"Oh.  No.  The baby just had a diaper blow-out all over his onesie in the bouncy chair."

"Damn you, colic."

"Hey, don't play with that flange for my breast pump!  I just sterilized it!"

"Young man, we do not put our fingers in our noses.  We do not remove the boogers and wave them in the air.  And we certainly do not plunge our mucousy digits into our mouths to partake of their slimy saltiness."

"Nor do we eat our eye boogers."

"No, sweetie, those aren't your panties.  Those are the bloomers that match your dress and go over your panties so you don't flash passers-by while you do somersaults and climb on the jungle gym.  Isn't it great that you don't need to wear pull-ups any more?"

"Griffin, when you hit kids in your class, they won't want to be
your friends.  I know you're so smart and caring, but when you act like a bully, the other kids won't like you, and that breaks my heart."

"Sweetheart, Grandpa left us.  He was so sick that he just couldn't get better.  No, you can't sing '76 Trombones' to him over the phone to make him smile, and he can't hold you on his lap and read to you any more, and it breaks my heart, and I don't know how to answer your questions about what happens next.  Even in English.  All I can do is hold you and tell you je t'aime, je t'aime, je t'aime."

Holding someone does help.

These are just a few of the things I never learned how to say in French class but that I have had to express while raising my children in my non-native language!   (No high school or college foreign language curriculum covers vocabulary for convincing a toddler to go caca in the potty.)

As host of the June edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival, trilingual mom Maria has asked us to write about our experiences raising children in our non-native language.  I feel like I expressed it best in this post after my daughter was born: "Second Language, Second Child."

Three years later not much has changed, except that I have a better grasp of the salient vocabulary and I panic less about things like colic and caca!

What I can say for certain after six years of parenting in my non-native language is that speaking French to my children forces me to pay attention to what I say to them, always.  Having to pause, even just a half-second, to find the right word or to put an indirect object pronoun in front of the verb where it belongs, means that my communication with them is purposeful, deliberate, heartfelt.  Speaking French in an English world means that I am constantly choosing to be present, alert, connecting with my children.

This challenge gift also means that my children and I share an intimacy, a linguistic complicity, that they don't have with anyone else.  It's special and precious (and it reinforces that old saying that French is the language of love!).

As Griffin grows older, his mind moving a million miles a minute, it's harder and harder to have conversations where I can fully and accurately express exactly what I want to say to him--why he needs to be compassionate, what's worth fighting for, how to put away his neatly folded clean clothes without wadding them all up into one drawer and losing socks along the way.

At some point, probably sooner that I'd like, I will be faced with a difficult decision: stubbornly staying in French no matter what--even if this entails losing nuance and muddying meaning and speaking haltingly--or resigning myself to the fact that I need to speak English with him because I am articulate and precise and funny and interesting in English, less so in French--thus sending the message that English is easier, more useful, and more important.  And maybe betraying myself and my blog.

What would you do?  What have you already done?

This post was written for the June edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival.

getting technical with the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival

This month our hostess, Rita, collected and annotated blog posts about the elements of technology that we use most while using with more than one language with our kids.  Check out the favorites--and some caveats--at the May edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival on Rita's blog, Multilingual Families Raising Bilingual Children!

writing about reading in the April carnival

Adriana is the gracious host of this month's Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival over at Homeschool Ways.  She gathered a collection of blog posts about teaching reading to the children we are raising with more than one language.  Thanks, Adriana, for the anthology and annotations!

For more info on how to get involved with this monthly carnival, visit our founder Annabelle's blog, The Piri-Piri Lexicon.

Immerse yourself in the carnival!

The March edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival is out!  Bop on over to Hapa Mom to see the posts that Kat has gathered.

Curious about this carnival?  Read Annabelle's explanation--and join us for the next one!

gratefully

As host of the November edition of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival, I wanted to pay tribute to the upcoming US holiday of Thanksgiving.  Yes, even though I'm feeling rather resentful of this warm and fuzzy celebration, given my father's recent passing ("gratitude" is not the first emotion to come to mind this season).

But it seems that connecting with other parents all over the world who are also raising their children with more than one language and finding out what they are most thankful for in this process has helped--I see that we have much in common, that we all persevere, that we will all be thrilled one day down the road when our children tell us "Thank you for making it possible for me to become multilingual."

So I asked you all what you are grateful for on these journeys--your supportive spouse?  your library card?  your frequent flyer miles?  And the results are in!  I think they'll resonate with you as much as they do with me.

Family: Unsurprisingly, the most popular answer.  We cherish our parents' and our spouses' support, even if they don't speak the language we are imparting to our children!  Strongly connected to this answer are several writers' mentions of their families' cultural heritage as well as a discussion of how multilingualism shapes the family's identity.

Education: The second most common answer.  We praise our teachers, our schools, our children's schools, our children's afterschool enrichment programs.

Bookstores and libraries: Number three on our list of what we appreciate, from behemoths like Amazon to small local companies like Les Petits Livres to the public library.  (I am especially partial to eBay Canada for used children's books in French

Our children's attitudes: The fourth most cited answer.  We delight in our kiddos' interest in and willingness to speak the minority language(s), describing it with phrases like "zest for learning" and "contagious enthusiasm."

Community:  We so appreciate what our circles of friends, our communities (next door and online), and our cities offer to multilingual families.

Travel and the Internet: Interestingly, these two nearly-polar-opposite ideas received an equal number of mentions in our essays!  Some of us treasure our opportunities to travel to countries where our families' minority language is spoken; some of us treasure the Internet, which brings those other countries into our homes.

Everything else: One or two writers also cited the following ideas: watching videos in the target language; the way that multilingualism has sculpted self-identity and created a sense of family identity; and appreciation for the way that others react to a multilingual family.

Intrigued?  Now go take a look at all of the essays to read more about the writers' explanations of their choices!

Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Parenting and Teaching: Eugenia describes an "all-day family pyjama party" and her children's ability to switch in and out of languages with ease, concluding with "the language we all stuck to today, understood perfectly and loved using no matter who we were with was the language of happiness.  My favourite of them all!"

Bilinguebabies: Audrey praises her "very patient monolingual husband and father," her oldest child's willingness to speak Spanish to his siblings, their books, the opportunities for her family in London, and "the joy of hearing and seeing the benefits [of bilingualism] in my children."

Bringing up Baby Bilingual: I share my appreciation for my education, my family, the Internet, and my community of Francophones, Francophiles, teacher colleagues, fellow bloggers, the public library, and my son's bilingual (Spanish-English) elementary school, explaining that indeed, to raise children with more than one language, "it takes un village."

Busy as a Bee in Paris: Maria enumerates 30(!) things that she's thankful for, especially her "four beautiful children who are each embracing their multilingualism and multiculturalism with their whole hearts."  She also explains that sharing three languages (English, Spanish, and French) "makes our family so united and so unique and gives us a common goal and identity and purpose!"

Discovering the World Through My Son's Eyes: Frances freely admits that raising her son bilingually has been challenging, but now that she is successfully teaching him to read in Spanish, her "worries instantly subsided with his reaction....his excitement to learn a new language."  She is grateful for his motivation, which in returns motivates her!

A French American Life: Carol shares her many reasons for gratitude, from education to bookstores to her children's attitudes.  Being the maman of a bilingual, bicultural family has broadened her horizons and improved her outlook: "I'm a better, more tolerant, more open-minded, more patient, and I think more interesting person after learning how different languages, cultures, and families can be."

Intentional Mama: Michele meditates on grace and gratitude as a mother, world citizen, and writer, citing in particular Les Petits Livres, a French children's books rental-by-mail service, as a wonderful resource.  She adds, "I'm grateful for the time I've been able to spend living and traveling in other countries.  From Sri Lanka to Syria, the people I've met have added so much to my understanding of human nature, and I feel fortunate for these experiences and how they've changed my global perspective."

Mommy Speaks Chinese: Emy focuses on the education: her quest to find an extracurricular Chinese language program for her two children with an emphasis on speaking and interacting, unlike the stiff, serious, writing-intensive Saturday Chinese school that so many Chinese-American children of her generation attended.  "I was really happy to find an after school Chinese immersion program just two miles from my house!  It was a brand new facility, with bright cheerful classrooms, sweet smiling teachers and (most importantly) small class sizes.  Lessons included hands on cooking and crafts."

Multilingual Parenting: Rita lists her top 20 reasons that she is glad to be bilingual, including several ideas that no one else mentioned: "I have had the opportunity to read great literature in the language it was originally written in" and "When I was young I had pen pals (with pen and paper via snail mail!) in  several countries all over the world."  Moreover, she points out, "I can now help other families bring up their children to become bilingual."

Open Hearts, Open Minds: As a non-native speaker of Spanish, Lynn is most thankful for WordReference.com ("with the increasingly complex definitions my four-year-old is demanding, I'd have a hard time getting through the day without my favorite iPhone app"); her son's Spanish immersion preschool ("having teachers from various Spanish-speaking countries gives him the kind of exposure that it's hard for just me to provide"); and her monolingual husband who brags about his bilingual son.

The Piri-Piri Lexicon: Annabelle realizes that she is lucky for quite a few elements of her multilingual life, from the American Library in their German city to Apple TV to her parents' and in-laws' support ("never questioning our decision to raise LJ with four languages, trusting us, supporting us and helping LJ to practice her languages.  I probably would have disowned them anyway if they had raised any objections!).  She concludes with a lovely tribute to her amazing daughter who is "perfectly happy, not at all confused, silent or dumbed down by having four languages...by 14 months."

Project Procrastinot: Mercedes agrees that job prospects and test scores and lower risk of dementia are all important benefits of raising one's children bilingually.  But more essentially, as "professional nomads, living thousands of miles away from family, we don't need a language barrier to divide us even further....Speaking Spanish will be a way for Astro and Cupcake to 'belong' with their family in Venezuela, and to honor our Mexican heritage as well."

Wow, right?!

And now, please share what elements of being in a multilingual family that you are most grateful for!  What makes you nod your head vigorously in agreement?  What did we leave out?

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers.  Give big hugs to your family.

coming up on carnival time!

In November, I will have the honor of hosting the monthly Raising Multilingual Children blogging carnival.  Because here in the US we celebrate Thanksgiving this month, I am hoping to gather posts about what you are grateful for as you raise your children with more than one language--your frequent flyer miles?  your public library?  your supportive spouse?

Please send me the link to your post about gratitude and language learning or teaching by Monday, November 18; I will publish the carnival collection on November 25.  You can email me at babybilingual {at} gmail {dot} com.

Here, I'll start: thank YOU!  Thank you for reading my blog and thank you for sharing your experiences with me and your other readers.

Hooray for the October Carnival!

Bravo to Frances, author of Discovering the World Through My Son's Eyes, who is hosting this month's Raising Multilingual Children blogging carnival.  She posed a very important question:

How do you nurture your child's target language? Has it been through play, games, immersion, travel, culture, or books?

To see how 25+ parents responded, just click here!  I think you'll find that many of the responses resonate with you too.  Thank you to Frances for hosting!

language, literature, love

For this month’s installment of the Raising Multilingual Blogging Carnival, the host asked us to write about how we keep our children immersed in the target language--travel, games, music, and so forth.  While I wish I could say that we spend every summer in France, or that we have regular contact with native speakers via an extensive social circle and a Swiss au pair--or simply that my husband was fluent enough that we could speak exclusively French at home!--I realized that our solution is decidedly less complex.

Books.

Our children have heard me reading to them in French since before they were born, and not just because I work in a library and used to be a teacher.  As a non-native and far-from-perfect speaker of French, I knew that books were our golden ticket into French and Francophone culture and language.  In books, we--and especially our children, with their brain-sponges--encounter words that we might never use in a week, or a month, or a year.

In books, we hear dialogue at its best--flowing, clear, articulate, sassy, thought-provoking, and (generally) grammatically correct.

In children’s books and magazines, colorful illustrations accompany the text, allowing us to better understand the words and the story, giving us ideas about the book before we even start reading it.

Also, for parents like me, who learned French in school as teens and adults and never had to talk in their second language about dirty diapers, sippy cups, “love and logic” discipline, and which fast food restaurant has the cleanest indoor playground, children’s books give us that crucial daily dealing-with-a-baby-or-toddler vocabulary.

Because of books, I finally understand all the lyrics to the songs and rhymes that delight my children and keep them content during long car rides and when doing chores around the house.

If traveling opens doors for us, then books are windows into all those other places and people’s lives.  Because of my reading to him, Griffin knows what French children drink for breakfast (chocolat chaud in a bowl), what is sold in souks in Tunisia (a little bit of everything), and that not all contes de fée have truly happy endings.  (Gwyneth, on the other hand, knows that the cow goes “meuh,” that Madeline lives in Paris, and that board books with flaps to lift are the best. Thing. Ever.)  Every book I share with Griffin and Gwyneth is another window for our home.  When they’re ready to walk out our front door, they’ll know where they’re going (or at least how to talk to the folks when they get there).
 

I also read in French to my children for selfish reasons: poring over a book together gives me an excuse to snuggle with my oh-so-big almost-six-year-old son, that boy whose dinner conversation already tends toward monosyllables when we ask him what happened at school that day.  Reading with him allows us to laugh together, figure things out together, share our thoughts and questions--in other words, to have genuine conversations.  (The fact that it happens in the target language is just a bonus.)

And as for my daughter, who is two years old, and VERY two years old at that (willful, imperious, unpredictable, shrieky, simultaneously independent and helpless), books give her a reason to slow down, sit down, calm down.  She actually listens to me when I read to her. 

Oh, how sweet it is, to cuddle together in the rocking chair with a stack of books at my feet, her current favorite dolly tucked between us, making her giggle when I point out a funny picture or read a silly rhyme, watching her eyes grow wide when she is surprised or confused, aching with pride as she identifies which animal says “cocorico” and which vehicle goes “tchou tchou,” rolling my eyes and smiling when she tells me that the ladybug is rouge, and the banana is rouge, and the bathtub is rouge (“red” is the only color word she can say so far in either language).

The fact that this happens in the target language is just a bonus.
 

So I’m not just immersing Griffin and Gwyneth in a target language--I’m immersing them in books, cultivating their curiosity, helping them learn about life outside of our comfortable home, developing and maintaining strong bond.  I’m not just immersing them in French, I’m immersing them in a mother’s love.
 

The fact that this happens in the target language is, oui, just a bonus.

bilingual parent bloggers!

Oops--I forgot to submit a post to the blogging carnival by bilingual parents for August, and then I forgot to announce here that the post was up at Perogies and Gyoza!  Thanks to Jen for curating another very cool collection of posts.

a list, plus a favor to request

It's tough to be a toddler.

It's also tough to write fluently or with much detail when you're sitting next to a crib from which that toddler is protesting with great decibel power that she wants out of her crib, but won't let you pick her up.

(If she were actually expressing herself with more than "noooooo" and "mamamamama" and guttural screams and increasingly higher shrieks, you'd be thrilled; but she really doesn't talk much yet.)

(It's not that you're worried that she's not verbal enough for her age--not really--but you're such a language geek that you really wish she was producing more comprehensible stuff in either language!)

(Although your husband points out that she made her first six-word phrase last night--quite a jump from her customary two-word utterances--"my hat and my dada hat"--because she is clearly a little girl who cares about fashion.)

Anyway, because she's screaming her head off and I'm trapped in the rocking chair, this blog post will be a simple list of what I've been meaning to write about lately.

1.  The May edition of the Raising Multilingual Children blog carnival came out about a week ago; Annabelle of The Piri-Piri Lexicon, founder and host, offers annotated links to lots of cool posts on the topic.

2.  My blog had a birthday!  Seven years since my first post. (If "Bringing up Baby Bilingual" were a person, then it would be in second grade now.)

3.  The annual "Top 100 Language Lovers" competition is currently in progress.  Sponsored by Lexiophiles and the bab.la language portal, this popular event identifies blogs, Twitterers, and Facebook pages that promote the joy of languages.  "Bringing up Baby Bilingual" is a finalist in the "Language Learning Blogs"and I would deeply appreciate your vote.  (25 of the 100 nominees will ultimately be chosen, in part based on the number of votes they receive.)

Why vote for me when all the other nominees have remarkable blogs?  How about because...

My kids dressed up as Hansel and Gretel for the preschool's Fairy Tale Tea.  Finally, a reason for him to wear the lederhosen that his grandmother found at a garage sale!

a.  I speak for those of us who choose to use our non-native language with our children.

b.  I have also branched out into Pinterest and am using its virtual bulletin boards to organize zillions of resources about language learning, early literacy, YouTube playlists of songs in French, reading games, and more.

Pinterest is addictive--but I'm using its forces for good!

c.  True, I have been blogging with less frequency, but continue to expand my "French Teaching at Home" page with annotated links to recommended materials.

c.  If my blog is chosen one of the top 25 Language Learning Blogs, I will feel validated and rejuvenated and thus start posting more often again!

But I'll still make time to take Griffin out on his two-wheeler, I promise.

Please show your support for non-native speakers raising their kids bilingually and for parents and teachers who share their resources by voting for my blog, "Bringing up Baby Bilingual," by June 9, 2013.

Thank you--and thank you to the teachers and my Francophone friends who have helped me get to the point where I can use my non-native French with my kids well enough that I am able to blog about it!

the Carnival is back!

Letizia from Bilingue Per Gioco, founder of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, has passed the torch to Annabelle of the piri-piri lexicon, who is our new fearless leader for a monthly blogging carnival: Raising Multilingual Children.

I didn't get my act together in time to submit a post for this month's carnival, hosted by Coco at Multilingual Mama, but that doesn't mean I won't be rushing over there to be inspired by what the regulars and the new voices have to say about their adventures in bilingual parenting!   I hope to see y'all there....

visit the carnival!

Have you seen the September edition of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism?  Leanna at All Done Monkey is this month's gracious host.  What are you waiting for?  Go read the posts she rounded up about parenting in more than one language!

visit a worldwide carnival without leaving your computer!

That's right, the August Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism is ready for us to visit!  Swing by Best 4 Future, where Lina has assembled an impressive collection of posts from a wide variety of bloggers who share their thoughts on raising children with more than one language.  Thanks, Lina!

step right up, ladies and gentlemen

...and visit this month's Carnival!  Tamara of Non-native Bilingualism is hosting a lively and thought-provoking group of posts about raising children with more than one language.  See you there!  (Here.)

been to a Carnival lately?

Oh, the May version of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism is out!  Visit Dominique's Desk to read ten or so stories about parents raising their children with more than one language; their tales touch on culture, reading, singing, and much more!

carnival of words

Make sure to swing by Gato & Canard for the April Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism!  Merci beaucoup to Annabelle for hosting this month.  She spent four years analyzing language acquisition in bilingual children and brings a welcome academic perspective to our gathering!

join in the fun!

It's time for another Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism!  Head on over to Pebble Meddle, where you'll meet lots of other families who are raising their children with more than one language.