Dimaya y su muñeca...

So Dimaya is now 14 months old and it seems like she's grown up overnight! She climbs on everything and is such a great walker. She got a few cute dolls for her 1st birthday and favors one in particular. This muñeca is like a little princess doll. We never had a name for this doll so we just started calling her Muñi for short. Dimaya loves to put Muñi in her shopping cart long with other stuff--libros, papeles, etc. It's fun to watch her roll that thing around. She has even learned to say a few words that we can all intelligibly understand!

Her English list consists of:
DAD, MOM, GIGI, HI, BYE, SEE YOU LATER, NO (her favorite at the moment), STOP, GONE, PLEASE, and THANK YOU.

Her Spanish list consists of:
SI, and sometimes MAS when she wants more food.

Her Spanish understanding of these spoken phrases is great:
NO TOQUES, CIERRA LA PUERTA, SALGA, ABRA LA BOCA, and more.

I'm trying very hard to keep her Spanish exposure since she doesn't get to hear it very often. It's just DORA THE EXPLORER and me against the rest of the monolinguals! Most of her books are written in both Spanish and English and we read quite a bit. We do vocabulary pretty regularly and I try to do more learning on my own time. Now that Dimaya is going to be starting her nursery school, I'm not sure if they do anything in Spanish there. I truly hope so, because if not, I may have to spend any extra time with her speaking Spanish only.

I admit my Spanish is a little rusty since I don't use it as much, but that's about to change. I'm thinking of possibly going back for a second Bachelors degree in Spanish which would be about 27 hours. I'm such a polyglot and would love to add another language in there some day, but hey...I gotta start somewhere. In our house, it's hard to keep up the OPOL (One Parent One Language) method. Steve speaks decent Spanish and sometimes like to read her Spanish books to her, even though that is technically supposed to be my job. Plus, I want him to be able to speak Spanish with us. The only bad thing is that he is definitely not as motivated to work on Spanish as a family language as I am lol. He's really more into Gaelic. Gaelic is cool, and maybe we could add that to our inventory someday, but Spanish is where the resources are for us right now. Heck, I would rather be learning French, but the resources are limited at the moment.

This adventure is fun, and even though it's hard to know exactly how much Dimaya is learning and/or understanding, it's rewarding! I'll keep posting the progress of Dimaya y su muñeca favorita.

There will be change...

It's been a while since I last blogged, but I'm back! My family and I are going through a transition right now which involves me going back to work and Dimaya going to nursery school. I am kind of excited about my job since I will be teaching Geography courses at the University, but I'm also kind of sad because we've never spent more than a few hours away from each other. I know that once she's over the initial shock, she'll do great. There are many positives in this equation. One being that she will just be around the corner on campus. At least I can get to her quickly if there is a problem. Steve will also be available and that makes me happy.

I still have so many things to do--lecture prep, generate a syllabus, trainings of all sorts--and it feels like going from spending the day with my daughter speaking Spanish and having a good time to filling out a ton of paperwork for HR and making decisions about who is fit (in my mind) to be caregiver for my child. I love teaching more than anything and if it didn't take up so much time...I would probably do it for free. It's something about being able to present--sometimes boring--material in your discipline in an interesting manner. I strive to be the best instructor that I can be, and this means looking at the things I hated and loved about the instructors I've had in the past. Right in between is a healthy balance ;)