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

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.

Back to School!

School starts on Tuesday.  I've already been in faculty meetings for two weeks.  We built a tower out of spaghetti and tape, we played with legos, and we got treated to two rounds of drinks (I had margaritas of course) after work last Friday.  So far so good.   Not to mention the long engaged discussions about curriculum and motivation and how to be innovative teachers -- these faculty meetings are not messing around!

The transition from stay-at-home mamma back to working mamma is difficult but relieving -- I do end up feeling like I need to "do" something by the end of the summer, as though raising a son is doing nothing.  I know it is doing something, but my brain doesn't get challenged in quite the same way.  My patience, yes, my creativity, yes, but not my analytical skills and strategizing.  It is almost a physical sensation of joy when I do come home and see Hudson, usually already in his high chair having dinner, and he always throws me a big smile and a shout of some kind.  Hudson is starting a session of baby gymnastics at The Little Gym with Ben, and it appears to be starting off well -- shy at first, but able to join in by the end of the class.  I get a reportback at dinner each night (in between all the noise Hudson makes) about what happened during the day.  I can't help but feel that I missed out on so much fun, but I am more motivated now to make the most of the weekends - we went to Camano Island for camping last weekend, for example. Maybe, just maybe we'll catch the state fair this weekend...
The stress of teaching at a new school has been making me fidgety and a little sleepless, but not overwhelmed, thankfully.  As the Spanish department (though here we call them disciplines, since there is no department head), we've been talking about several interesting things during our meeitngs - how to grade participation, and how important it is in the grade, and also how to encourage kids to do summer immersion and travel.  Last year I finally took particpation out of my grading system as a category, but I've agreed to put it back in this year to be consistent with my current colleagues.  It's always been difficult for me to know exactly what constitutes a participation grade, and whether it really has any bearing on the student's ability to use and understand Spanish.  However, I do understand that especially with kids younger than juniors and seniors, a lot of what they are learning in the classroom is how to behave and function in an academic environment.  I decided to call it 'classroom citizenship', copying a colleague, and simply force myself to make a system and be organized about it.  And as for summer travel, I'm enjoying looking around the Internet for summer programs for youth, and I'll give a report back here when I compile some good info. 

I am going to spend the next two hours making lesson plans and getting something concrete to bring into the classroom after the first couple days of syllabus dissection and introductions.  Wish me luck.