wee laddie and lassie in the Colorado Highlands

You are a non-native speaker of the language you're raising your children to speak, and you live far away from the countries where it is spoken.  You know that the ideal way to learn any language is by complete immersion in it--just as you learned to speak your first language as a toddler.  But you can't offer that to your children, at least not right now, without much vacation time off work for you and your partner and no relatives abroad who could host you.

(Plus, with two small children, it can be an ordeal just to get your family out the door for a picnic in the park with all the necessary supplies--and that's just a two-block walk away for an hour-long activity, not a series of international flights to spend days or weeks in a new place!)

You--that is, I--I know that my family will travel to France, to Belgium, to Quebec, to Martinique, to Morocco some day.  But in the meantime, I will do my best to expose them to French and Francophone culture through books, DVDs, storytimes, and playdates.

And not just French and Francophone culture, for that matter!

Griffin and Gwyneth will grow up knowing that ours is just one of dozens and dozens of countries in this world--that some children eat noodle soup for breakfast, some speak three and four languages, some sleep under the stars, some take a boat to school, some don't go to school at all.

Unfortunately, my son and daughter will also have to learn that some children have to walk miles every day to fetch drinking water from a polluted pond, some are taught to use guns against others at the age when American kids are figuring out how to hold a baseball bat, that some children are born to mothers so young they are still children themselves, mothers who will go on to bear four or six or eight more--if they don't die in childbirth, that is.

But right now, with the kids at ages one and four, we can stay in the bright generalities of mountains vs. deserts, gigantic ocean mammals vs. bizarre marsupials, colorful dresses and towering skyscrapers and jungles and "Can you believe that some people like to eat chicken feet, or calf brains, or seaweed, or coffee beans that an animal ingested and then pooped out?"

Aaaaand we can take them to the Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Festival, the largest Celtic heritage event in Colorado!  No, it has nothing to do with French, but until I find, say, a West African dance competition or a Tahitian pirogue-carving camp or a symposium on Swiss chocolate around here, we'll take them to a slice of Scotland in the Colorado highlands.

now Griffin wants to toss cabers and joust too

Gwyneth, in her tartan sash, enjoyed the Scottish music so much that....

she asked a piper if she could join the band

Griffin bellowed "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?" 

...before running across the competition field with wild abandon (in his kilt, handmade by Tatie Amy)

And they'll love it.

What's new at Bringing up Baby Bilingual? (January 2012)

Mon fils can write his own prénom!   Uncoached!  Up to this point, I've drawn dots for him to connect so that he could "sign" his name on cards.  Yesterday, I was in a hurry and just told him to write "Griffin," fully expecting to see some cheerful, vigorous scribbles as a result.  Wowza!  He learned to write his name when we weren't looking!

Ma fille now likes to ride on mes épaules.

(Oh, did you think I meant "What's new on the blog?" Dear readers, thanks, once again, for indulging my habit of gratuitously posting photos of my kiddos.)

Here's what I've added to the blogroll recently:

French Today, a blog of fun and useful resources for practicing your French and learning about French culture (written by the the owner of a company that sells mp3 French classes--I just bought one with fairy tales because it sounded like it would help both me and Griffin).

She also shares some video clips of her daughter speaking and singing in French--adorable, plus it's important to me that Griffin see other children using French.

Parisian Fields, a very well-written, beautifully-photographed blog about the City of Lights, focusing on history and culture from the perspective of a Canadian francophile couple.

Vos questions de parents, "Pour aider vos enfants a grandir," a website in French with activities and advice divided up by children's ages.

PicassoHead, a face drawing game that you can play with your young children (and that older kids can play by themselves).  While it's not a language-based game, it provides lots of opportunities to discuss facial features using vocabulary more sophisticated than just "nose" and "smile" and "brown eyes" in the target language.

Get Bilingual, a growing series of YouTube tutorials about teaching your own second language to your children (or just staying a step ahead as you learn along with them).

And in a new category for my blogroll, "Global Learning," because I wanted to highlight these blogs and websites that encourage learning about other cultures and countries, even though most of these links don't focus specifically on languages:

Global Table Adventure, a blog by a mom whose family is learning about the culture and food of every country in the world (in alphabetical order) via their own kitchen in the US.

InCulture Parent, "a magazine for parents raising little global citizens" with articles and essays, including some by bloggers I really admire, Jan and Souad from BabelKid and Coco from Multilingual Mama.

Moms Gone Global, "helping parents raise happy, healthy, globally-enlightened kids," with crafts, activities, recipes, and more, with a global flare.

Drag-and-drop Middle East map quiz--because the region stretches as far west as French-speaking Morocco (and because I can't keep my -stans straight)

And what links would you like to recommend?

Oh, okay, if you insist: one more photo.  This is my niece Eleanor (14 months) with her  baby cousin Gwyneth.

note to self: don't judge monolingual families!

A visit with an old friend this past weekend got me thinking: is it possible for those of us who are raising bilingual or multilingual families to congratulate ourselves for our efforts yet not judge those families who don't? Particularly families whose parents do speak more than one language already?

Natasha and I have been friends for fifteen years, when we studied abroad in the same city in France. Originally from Russia, she and her parents came to the US as refugees when she was 16. By the time she was in college, she was fluent in English, very good in French, and had also studied some German. Although she hasn't had a reason to use her French since college, she said she felt it coming back as she interacted with Griffin this weekend. (And her accent is still great!)

She has two children, ages three and seven, and she confesses that she doesn't speak Russian with them. Her parents, who moved to be near her family, are so very disappointed that she has not passed her mother tongue on to the kids. But she doesn't beat herself up about it: she had to be realistic, she said. She has worked full-time all along, with her husband doing more of the day-to-day child care, so during the few hours in the evening that they are all together as a family, she has not wanted to shut her non-Russian-speaking husband out. She chose harmony and family time over bilingualism.

She also pointed out that her own Russian language development more or less stopped when she was a teenager. Never having been exposed to the critical baby-related vocabulary in her native language, she couldn't say everything she wanted to when her first child was born, and she had neither the time nor the inclination to research Russian vocabulary with a newborn around. (This is a significant difference from how it worked for me: when I started taking care of my nephew once a week and writing this blog four years ago, I was a newlywed teaching full-time in a foreign language department. I had myriad friends and colleagues to ask vocabulary questions of and who were genuinely interested in hearing about my would-be bilingual nephew. In other words, I had what she didn't: lots and lots of linguistic support and lots and lots of time.)

And she didn't state this, but of course it would probably be especially difficult to raise Russian-speaking children in the medium-sized town in the northwest where they live--no Russian playgroups, no Russian nannies, stares from strangers at the grocery store and the doctor's office, skepticism from the preschool and elementary teachers, the expense of buying books from halfway across the world.

That all makes sense to me, but I wish for her children's sake that she had been able to raise them bilingually. Of course, it's none of my business, and seeing these words in print makes me feel terrible, like I'm judging her, when the last thing any parent needs is the disapproval of a friend or the judgment of someone who's not in her shoes!

Still, it seems like her kids are much better off than those whose families haven't given them a second language. (Look, there I go, being judgmental again, this time against people like my very own parents!) One of my too-many projects that I'm doing for/about Griffin is making a storytime DVD. Ever since he was born, I have videotaped family and friends reading to him, singing songs, reciting rhymes, so I asked Natasha if I could film her. She read him a book in English and then, after some gentle prodding, told him a nursery rhyme in Russian, then another, then another. Griffin ate it up, telling her "More! More!" so that she had to repeat them over and over. At one point, she looked down and said, "More? Yeah, this is Sasha's favorite too." So even though she doesn't use Russian with the kids, she surely sings to them and recites these rhymes. She still shares her language and her culture with them. And I think her parents do speak Russian around them too.

As Clarisse, a Brazilian in Namibia, mentioned in her recent profile, an inextricable part of raising children with more than one language is the idea that we are exposing them to other cultures as well, showing them that an entire world exists around them, a world where other people's appearances, beliefs, homes, and languages can be quite different from ours. So Natasha's kids are definitely benefitting from that. They are growing up bicultural, if not bilingual, which is just as important, and perhaps even more useful. This also presents a significant contrast with me and Griffin: he may be bilingual, but I have not shown him much about French or francophone culture so far. (Uh-oh. Judge away!)

All this simply reinforces my belief that we parents are doing what we can, giving what we can, the best we can, most of the time (I honestly can't say "All of the time," at least in regards to myself), and that's plenty good for our kids, and that we shouldn't pass judgments based on what everyone else does. Bravo and kudos to us bilingual families--and to the monolingual ones as well.