Motherhood & Spanish

My bachelors degree is in Spanish with a Teacher's Certification. Because of that I can speak Spanish pretty fluently, understand a lot more, and speak Spanglish a lot in the house. Teaching my son the language seemed natural to me. I believe that any talent, knowledge that you have should be passed on to our children. Just like croquet, I play a mean game of croquet, so can my son.

Thus when he was born I translated all of his books into Spanish. I only read to him in Spanish. Many words I speak to him have only been in Spanish. I don't say "enough", I say "bastante". In turn he doesn't say "enough", he says "bastante". When I reply "of course", I say "por supuesto" and so does he. His first Spanish word was "Choque", or "crash" because as one and two years old children do a whole lot of it. Whenever I wanted him to "look at me" I always said "mirame". Yep the list goes on and on.

There are many times when he rebels against the language. Most children want to show their dominance by rejecting things that make him different and by age nine or ten he realized other kids weren't being spoken to in Spanish. I think it started on the ball field. I had almost always chastised him in Spanish. "No más, uno, dos, tres", "No more, one, two, three". Or cheered him on in Spanish "Go, Go, Go", "Vaya, Vaya, Vaya". When we were in public I spoke to him in Spanish so that he knew I meant him, "Estamos listos", "Are we ready". And I rarely call him by his name, just as I call my mom "Madre" for "Mom", I call him "Mijo" for "My son".

The "Mijo" is what finally clued him into the idea that he was spoken to differently. His friends and team mates would stop and ask him or me what I was saying, what I was calling him. I saw it as great, they were interested too., him not so much. He never told me to stop, he knew I wouldn't, but he would then rebel against other times. Telling me he didn't understand, to speak English. I would go right back at him with even more Spanish. Sometimes he would storm off, others he just did what I told him. His dad has always been on board with it too. Letting him know that most kids don't have the benefit of learning a second language at home. My husband took two years and high school and can understand simple phrases.

For years now I call my son to the dinner table with "es la hora para comer", tell him to feed his fish "le da comida a pez", throw stuff away "tira in la basura". At the dinner table we will go through different foods and their Spanish names. But more importantly for the last two years we have been practicing more specific grammar during the car ride to school. It takes us about seven minutes to get to his school and for about thirty seconds to a minute he is required to do something with Spanish. This year we started of with being able to hold full greeting conversations, then we worked on counting to one hundred. We have done months and seasons, shapes and colors, and on and on. Now we are on verb conjugation. He had to learn just the endings first, -o, -as, -a, -amos, -an. Now he has to add them to a verb that I give him, hablar = hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablan.

Does he still give me grief, you bet. But it's not during the morning lessons, it's when I speak it at other times, even if he initiates it. He even tells me that he wishes that he could take French in high school, and we're like how silly is that when you have the perfect tutor at home. I tell him that he is more than welcome to take it in college so that he can be multilingual.