where did the año go?!

Griffin and Gwyneth in front of their school, Escuela Bilingüe Pioneer

I sent my second grader and preschooler to school yesterday and they didn't come home.  Instead, at the end of the day, a rising kindergartener and a third grader greeted me with hugs and overstuffed backpacks and paleta-stained fingers.

a peanut of a rising kindergartener who only weighs 31 pounds--the big kids won't even notice her in the hallways and she'll get squished like un insecto--and a third grader who has lost several teeth and gained a pair of glasses in the past month!

And I cried during the end-of-the-year pre-K slide show.

Gwyneth "can't stand" my French!

My daughter (who recently turned four, which gives me hope for my sanity, as she's no longer a "threenager") is very, very good at pushing my buttons, and she is realizing that perhaps the best way to do this is to claim that she doesn't know what I'm saying and that I need to translate it into English for her.

joyeux anniversaire !

"Mommy!  I can't 'stand your French!  Say it in English!"

Deep breaths.

Don't let her know that I'm frustrated and saddened.

Recognize that yelling, "Mais si, je sais que tu me comprends!" doesn't improve the situation.  [But I know you understand me!]  To which she will reply, in English, "No I don't!"

Just smile, rephrase, repeat.  Point, gesture, demonstrate.  Hug, rephrase, repeat.  Hug, repeat.  Hug.  Câlin.  Hug.

"You can take a picture of me, but you can't make me smile."

random Frenchy, teachy things

No time for full blog posts this month!  But at least I can make a bulleted list of some of my recent Frenchy and/or teachy thoughts….

gratuitous shot of G&G at the zoo

• A mom I know who occasionally uses her non-native French with her teen daughters told me that she has discovered a way to cut down on the speed and intensity of their arguments: she announces things like curfew in French, and when the girls protest, they have to do so on French too!
• Grandrabbit's Play, where Carol and I taught two French classes for kiddos, closed last month, so we won't be teaching there again.  :(
• But I now am leading three separate weekly French tutoring sessions: one with a four-year-old, one with a group of siblings ages four through nine, and a duo of ten-year-old boys.  (See those toes down there?  These three very different classes are keeping me on them!)
• The afore-mentioned siblings are already bilingual (from Spanish-speaking homes), and it's sooooo cool to observe how completely unfazed they are when I speak French to them for 30 minutes at a time.  No freaking out, no funny looks, no demands for translation.  It's like they know that they'll get it eventually, and in the meantime, they are understanding enough to have fun.
• I saw the four-year-old at school; she was wearing a t-shirt with an owl on it, and when she saw me, she pointed to it and said "hibou!  hibou, Sarah!"
• The mom of the other four-year-old told me excitedly that she can't wait until she and her daughter can converse in French.  Should I tell her that half an hour once a week won't lead to that anytime soon?
• Griffin is really enjoying the following three resources in French: the magazine "Youpi! J'ai compris!" along with the free animated videos on nonfiction topics available on Brainpop and the geography games on Jeux de geographie. 
• Gwyneth continues to assert that she doesn't know how to speak French whenever I ask her how to say something or other in French.
• Gwyneth also continues to tell her nanny, "My daddy doesn't talk French or Spanish.  My mommy talks French and English.  I talk French, English, and Spanish."
• Her pronunciation (in English) is gradually improving, which means that "Spanish" sounds like "panis" or "panish" now, instead of "penis."  (Oh, the shocked stares I intercepted when strangers heard my three-year-old announce, "I wike penis.  Mommy wike penis too.  Daddy don't wike penis.")
• Gwyn and I attended a classmate's birthday party where we and one other family were the only anglophones there!  I ate spicy salsa, drank hibiscus cooler, and practiced my Spanish.
• I've done three storytimes in French at the library this semester, and they're going well.  Themes: love (in February for valentines day), animals, and Paris. 
• We've had two French playdates so far, each very different, and for the next one this weekend, I'm going to bring more games and puzzles and toys (and thus fewer French learning games).
• Several private schools are offering French camps this summer, and I'm determined to send Griffin to one or two of them.  And there are Spanish camps in the area, too--including one at a farm!  I bet both kids would like those.
• I need to make more time to blog and read the blogs of those I admire!  

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.

the very hungry Gwyneth

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you a report of Gwyneth's Very Hungry Caterpillar-themed birthday party!  (Since it's based on a classic children's book, this post is at least tangentially related to my blog theme, right?)

Party appetizer: grape caterpillar skewers

This is not a new concept, of course: just do a search for Very Hungry Caterpillar Party on Pinterest and an overwhelming number of ideas for decorations, foods, and favors will assault you with the ferocity of a thousand swirling Martha Stewarts sculpting a butterfly piñata out of twelve years' worth of carefully-stored-in-archival-quality-lignan-free-paper belly button lint, hand-dyed in a rainbow of hues from organic beet peelings, kale leaves, and harvested-under-a-blue-moon fairy wings.

Me, I'm not crafty like that.

Therefore, we rented a shelter at a local city park so we wouldn't have to do much in terms of decorations, and I put my energy into food, activities, and the favors.

(Mmmm...caterpillar food!)

Rather than staying scrupulously faithful to the book --I didn't really want to prepare one apple, two strawberries, three plums and so forth all the way through a slice of pizza, a sausage, and a cupcake--I started with several book-inspired salads and appetizers.

"In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf."

Rather than serving the fruits separately, I just threw them into a salad.  

(For the dressing, I infused fresh ginger into a simple syrup and added lots of fresh mint.) 

Butterfly Pasta Salad--featuring farfalle pasta
(shaped like butterflies!)

"Then he ate through one nice green leaf,
and he felt much better."

Sandwich supplies

Dessert was easy: Caterpillar Cakes!

(store-bought cupcakes spread with store-bought icing
into which I mixed green and yellow food coloring)

As for the decor, I ran out of time to do what I really wanted (making yard decorations out of green paper plates stapled to chopsticks and inserted in the ground at appropriate lengths to look like the iconic famished creepy-crawly).  But since the party was outside, decorations weren't even necessary.

We did set the atmosphere with some insect-inspired children's music:

silly, catchy songs about bugs--educational, but the kids don't even realize they're learning!

And we did a craft: a "sticky table," using adhesive contact paper (backing removed) taped to a table. I provided little crafty doodads, like paper leaves, sequins, plastic grass from sushi plates, pompoms, pipe cleaners, and colorful caps from squeezy baby food pouches, and the party-goers made 3D scenes that stuck to the paper--even on a windy Colorado day!

la chenille la plus longue de Lafayette !

The "sticky table" scenes then became a fun background for blowing out candles
 and serving the cupcakes.

la chasse aux papillons

Our main activity (besides eating, of course, and running around like small wild beasts) was a butterfly hunt, which involved donning the antennas that Griffin had helped prepare,

pompoms, pipe cleaners, and plastic headbands from the dollar store

grabbing some butterfly nets (also courtesy our local $1 establishment), and running after tissue-paper-and-pipe-cleaner butterflies

take a small rectangle of tissue paper,
pinch the center together,
and wrap a piece of pipe cleaner around it
so that the antennas are sticking up

that another (tall) parent threw into the air on this very windy day.  

Gwyneth's fête was magical!  (Other than the fact that the birthday girl participated in almost nothing except the eating of the cake.  Oh well--she was only turning two.)

I also put a ridiculous amount of time and energy into creating the favors: spiral-bound workbooks about caterpillars.  With the help of Google and Pinterest, I printed out coloring pages, mazes, seek-and-finds, easy crossword puzzles, poems about bugs, and other activity sheets, then had them copied and bound.

(I hate all that plastic crap and candy that guests typically receive in the 
ubiquitous child's birthday party favor bags.)

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out!  I'll take a creative and (semi) educational kid's party with store-bought cupcakes any day.  (Although, apparently, it will take me 15 months to finish blogging about it.)

losing hats and gaining fluency

Six and a half years of speaking exclusively French with Griffin really is working, and I can prove it: a week after our 12-day, three-generation family trip to France for the first time (August 2014), Griffin went back to school.  His Spanish immersion school.  His third year there.  And in half an hour at the back-to-school-meet-the-teachers event, I counted five different instances in which he answered a teacher's questions in Spanish with words in French!  He was "oui"ing all over the place!

Gwyneth, Griffin, Grammy in Paris

Since I had never observed him doing that before, I feel safe attributing it to our having spent nearly two weeks in a French immersion environment.  Hourrah!

If I had written this blog post sooner after our return from Alsace and Paris, it would have begun quite differently.  I would have bemoaned the fact that Griffin's fluency in French didn't improve in great leaps.  I would have expressed my disappointment that our trip didn't have the same effect as my fellow bilingual parent bloggers' experiences--it seems as if when they take their families to a country where the minority language is spoken, or when relatives who speak that language stay with them for a week or more, it is a revelation.  These parents (and also the mamans in French playgroup) are rapturous about how comfortable their kids get in the minority language in such a short time.

And, well, it wasn't really like that for us.  Nothing major went wrong, and Griffin did have lots of chances to interact with native speakers--but I can only think of three extended conversations he had with them, and he kept speaking in English to me otherwise, as usual.  No revelations, no magical transformations, no sudden desire to use only French with me.

Gwyneth continued to do her own thing, which is basically the opposite of whatever her parents want.

I had so hoped that our travels would recharge his French brain batteries!  But 12 days isn't enough, clearly, at least when he's still spending each day with our anglophone family in the rental car and lodgings.

But instead of dwelling on my belief that he didn't speak enough French on our trip, let me focus on what he did do!  Here are his linguistic highlights:

We participated in a tour of the Chateau Haut-Konigsbourg specifically for children, in which a man dressed as a medieval minstrel led us through the castle looking for his musical instruments which went missing after the previous evening's feast for the king.  Over an hour of listening to a stranger speak French in a strange place with cannons and towers and a fascinatingly deep well--that's a record!  (And it made an impression on Gwyneth, too; she keeps telling people about how we couldn't find the instruments in the castle.)

During our week in Alsace, we never encountered another American tourist, and the owners of our rental house spoke only French.  And as they lived right next door, we chatted with them regularly.  They even invited us over for drinks one night!  Plus, they were curious about us, and also wanted to make sure that we liked their house, so the landlady peppered me with questions every time she saw us.

(The only awkward moments came when she stuck her head through the open window as I walked out of the shower, and then when we had to admit that we didn't know how to operate the washing machine.  Oh, and when Griffin threw a basketball so hard it cracked a plastic lawn chair.  Oops.)

His other two noteworthy conversations came about because of public transportation.  On the bus, I started chatting with a grandmother accompanying her two young grandsons and called him over to join in.  One of the boys, a six-year-old just like him, told us that "Griffin" (which they pronounced "griffeen)" sounded like a girl's name.  But Griff defended himself and said that was okay, that it's a boy's name in English.  (Interestingly, he also ended up meeting a French boy named Sasha on a playground, and his reaction was shock that the boy had what he considered a girl's name!)  We ended up exchanging addresses and promising to send the French boys a postcard from Colorado.  (Wouldn't it be cool if they turn out to be penpals?!)

The people we spoke with in France seemed surprised and impressed that we're raising our children bilingually and asked us lots of questions about it, but none more so than two young workers at Charles de Gaulle airport who overheard me speaking to the kids in French with my American accent.  Ultimately we spent about ten minutes watching them barrage Griffin with questions, which he handled beautifully.  He even told them about how he's learning Spanish at school!

Then there were lots of little interactions that turned out to me more important than I realized at the time--opportunities for Griffin to read and speak French because he wanted or needed something.  For example, my husband took him out on a Sunday to look for a bakery that was open; they got completely lost and encountered bakeries that were closed for the day (or for the season).  Since Ed doesn't speak French, he was entirely dependent on our six-year-old to translate the signs and ask strangers for directions!

My children have an unfortunate habit of leaving their hats behind, and true to form, they lost one apiece on the trip.  Ed and Griffin retraced our steps in Colmar, looking for Gwyneth's errant chapeau, which meant that Griff had to do things like ask the carousel operator if he had seen it.  And when Griff's cap went missing at a museum in Paris--and he was really mad about that--he took two separate trips to the lost-and-found desk to try to track it down.

before her hat disappeared

When Griffin wanted a map of the charming village of Riquewihr, I accompanied him to the tourist office and watched proudly as he obtained two of them--one in French for us and one in English for Daddy.  He also read menus and ordered his own food in restaurants, paid attention to signs all around him (traffic signs, lists of bus stops, directional indicators in the metro), and refused to leave a bookstore until he had paged through an entire Tintin comic book.

(And it was so reassuring to have strangers compliment my own French as well as the fact that the kids are bilingual.  Maybe they were just being polite, but I'll take it.)

I'd like to think that we aided in the efforts of international diplomacy, that the folks we met have better opinions of Americans than they used to!  And while it probably won't take long for Spanish to regain its position as Griffin's second most familiar language, I now know that French is in there firmly enough that it will come back out after another immersion experience.

Oh, and Griffin also exchanged rubber band bracelets with this boy I made him talk to when I noticed him watching us  from his ground-floor dining room window.

Now I just have to break the news to my husband that we'll have to go to another Francophone country next summer....

learning to speak? learning to fly!

For the first two years of her life, Gwyneth didn't have much to say (using words, at least--she's been quite a shrieker all along).  For the past six months or so, though, she has started talking to us, really communicating.

Yay!

Of course, it's primarily in English.

Boo!

(Oh, I'm not supposed to react this way, am I?)

Gwyneth definitely prefers using English words, but she does seem to understand both languages equally well (unless her papa and I are trying to, say, brush her teeth, convince her to leave her diaper on in bed, or go to sleep before 9:00 pm).

She has a handful of words that she knows only in French, probably from books I have read to her, and when prompted, she will supply individual words in French (e.g., "Comment dit-on 'elbow' en francais?"  "Coude!"--but if you simply ask "Qu'est-ce que c'est?", she will only tell you "elbow."

At 2.5 years old, both her big brother and cousin Carl had been making four- and five-word utterances in French, so I was feeling a bit impatiente.  Yes, yes, I know that each kid has her own strengths and weaknesses and timeline, so I wasn't worried per se--just eager to hear what she would have to say for herself en francais.

So imagine my joie when she created her first spontaneous three-word sentence in French this week!  We were reading a book about the various homes for farm animals (clapier, poulailler, etc.), and she looked up at me and informed me, "Dumbo 'bite cirque."

Dumbo, l'elephant volant 

Dumbo habite dans un cirque!  Dumbo (Disney's animated flying elephant) lives at the circus!  Three words, contextualized, coherent, unprompted.

Yay!

Bonne Année 2014!

Wishing you many wonderful adventures in the new year.  Stay warm!

cousins dans la neige

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.