Long overdue update...5 years old!!

Wow! It has been a really long time since my last post!!! I have two unfinished blog posts that I´ve abandoned and just decided to start a new one from scratch!! The truth is life is very hectic and I just don´t have the time(or the energy!!) for blogging. Any free time I have, I prefer to just relax and read a book or watch TV!!!!

Anyway, my daughter is 5 now and both her Spanish & English language skills have really blossomed .She understands 100% of what we say in both Spanish and English, speaks both languages with fully formed sentences and her vocabulary is expanding and improving day by day.She is also starting to pick up the grammar rules of each language and sometimes she applies these rules but in the wrong context, for example, she has realised that to form a noun  in Spanish you add -ando and she applied this rule to Cola Cao and invented a made-up word "Cola Caoando". She also sometimes mixes languages if she doesn´t know a word in one of the languages or has forgotten it so you can get Spanglish sentences,such as the following one. She was talking about stepping on the ants and either had forgotten or didn´t know the word "step on" so she said something along the lines of: " You have to pis it", taking the Spanish word "pisar" to mean step/stand on but it can sound a little bit funny in English!!!

......another year has passed since I first started writing this update. My little girl is now a big sister and has a little brother (now a year old) so between two night owls and a teething, clingy toddler, plus housework and all the other daily chores, there is little time or energy for blogging although I´m going to make it my New Year´s Resolution to get back into the blogging swing again!! Unfortunately our bilingual baby playgroup has folded a bit as everyone is busy at the weekends and also the fact that now everyone has two kids, we are quite a large group so it can get pretty cramped in our flats/houses....we could do to rent a place!!!We are attempting to meet up at least once a month if possible.

The Spirit of Halloween (no pun intended!)

I love Halloween although I didn´t celebrate it much as a child but I can´t wait to pass this slice of British(well, Irish really!) and American culture and tradition on to Chloe. I even thought about doing a party for her but then decided that she´s just a teeny-tiny bit young for a Halloween party at the moment.The week before Halloween it was my turn to host the bilingual playgroup at my house and I decided to do a Halloween theme. I don´t think there are many traditional Halloween nursery rhymes or songs or at least I didn´t know and couldn´t think of any  so we just did some pretty normal ones, Head,Shoulders,Knees and Toes and Row,Row,Row Your Boat. Unfortunately, Chloe was not very cooperative that day....I don´t think she was too impressed with all the other bilingual bubbas in her house,playing with her toys!!! Plus I think she was really tired! Oh and even better is that another of our bilingual bubbas and her parents joined us, increasing the group to 5 bubbas and 6 parents!!! I then read the story Owl Babies, not really a Halloween story but as it´s about owls and the pictures are quite dark, it was close enough without being scary. To end our Halloween bilingual playgroup, we finished off with a fingerprint spider craft (fun but messy and I think us, the parents ended up doing most of it but I think the children enjoyed it anyway!)I´m not sure I´ll be rushing to get the fingerpaints back out again for awhile yet though!!You can see our efforts in one of the photos!

The day before Halloween Chloe came home from nursery with her face painted, a paper pumpkin on a straw and a Halloween poem in English...I´m not sure if the native English people who work there made it up or whether it already existed but I´ve never heard it before...it goes along the lines of "Run,run,run, Halloween is fun, walk, walk,walk but don´t talk, play,play,play,Halloween is today!" I like the fact that although Halloween isn´t really a Spanish tradition(although it is rapidly increasing in popularity!)that the nursery is embracing it as it´s great for her to get extra imput on British/American culture.Also, on the 31st October, they had a Halloween party and it was optional to dress up. I definitely had to dress Chloe up and found a cute little witch´s costume complete with headband with a little witch´s hat on it. She came home with a little witch that they´d made at nursery.It was even in matching colours as Chloe´s costume!!!You can see Chloe´s costume and her witch in the photos above.

Thursday was a Bank Holiday as Spanish people tend to celebrate All Saint´s Day although my husband´s family don´t really tend to celebrate it so I took the opportunity to make some Halloween  Eyeball cupcakes. I tried to get Chloe to help me mix the green icing but she just wanted to eat it and put the spoon straight to her mouth,then lost interest and went off to find Daddy!! I´m looking forward to making and decorating other Halloween treats together every Halloween...it´s going to be a tradition!!So, all in all that was Chloe´s first Halloween. Hopefully I´ll be able to take her trick-or-treating in the future but it´s going to be difficult as I work in the afternoon/evenings so don´t know how I´ll get round that little loophole!

Bilingual Bubbas: Setting up a bilingual playgroup

As the city I live in is fairly small and there aren´t any bilingual playgroups, my friends and I decided to set up our own with our bilingual bubbas.Seeing that there is only a few of us, we´ve decided to take it in turns holding it at each other´s houses and that we are going to meet every Saturday at 11am as due to work commitments etc, that is the only day that we can all get together at the same time.

At the moment there are only the six of us, 3 mums and 3 babies, although I did mention it to two other British friends who have babies but they haven´t shown much interest yet unfortunately!I suppose I could advertise but then we might be inundated with Spanish parents wanting to bring their children and really I just wanted to keep it only for native speakers and their children or in other words, proper bilingual children as it just wouldn´t be the same with parents who don´t speak English or don´t always speak to their children in English as then the majority language might start creeping in or worse our children could pick up grammatical mistakes or mispronunciation errors from the Spanish parents. Don´t get me wrong, I´m not trying to exclude people here and I have nothing against Spanish parents joining but I´m just concerned about what effect it could have on our children´s own language. In fact, one of my friends´ Spanish friend and her child may be joining us for awhile or until her second child is born (She´s due in October so not long!)We could do with a few more people though so the whole thing just doesn´t fizzle out.

The first "meeting" took place at my house and we sang Five Little Monkeys and did some actions to it which I think they enjoyed....unfortunately there is a bit of a gap between my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 1 to Bilingual Bubba 3, a difference of a year but anyway at least Bilingual Bubba 3 can listen and take it in subconsiously!I then read "Dear Zoo" to them and my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 1 enjoyed seeing the animals,making the animal noises and opening or lifting the flaps.We then let them have free play while we had a chat and refreshments!It was fun and seemed quite successful. Bilingual Bubba 1 calls my daughter Coco as she can´t pronounce Chloe yet and Chloe seems to have picked that up off her so I think it´s working although it´s still early doors so we´ll have to wait and see!

The following week Chloe was ill so we called it off and then the next week one of the Bilingual Bubbas couldn´t make it but we still went ahead with the playgroup with my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 3, otherwise the playgroup will definitely just die its death particularly if we keep cancelling it every time someone can´t make it!Anyway, I´ll be reporting on our activites and updating the progress of our bilingual playgroup from time to time and we´ll see how it all pans out! I´d love to hear from any of you who go to a bilingual playgroup and your experiences or if you set up your own bilingual playgroup!

First week at nursery school!

This week was a difficult and emotional one because it was Chloe´s first week at nursery school and her first time ever really being apart from us.As I work in the afternoons,she is going to nursery school in the afternoons for about 4 hours. Unfortunately,many nursery schools where I live are shut in the afternoons and due to the crisis, even more are choosing to shut in the afternoons because there is little or no demand for nursery schools in the afternoons. After my search for a nursery school which you can read about here, I´m very happy with our final choice. It´s one of the best nursery schools in my city, is open in the afternoons, does activities in the afternoon and is the nursery school that is the closest to being a bilingual nursery school.

The first day came and we dressed her in her little nursery uniform(a bit ridiculous a nursery school having a uniform but at least her clothes will keep clean!).They have a summer uniform till October, girls wear a little blue and white striped dress, boys wear a blue and white striped knickerbocker/shorts type thing....I haven´t really paid as mcuh attention to the boys´uniform!!In winter, they have a different uniform...not sure what it´s like yet, plus a" baby",which is like a smock, to protect their uniform.That cost 50 euros already and we haven´t even bought the winter uniform yet!

When it came time to drop her off,she screamed, cried and tried to cling on to my husband for dear life. It was awful and we felt so bad leaving her. We rang after an hour to see how she was and they said she was ok but she was having her moments of crying.We went to pick her up after two hours and she was very happy to see us. This scenario was repeated the following two days although on the third day,she did stop crying for a little while but started again when the nursery nurse took her off me.She didn´t go the rest of the week as Wednesday night she started with a high temperature(which could´ve been down to teething though too!) and she was full of a cold...I hope it´s not a sign of things to come!!!

When we spoke to the head of the nursery school, she told us that she liked being sung to and that she had stopped crying when she heard English!We were given a list of materials we had to provide which included glue,crayons (and they had to be a certain brand!!!),a pad of different coloured card, non-slip socks, white finger paint, glitter gel,EVA rubber, 500 sheets of blank paper...I think that was everything!!I was really surprised....I never had to buy all that stuff for school,never mind for nursery!!!She´s only 1!We also paid for the "books" they use "El Conejita Juguetona"(another 35 euros!), which also comes with a CD with all the songs she´s going to learn, animal sounds and everyday sounds such as breathing etc and two English nursery rhymes "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and " Pat-a-cake,Pat-a-cake". My daughter is already familiar with these two rhymes as I sing them to her occasionally.

The nursery has two English speakers,one of which is native English and the other is bilingual although she speaks English with a Spanish accent. I was disappointed to learn that the native only works in the mornings and that children who go in the mornings get 5 hours of English, in other words they have 1 hour of English every day whereas the children in the afternoons only get 2 hours of English per week(and with the bilingual person not the native unfortunately). I don´t see why kids that go in the afternoon should suffer and get less than their morning peers but I suppose the afternoons are shorter! So it´s definitely not as bilingual as I´d have liked!Maybe I will see if she can go once a week in the mornings too although  it probably doesn´t matter so much as she´s still going to hear a lot of English off me!

I´m hoping that her time in nursery will encourage her speaking in both languages and that her talking will come on in leaps and bounds....we´ll just have to see how it goes!!

First trip to the UK/ Bilingual Babies: 14-15 months

There were a number of reasons I wanted to go to the UK this year, some of them being to see friends and family, to escape the heat of Spain, because I haven´t been for about two years but one of the main reasons being for the sake of Chloe´s English. However, in hindsight with only being 14 months old, maybe this year the trip wasn´t so worthwhile as maybe she´s still a tad too young to have got the most out of it,particularly as she isn´t even speaking much yet.
    One of the things I have also realised after our trip to the UK is that bringing up a child bilingually is not cheap and this concludes with the following articles from Multilingual Living and Hiragana Mama but in my opinion it is definitely worth it or will be worth it in the long run!First of all,my husband could only take his holidays in August which automatically makes it more expensive, then despite the area where I´m from not being very touristy, all the holiday houses were extortionate...we managed to find one slightly less extortionate for the two weeks. I thought that the Olympics wouldn´t affect the prices of flights, houses etc as  we were based in the North but little did I know that some of the football matches were held in Manchester,which might also have affected prices.We also hired a car for the duration of our stay, luckily we upgraded the car to a bigger one as the five of us plus all the suitcases and the buggy would´ve been a bit of a squash! We ended up taking our car seat with us otherwise to hire a carseat for Chloe for two weeks would´ve cost a further 100 pounds!!!

  Anyway, after researching the travel tips on Babycentre and German In the Afternoon, which were very useful and helpful, our flight (Chloe´s first time on a plane!) went smoothly...we read a couple of books and did some nursery rhymes and finger plays.
 We stayed in a comfortable and clean bungalow in Haslingden, which had great views from the living room window.My parents joined us for the first week of our holidays, which meant that Chloe had almost total immersion in the minority language!! Unfortunately, the weather was typically British in that it rained almost every day but we were pretty lucky as it always seemed to rain when we were in the car, having lunch or visiting something indoors!!

  We visited Chester Zoo,which was a great day out, visited the Lake District and discovered some British culture at Beatrix Potter World...(Chloe loved all the fake animals straight out of Beatrix Potter´s books!). I also met up with one of my friends,her husband and their baby, who´s about a month younger than Chloe, in Blackpool and went to the Sea Life Centre. We also met up with the majority of my family for Sunday lunch and Chloe had a great time playing with my cousin´s children and then met up with my stepdad´s family too and their little girl, who´s  about two weeks younger than Chloe. They seemed to get on very well! So she´s had plenty of interaction with other children and adults all of which are monolingual.

 The second week my husband´s parents came,which unfortunately meant that Chloe was once again almost totally surrounded by Spanish.We visited Chester, the Lake District (this time we did a lake cruise!),
Chipping,Clitheroe and Downham and York. Chloe enjoyed walking around the York Castle Museum, which gives a great insight into British history, particularly the Victorian street,which takes you back to England in Victorian times,and she also liked Jorvik Viking Centre,which tells you about York after the Vikings invaded. The trouble is I guess we´ll have to revisit them when she´s older as she won´t remember it now or learn as much from it at this age! I also showed my in-laws where I´m from and the houses I have lived in and we visited Hoghton Tower.We also visited my aunt and saw my cousin,his wife and their children and had an English tea,with tea,sandwiches including egg and salmon, various English cheeses, Pimms and cakes.While we were in the UK we ate a lot of typical British food, such as crumpets,English muffins, teacake, roast pork with all the trimmings, sticky toffee pudding....even an English breakfast in the airport on the return journey to Spain...Chloe too! She enjoyed her first taste of baked beans too!

On to the language part,I had hoped this trip would stimulate Chloe´s speaking especially in English and I think it did but not to the level I had hoped for....I guess this language acquisition takes time particularly if you have to acquire two languages at the same time! As I mentioned in my last post, Chloe has been saying mas or ma´ for more or if she wanted something but after the first week with my parents,it started to sound more like "more". Then my inlaws came and it went back to "ma" but she would often say both words so it would go "Ma..more". I don´t know if she´s starting to distinguish the two languages and realise that she has to speak in different languages with different people...probably not.She´s just probably repeating both words but it seemed like she directed the "more"at me. Her animal noises are improving and she is trying to repeat them....every time she sees a dog,she says wow,wow.In fact, I think that´s her name for the dog!!She´s also trying to repeat words or noises that we say or she hears. She now says Uh-oh if we say it when she drops something etc and the other day she was playing with her Chicco mobile phone and pressing the numbers and she repeated "four" after pressing the number four button and it sounded very clearly like four....the thing is she probably won´t say it again now at least for some time anyway!

A Bilingual Birthday & Pressies Galore

I can´t believe it! A couple of weeks ago,Chloe turned one. I can´t believe how quickly the past year has gone! It has been an enriching year full of joy and happiness.

 My parents came to stay with us so that they could celebrate her first birthday too. We decided to have a BBQ and invite family and our friends, especially those that had kids too, including our bilingual bubbas. Unfortunately, only one of the bilingual bubbas could make it and the rest of the kids were monolingual.There were only 7 children in total.

Parties are hard work, I can tell you! I spent most of the day preparing food...decorating the cupcakes and the birthday cake(both of which I had made a day or two ahead!), making two salads and the dressing, one salad was a typical Spanish-style salad with tomatoes, tuna, lettuce leaves and the other salad was more my type of salad, mixed lettuce leaves, apple,dried cranberries, cheese and a creamy garlic dressing etc. The worst thing about it was that because I was so busy preparing the party(even though I had a lot of help!) it meant that I didn´t get to spend much time with Chloe! Next year we might just go to a ball pool place where they do the food...it´ll be so much easier! My parents had brought pork pies,puff pastry, sausage meat to make sausage rolls with. I also did a cheese and pineapple hedgehog,which was typical of birthday parties when I was little. My mother-in-law made two Spanish omelettes and we bought olives and sliced meat such as chorizo, Iberian ham and Spanish salami so we had a mixture of both cultures food wise. The sausage rolls were a big hit with the Spanish but the pork pies didn´t go down quite so well!We actually did too much food but never mind!Here are some photos of the birthday cake, a ladybird cake which I was very proud of!

We sang Happy Birthday followed by Cumpleaños Feliz, then Porque es una chica excelente and the English version, For She´s A Jolly Good Fellow, before the candles were blown out and the cake was cut. The only birthday cards,my daughter got were off English family and friends, there isn´t much tradition of cards in Spain but she got lots of presents.

She got quite a few books but I´ll be doing another post about them and I want to highlight some of the toys she got,particularly those that are great for language learning. One of the toys I bought her was My Puppy Pal Violet from Leap Frog, a cuddly puppy which can be connected to your computer and can be personalised to say your child´s name and will also spell it, favourite colour, favourite food and favourite animal. It also plays lullabies and songs which you can also download and change.This toy has won many awards and so far is proving to be a big hit with my daughter, especially now that she has learnt how to press it´s paws. She loves the music and dances along and the lullabies have soothed her to sleep on various occasions.It is aimed at babies from 6 mnths to 3 year olds.It also has a British accent so it´s great for further English exposure. The only downside I have come across is that the batteries run out pretty quickly.Here are some customer reviews from Amazon.

Another toy which I think is going to be great for Chloe´s English and learning in general is the VTech Alphabet Apple, an apple-shaped electronic toy with buttons for each letter of the alphabet. Each button has a little colourful drawing of an animal that begins with that letter plus the name of the animal in smaller print on it so for example A has a picture of an alligator and the word written below.Although this toy is aimed at older children, 2+ year olds, I bought it as a present that my daughter wouldn´t grow out of too quickly. As well as teaching the alphabet, animals and their characteristics, spelling, it also has a clock to help teach the time. The child can select different activity modes by sliding the icon up or down to do spelling games, clock quizzes, alphabet activities and listen to animal facts. There is also a music mode and each letter plays a different tune. My daughter loves pressing the buttons, turning the hand of the clock, the flashing lights of the buttons and the music although she doesn´t really play with it as such yet.The pronunciation of the letters and all sentences are spoken in a British English accent and they are very clear and accurate. Both My Puppy Pal Violet and the Alphabet Apple are great value for money and as I bought them on Amazon UK and they were both eligible for Super Saver Delivery, there were no additional costs for shipping, which is always a bonus!


My mum got her a couple of presents also from Amazon, which included two Melissa & Doug jigsaw puzzles, one of  the numbers 1-10 and the other is of the alphabet.They are both colourful and beautifully illustrated,particularly the alphabet puzzle as each letter has an illustration of something which begins with that letter, for example A has pictures of apples in it.Although again maybe a bit old for her, she will get a lot of mileage out of these puzzles and they will really help with learning the alphabet and widening her vocabulary.

Bilingual Bubbas

Although I live in a fairly small city (I´d call it a town really!!!)with very few foreigners due to the increased interest in learning English, a lot more language academies have sprung up and also because of the university, it´s becoming easier to come across other native English speakers and other foreigners!!

I´m quite lucky as a lot of my native friends have also had babies at a similar time to me so we have a little bilingual posse, 3 of which are all girls(including Chloe) with another girl on the way to join them! Hopefully, this will encourage them to speak their minority language when they are older,especially in the street as they will realise they aren´t "different" from other people. I´m hoping they´ll play together and speak English together and learn from each other and the other Mummy´s or Daddy´s. It´s also great as our children will be able to hear different English accents and get used to them instead of hearing just our accent. For example,I´m from North England but have a fairly neutral accent, one of my friends is from Belfast and two of my friends are from the South so Chloe will hopefully get accustomed to all these different accents. Maybe we´ll even start up our own bilingual playgroup!



Another great thing about Chloe having a little bilingual posse is that we could swap English children´s books with one another, as it is quite difficult to buy English books where we live (you can buy them but there isn´t much choice and they are more expensive)and the library also doesn´t have much variety.

As a parent wanting to bring her child up as bilingual as possible and also as an English teacher, I´m trying to find out as much as I can about bilingualism and educating a child bilingually,and one website mentioned in my Growing Up With Two Languages book was The Bilingual Families Webpage. This website is run by Cindy Kandolf and has allsorts of useful information, including Myths about Bilingualism,Frequently Used Terms and Resources, which lists books and newsletters which bilingual parents may be interested in reading,websites, sources for books in different languages including Spanish,Portuguese, German,Arabic and Chinese etc.It´s definitely a very helpful and useful site to find out more info.You can also read about Cindy´s story and visit her home page or join the mailing list.I haven´t done this yet but if any of you do or have, I´d like to know your opinion about whether it´s worth joining or not! I´m going to check out some of the books,articles and websites reccommended (eventually!) or when I can get my hands on them & more importantly when I have time!!