After reading a book in which the protagonist interviews various people (with sometimes outlandish questions!) for her school newspaper, and a first experiment of Interviewing Mommy, here is finally the long-awaited, hilarious Interview with Grandma This interview is already two months old, it was made only a few days after our then not-quite-5-year-old girl interviewed […]

I am very much looking forward to our visit with Grandma, because she hasn’t seen my now 5-year-old daughter in a while (3 months, that is). I’d like her to tell me if my impression is right that my daughter’s German skills have improved quite a bit recently. Just tonight, as I came home after […]

Do you know the German prefix “über”? It means “over” and is used in such verbs as überholen (overtake), überhören (overhear), übersehen (overlook), überschreiben (overwrite) – you get the idea. However, it is also used to designate the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow is morgen, the day after tomorrow is übermorgen, and the day after the […]

We’ve been reading a book where the protagonist interviews various people for her school newspaper. That gave my daughter the idea to interview me. And what better way to record her vocabulary and sentence structure? And her imagination, of course! Enjoy “Interview with Mommy” in three parts (and in German, our minority language): interview part […]

My 4½-year-old daughter speaks German (minority language) with a French (majority language) accent, up to and including the famous “H”. I expect this will get better as her German grows stronger. Meanwhile, she doesn’t always seem to hear the difference, either. Which led to a funny situation the other day when I read her a […]

A few weeks ago, I said something about Daddy being an adult. Which prompted this exclamation from our 4½-year-old daughter: “C’est pas un adulte, papa!” (Daddy isn’t a grown-up!) We looked at each other. He shrugged. I grinned. And she added the punch line: “C’est un parent.” (He’s a parent.)

The other day, my daughter (currently 4½) and I were playing with her various plush animals. She handed me her dragon hand puppet, informing me that it was not a real dragon. Me: “It’s not?” Her: “No, look.” She dropped it. “See? It can’t fly.”

Our family is quite a bit international, or European at least: In addition to German (Mom) and French (Dad), there is D., the second husband of my widowed mother-in-law, who is from Turkey, and my divorced father’s partner A., who is from Lithuania. Yesterday, during a car ride, my daughter and I were playing a […]

Two nights ago, I read my 4-year-old daughter a new book from the Conni series (for the second time). Afterwards, she chose the same book for Daddy’s bedtime story. Whenever she chooses a German book for him, he tells the story by the images, which works well for this series. However, some details mentioned in […]

This afternoon, my daughter and I went to the playground with her friend E. and her mother. I had only found out recently that the mother is anglophone, and so of course I chatted her up on the subject. At some point, the girls came to see us. E. wanted something from her mother who […]