Our actually bilingual child

I have a confession to make.  About the same time this happened for the first time, we began what I refer to now as "The Summer of Dora the Explorer" and she just got a ton of screen time.  I know it's a choice that a lot, a lot of other mothers wouldn't have made, but I did.  Often, I feel like a lesser mother for it because I see soooo many other women who just seem to seamlessly transition to adding a new baby to their family and I am just...clearly NOT one of those women.  And that's okay.  I have other strengths.  But Grant was teaching a summer class that didn't end for a month after Elliot was born which meant he had to teach and work on his class every single day, so he simply couldn't help out at first as much as he did when Kendra was born.  So, while I was struggling doing the newborn thing, we got some help from Dora.  And a little from Blue's Clues.  But mostly Dora.

After a couple of weeks, though, I started to feel a lot less guilty because her verbal and overall communication skills just took OFF.  She started understand and point out a lot more about the world around her because she saw it on Dora.  It was so weird.  And then one day, out of NO WHERE, she did this:




After we treated the distress of the bonked head, we were kinda blown away. Neither of us had ever gone over Spanish numbers with her.  In fact, I'd gone over Hungarian numbers with her at least a dozen times over the couple of months before this and they never seemed to sink in.  So, we went with it.  Dora got us started and we took expanded.




Clearly, fruit chewies aren't the most effective teaching tool.  So we grabbed something else that she couldn't consume by the fist full.




These videos are already six months old, she gets to 20 pretty smoothly nowadays.  And I'm feeling pretty okay with the Summer of Dora the Explorer.