One aspect of going home when you are the minority language parent is realising that “people understand me here”. By that I mean that I’m so used to no one around us understanding what I say to my three-year-old in public that I have to do a double-take when I’m back home and suddenly remember […]

Yesterday we participated in the annual lantern walk (Laternelaufen) of the bilingual school an older friend of my daughter attends. Following the walk, I was queuing for sausages, enjoying the unusual situation of being surrounded by German speakers on all sides, when I overheard three girls (I guess they were about 9 years old) talk […]

Yesterday when I picked her up from day-care (it’s the school holidays), my daughter told me what they’d been doing: “We went by Nanny’s house, and then there was a big TV.” Turns out she’s been to see her first movie at the local cinema. Already. I think I was six or seven when I […]

We’ve run clear out of pirate muesli. Alright, I admit we ran out of pirate muesli several months ago and have since been refilling the box with a very nice chocolate muesli from Germany. But now we’re still two months away from Christmas, the box is empty, and our daughter refuses to eat any other […]

This morning my daughter was playing with her parrot feathers (a gift from a friend). I told her: “Next time we’re at Grandma’s, I’ll show you a photo of me with a parrot on my shoulder.” She: “Mommy, were you a pirate?”

We just spent a long weekend with monolingual German friends who have a son almost exactly our girl’s age. (More on the effects on that on our little girl’s bilingualism later.) These friends are clearly unfamiliar with the concept of bilingual families, but the question they asked proved interesting. It was fairly simple: Why German, […]

I thought it was good fun to introduce my little girl to Pippi Longstocking. Even more so when I discovered there’s a new illustrated editon with the most lovely pictures. Nostalgic as I am, they made me ditch my old copy with the black-and-white drawings. (Besides, the new one has the new German spelling and […]

The other day, at the swimming pool, my little girl didn’t want to get dressed. We were in the communal changing rooms reserved for the baby swimming group, and another child her age came in with his dad. At some point I told her “Guck, der Junge zieht sich auch an.” (“Look, the boy is […]

Our girl has taken to scribbling with ball-point pens whenever she can get hold of them. And when she does, she asks for “papi” (Papier in German or papier in French, paper). With results that to our surprise look like this:

Today we went to see a child-minder because our child-minder is on sick leave. The lady is already looking after a little boy three months younger than our girl. We stayed for a while and the two of them played. There was a little tent in the room, and they had been in and out […]