The bilingual "experiment": two-year-old Spanish-English

"Agua, agua...!"  Hudson found one of his favorite things on a walk.

One of Hudson's mainstream pediatricians referred us to a language specialist earlier this year.  The packet of paperwork alone that came in the mail in order to go through with the referral was laughable, and we were afraid they'd just tell us to stop the bilingual life.  Recently we were at an appointment with a naturopathic pediatrician and they recommended starting to give him a supplement of cod liver oil every day because of its high DHA content, good for the ol' brain development.  And they said we should check in with a pediatrician in six months.

It's clear that Hudson is not saying "I wanna go slide" like some other two-year-olds at the park, but I have been reminded that many times boys will develop speech more slowly than girls, and I am reminded of so many anecdotes of children who didn't speak well until they were three or four and suddenly they popped out sentences like nothing ever happened.  The adults and older kids I hear about this happening to are exceptionally intelligent humans.

So, what's a mamma to do?  I don't know.  Give cod liver oil, talk a ton to my kid, get him interacting with other kids, (though most communication among toddlers I see is just shouting anyway), and try to relax.  It's hard to admit that your kid is different.  All I can say is at least so far, he's not different in a way that's costing us thousands in medical bills, or seeing specialists (yet). 

The important thing is that he is developing, albeit slowly.  He can make two-word combinations now, which he wasn't doing just a few months ago, and he even got three words together the other day:  "adios abuela cama" after we put away grandma's inflatable guest bed.  He said it like this:  "adio aba pama" but that's good enough for me.  I accept.  And every day he is repeating new words and sounds he hears us say.  Even if his speech is "horma horma horma" to ask me for his favorite song about ants (in English), I respond with "¿Hudson quiere la canción de las hormigas?" and I'm pretty sure that's the right thing to do rather than constantly respond to his partial words and sounds right off the bat just because I do in fact understand them.  He needs to hear what sentences are even if he can't make them.  He's also doing a great job of labeling items and their color, as well as other basic adjectives like "grande" or "pequeño".   He's working at differentiating "m" and "n" sounds, as well as other similar consonants like "t" and "d" even though he can actually make all those sounds.  But new stuff is happening every day.

We'll see how this all shakes down.  At 28 months, he is certainly "lagging" but I refuse to freak out and see a specialist quite yet.  His vocabulary is growing every day in English and Spanish, and he's even developing words that we have no idea who taught them to him, they just show up like magic.  Pretty cool.  Different kid, but very, very cool.

Create.

Parenting is the biggest creative challenge I've encountered yet.  The writing challenge, the choreography challenge, those are far less intense and seemingly endless, and in many ways, less real.  Though I do love them, let's not forget that.

When I feel like I've found a parenting solution it directly impacts a human being, my son.  I also love finding something close to a solution for a line of words.  But I never really know if that's a solution or just something better than what I did yesterday.  If you get down to it, that's the same thing, really, it's all just looking for something better than the day before.  Yup.  Can I get Hudson to not throw a tantrum right now... can I get him to eat his dinner... can we play something other than wheel-spinning and actually keep his attention...

I can't wait until he gets a bit bigger when we can really start doing arts and crafts.  When we can really start drawing, and making sculptures, and making sand castles... It's going to be great, and that will definitely satisfy my need to keep creative even when I can't sit down to write any thoughts for hours or days or weeks at a time.

I'm reading Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, our faculty summer reading, and it's doing a great job of helping me realize how many ways I don't stretch my creativity and my brain power.  I had very much the same sensation when I read Poemcrazy a few years ago, though they are actually quite positive sensations because I come away determined to do more, and also satisfied with the knowledge that I can in fact cultivate creative thinking in myself and those around me.  Travel, go to coffee shops, talk to more neighbors, allow myself to be under the influence (within reason) and get out into the arts world to be exposed to other people's creativity.  These are all important lessons I'm getting.

Mostly, I'm learning to take advantage of time even better.  To take a day and a half to write a blog post is okay if that means I am actually using every five-minute piece available to me, and if it means that on the whole I'm writing more.  I'm learning to observe more closely and narrate not just to Hudson what's going on in the world around us, but to myself.  I think it's all connected.  Hopefully all this will help me stay creative as a parent as the years go on...

Economic bilingualism?

Hudson is multicultural in so many ways!

In a casual playground interaction the other day at Matthews Beach, a mom told me her half-Mexican daughter would be attending Zoom preschool for the summer and that it was very difficult to get into.  I have heard other parents say similar things, and it looks like several programs run an average of $350/month for attending twice a week.  There are some, like La Escuelita that don't even post tuition rates on their website and I'm the kind of person who assumes that means it's too expensive for me, and even though it's a convenient location and it is clear they have a strong program, I probably will never even call them.
Currently I am our family's full-time income-earner, bringing home enough money to keep us going and to save a bit every month toward our imminent down payment on a townhouse.  Ben paints houses during the summer (anyone need painting?) and gives us enough extra cushion to allow for our uncontrollable extras like booze and seeing shows, attending flamenco workshops, etc.  We certainly do not have an extra $350 a month right now.  (We are even using state-offered health insurance for both Ben and Hudson, because adding even one of them to my program was prohibitively expensive.)  In short, bilingual preschool is not in our future unless Ben goes to work during the school year, in which case we'd also be needing to pay for child care when preschool is not in session...

The chain of money is dizzying, yet I'm dedicated to providing my child with bilingual experiences and education.  How do we go about this?

So far, I am simply counting my blessings that I am a fluent Spanish speaker and know of great resources other than preschool.  This makes me Hudson's sole exposure to Spanish so far, but at least I'm cheap.  Free Spanish exposure seven days a week is quite the bargain I think.  Perhaps by the time Hudson is school-aged we'll consider a two-parent income model so that we can afford a bilingual school.  Or I should call the school district today to get on a wait list for kindergarten at the John Stanford school, which I hear is also hard to get into...  My head is spinning.

At any rate, my dream is to travel to Spain (not to mention the rest of the Hispanic world) at least every two years, enroll my child in a bilingual school, and most importantly, just make some Spanish-speaking friends.  But my social ineptitude is another issue entirely.  Let's see what happens.

Love Stories II: Remember how we said we'd put the relationship first?

Finding ways to keep us all happy!

Part of our process of preparing for marriage was writing up lists of expectations and needs and comparing them and reflecting on them.  One of the expectations was for both of us to maintain the relationship and our family, as it grows, as the number one priority, even when careers and art get more intense.  Easy to say when you haven't come face to face with it yet.

So how we end up doing that now, five and a half years, one toddler, two vibrant careers later, is the tricky question.  I'm just getting off a full week of vacation that started and ended with flamenco gigs, at Agua Verde and Bilbao, respectively.  And I have decided to very intentionally stop performing for the spring so that I can have one trimester of school with less pressure, and see how that feels.  We have also decided to have Papá put the baby to bed at least one night a week so that I can have some alone time to read (imagine that!!) and then to have some time to hang out with Papá if I can stay up that late.  If possible, we are going to find a date night when we do not schedule other things and can have a babysitter take Hudson for just a couple hours in the evening, and once a week is the goal but even every other week will feel luxurious.  We have had to sit down and talk explicitly about how to schedule our lives, how to show each other our affection in little ways, how to maintain connection, so that we remain strong.  It doesn´t just happen on its own that is for sure. 

I loved performing at Bilbao the other night -- we were focused, calm, and had a good time.  It really goes to show that the venue can affect your performance, which I didn't fully believe until I went from Agua Verde, where it is noisy and we were very much in the background, to Bilbao in the same week.  So I am in a way sad to set aside performances for a while, because I feel pretty convinced that it can work well.  On the other hand, as soon as I vocalized my decision and said I was not going to worry about dancing, I felt a bit of a physical relief, that some of that stress automatically lifted.  Goes to show how the back and forth will always be there.  I feel like "just" a career and a kid is so, well, boring, even though it's an intricate and fascinating balance of its own.  If there's no art, it doesn't quite feel right, though I'm trying to chill my ambitious ego a bit and enjoy the sensation of having my family truly, intentionally, be the number one priority.  A happy mommy makes for happy kids.  Breathe in.  Repeat.  Breathe out. 

When the going gets rough...

Let's be honest.  I'm stressed.  I found myself welling up in tears the other day while organizing my photocopies in the faculty kitchen.  No reason.  Just stress.  One little wrong thought and my whole body and mind were twisted into hopelessness. 

I have little "time" for meditation, I hardly read anymore, I dance a few days a week but I don't run, and when I get home in the evening, little Hudson Guy is in need of attention and physical contact until bedtime, when the physical contact is continued, but at least we both sleep.  (Finally!!)  So it's clear that I am not setting my life up for stress-relieving choices right now. 

How do I redirect this?  A change needs to be made, and I keep thinking of what neuroscience and Buddhism both know -- generosity and kindness to others is probably the best way to bring a breath of calm and meaningful life back to myself.  My school is launching a kindness project this month encouraging people to "pay it forward" and to be kind to others both directly and anonymously.  We have cards that we're asking students to deliver when they perform their act of kindness so that the acts can be registered online.  I'm hopeful to see great and widespread effects, but mostly I'm deciding to take it as yet another hint that this is where I need to focus my own stress right now... on the good, not the bad.  For example:

-Ben cooks me dinner every night without asking.
-Last night he not only brought me a cup of tea, but with honey, lemon, and whiskey.  Just right.
-I got taken out to the ballet (PNB's Don Quijote) on Sunday by Ben's Mom and it was beautiful, relaxing, and inspiring.
-Yesterday a student actually helped clear away some backpacks and binders from the floor that belonged to someone not in the room, so that we could shut the classroom door and begin. 
And even...
-The sunrise has been beautiful for days on end, and I love driving across 520 to see all the mountains and the lightening sky each morning.
-My son is learning about new words, new animals, new pieces of life every day.  He pushes his hair out of his eyes, and points to things on the pages of his books he never saw before.
-I feel a deep love for my family, and I know my family loves me.  That's what it really comes down to.

Love Stories

My two greatest loves

I am perhaps influenced by how many articles I'm reading recently devoted to love, or perhaps I have been doing the thinking on my own. I can't tell anymore.  But wherever it comes from, I am finding myself compelled to reflect on my relationships and my happiness and to share this joy.  I have been reading about the physiological importance of kissing and holding hands as part of healthy marriages, of the importance of touch for a baby's and child's learning, and about the importance of emotional stability for one's own success.

I usually hate Valentine's Day and the commercialism behind it but I am getting a little behind the idea of the holiday this year just as a way to encourage some meditation on the good things in life and a way to jump start the positivity I want to bring into my everyday life.  Enough of this stress that holds me in its clenched fist.  Right??

I've been wanting to tell the story of how Ben and I met, and I'll try to keep it brief.  This is one of my meditations on love.
Ben and I met in Melinda Hedgecorth's flamenco class in Seattle in March 2004.  I was taking her dance classes after not dancing for seven or eight months, and Ben was accompanying them on guitar after not doing classes for quite a while.  I don't know if it was love at first sight, but pretty close.  I knew we'd connect, if not fall in love.  It was easy, and genuine, to talk to him before and after class and it felt like we were really becoming friends.  When he actually asked me for my number, in May, and asked me to see Eric and Encarna with him at the Capitol Club, I had to ask my friends at work the next day if they thought it was really a date.  Duh.

Since I already had plans to move to Wisconsin and live with my sister starting about a month later, I called Ben as soon as I figured out it was a date, to re-schedule our get-together for sooner.  How about tomorrow?  Yes.  By the time we did go to the Capitol Club a week later, I was in love and we had been spending every day together.

I left for Wisconsin four weeks later with the plan that Ben would come visit over the summer and see if he could get his own apartment and job.  I was sleeping in my sister's den, and we were looking for a new place to move ourselves.  The visit was a success and sure enough Ben came to Wisconsin around September and moved in to an apartment about ten blocks from our new place.  It was only a matter of months before we realized we were just wasting rent money having him live down the road, so he moved in to my bedroom with me and shared the apartment with my sister and her dog and cat.

We had a rough year in Wisconsin, but we were falling in love, totally self-obsessed.  We got engaged on our one-year anniversary after dinner at the restaurant where I was busing tables, and it was a totally planned engagement.  We had been talking about it, Ben spilled the beans that he'd bought me a ring, and frankly, I told my sister as soon as I got to Wisconsin that I'd be marrying him some day.  She didn't believe me at first.

We left for Spain a year after landing in Wisconsin, and I started grad school at NYU in Madrid that September.  Ben taught some English and took guitar lessons.  I'm so glad we were there for a year, and I sometimes wish we'd stayed longer but at the time we had several reasons for wanting to come back.  We planned a Seattle wedding at the Japanese Garden, with help from Ben's mom while we were abroad, and I bought my wedding dress with my mom in Boston on a trip to the States for some job interviews.  We took the marriage both very seriously and not at all seriously.  I think we were dedicated to the process of reflecting on our relationship and preparing for a new life, but I also think we knew that marriage in itself meant little to us and that we could decide to be un-married at any point it felt logical.  We did not connect the "marriage" to our deep love as directly as many do.

So the following summer, we moved back to the States, got married in Seattle, and then settled in Pennsylvania for my teaching job and it was perhaps the most intense summer of our lives, but it was also very real.  I felt like a grownup.  Slowly the domestic life expanded... a cat... a dog... planning the pregnancy... and not once did it end up feeling like a "sell-out" or the lame version of growing up that we all fear in our youth.  I think we stayed true to our passions and to our ideals pretty well.

We've moved back to Seattle, full circle, arriving the same summer our marriage filled five years.  We have had our fights over the years and we've pissed each other off but we also accept each other and love each other profoundly and we encourage each other and we find tiny ways to celebrate love and give thanks.  We are constantly trying to balance intimacy with space, passion with obligation, career with family, like anyone.  We will always be working at it.  We are starting out, yet again.  We are helping each other through the transition and we have each taken turns holding the other tear-streaked face on our shoulder.  Hopefully this has been one of our last major moves, and we can truly settle, and continue to travel and experience the world from a great home base.

If I didn't have Ben I don't know what I'd do.  I don't know how I'd keep my sanity in all this (job, baby, art).  Ben is a dedicated partner and open communicator. He's a wonderful dad, and I don't even think he knows how talented he is in this.  He is a dedicated stay-at-home dad and even though winters are hard, he pushes through and brings love and creativity to Hudson's expanding life.  And for my part, I am definitely still in love.

The morning after: "normal" life

Last night Cuerdas y Clavos had a show at Agua Verde in the U District and I'm certainly proud of putting on a flamenco show that was rehearsed and prepared and fun.  We all made mistakes of course - rhythms got lost, tempos got rushed, voices cracked, turns failed, but overall Ben, the singers, and I put on a good show for our friends who made up most of the audience.  It felt good to sweat and put more than "rehearsal" energy in to the dance pieces.  There were also, of course, many moments that for us as a group lost their magic because of the noise and distraction of the restaurant.  Rehearsal can bring quite a bit of duende in the focus of the living room environment.  It all balances out I suppose.

I drank wine, we ate Mexican food at a table in the corner at the end of the night, and we all parted ways after standing with our equipment and costumes chatting on the sidewalk.  I was exhausted.  We went right home and relieved our babysitter who had put Hudson to bed about an hour earlier, and I could barely bring myself to put on pyjamas and wash all my makeup off. 

Sitting on the bedroom floor and watching my son sleep in bed was possibly the most moving moment of the evening.  His still, contented face and his gently rising chest were all I needed to calm down and come back to my other reality.  And this morning, even though I was exhausted, I was so excited when Hudson woke up and looked up at me, immediately ready to jump out of bed and run around.  I missed him last night.  So we got ourselves ready for the day, we treated ourselves to breakfast at the Kona Kitchen, and walked home in the rain.  Normal life resumes. 

And then, there was Rubina's cante class this afternoon, which was a great way to look at dance and cante structure with the eyes of "the morning after" and review things that I need to work on.  Flamenco is a bottomless process and bottomless source of insight.  So we keep going...