Hola y bienvenidos! Hello and welcome!

The excerpt said it all :).

But in case you’d like more context, here’s more information on this here blog to help you discern whether it’s the right resource for your own journey.

As a (legal) Spanish-speaking immigrant (turned Naturalized citizen) in the United States, I thought I knew that knowing another second was a sure-fire way to get ahead in this country.

And it very well may be! I’m not saying it’s not. Being almost trilingual (I speak a bit of French as well) opened many doors for me and it greatly helped me to keep them open so I always had ways to advance. But because Spanish is my native language and I never had to learn it, I never paid attention to just how important it is to, well, consciously work at learning it or at fostering an environment in which it became “second nature.”

My experience with the English language is somewhat similar: That one I did have to learn as my second language so I grew up in an environment that ingrained its importance in my psyche and where I always had to work at understanding it, its idiosyncrasies, its rhetoric, and so on.

You could say I developed a more “meta” understanding of it, aided in part by my minor in Rhetoric and my work as a Writing Tutor in College. However, Spanish, which I never had to study past required Orthography lessons in my Latin American school (with things like where the tilde–AKA our accent mark–goes, etc.) came naturally.

Fast-forward a few years.. I meet my husband, we fall head over heels for each other, we get married, some more time passes, and NOW we have a preschool-aged son, a little Saint in Heaven, and a toddler-aged daughter. My husband was born and raised in the South (yes, we met AFTER I was already a citizen!) so we speak English to each other, when my parents are around, and as a family.

But I speak Spanish about 70% of the time with/to the kids: the other 30% (sometimes more) is honestly English or Spanglish. I’ve been enamored with this country since I was a little girl: my family had cable so I grew up watching common 90s American TV shows that made me really yearn for a safer, more modern culture where kids seemed to be all on the cutting edge of the next invention. At least that’s the impression I got back then.

This penchant for what I thought American life was like wasn’t “put out” (as in a fire) by my parents’ insistence that a second language was imperative to having a good life and to getting ahead. My dad studied in the U.S. when he was younger so he had some experience with the country, and he really thought that learning English was key to being competitive in a global marketplace.

So learning English–and learning it WELL–became both my most valued goal and the bane of my existence at that age. As a kid, I hated those classes (my parents enrolled me in extracurricular English-language classes because my school’s bilingual classes weren’t great) BUT they significantly contributed to my stellar performance as a young student having just arrived in this country in the early 2000s.

Then we moved to the U.S.

If I told you that teachers liked me a lot, that’d be an understatement. I quickly became a favorite student because I did what was told, I participated in class, got great grades, and I got involved in extracurriculars. I don’t say that to brag, but rather to paint a picture that might help you understand what life here was like for me as a new immigrant.

I wasn’t withdrawn or struggling because I didn’t understand the language: Instead, I was flourishing. I was thriving. I could more than “defend myself”* in English; I could present research to big groups of people and an undergraduate dissertation to a panel of professors and students, get two undergraduates plus a minor, write long essays, tutor US-born college students on proper rhetoric and help them understand what assignments required, and even write for and edit student newspapers (one of my stories even won a state award!), and so on.. all the while not sounding like I wasn’t from here. (At least that’s what I’ve been told numerous times.)

*By “defend myself,” I meant “defenderme en Inglés,” which is how Spanish speakers refer to understanding the basics of a foreign language (English in this case) well enough to know what’s being said to them and how to respond, but it’s not actual or complete fluency. (For example, if someone’s talking about you behind your back, you wouldn’t know what’s being said.)

At some point after becoming a citizen I met my husband. We courted, got engaged, married, did all the things, and had kids–a boy, another baby boy whom I lost during my second trimester of pregnancy, and a girl.

Spanish form the start

I’ve always known that I’d speak Spanish to my kids–it was never a question. My husband liked that I was bilingual and he’s more than happy to have us be a bilingual family, where I speak Spanish to the kids 70ish percent of the time and English to him and to the kids when he’s around (and heck, sometimes when he’s not around, too, because it’s what seems to come more quickly or instinctively).

It’s difficult to remain “committed to the bit” when everything around you is in your other language: Books, shows, websites. So it’s almost like I have to make a conscious effort to speak to the kids and teach them as though we were in my native country of Colombia and there were other Colombians around.

Which is the perspective you’ll get glimpses of in this blog.

I’m not writing from the point of view of someone trying to learn Spanish with her family. I’m writing from the point of view of someone who already speaks Spanish fluently, and therefore some things might not seem obvious (if you’re a Spanish-language learner) or they might seem strange or new.

This is why I’m not aiming to prescribe anything or tell you EXACTLY WHAT WORKS. Homeschooling is deeply personal and unique, and I only aim to show you what we’ve done and what we’re doing as a way to hopefully inspire you to either: 1) try something new if you think it’ll be the right fit, 2) ask why we did something a certain why, or to 3) suggest what worked for you as an alternative for us or other readers.

This site is for my benefit (because I love blogging and helping) as much as it for you (because I hope you take the time to learn, comment, and get in touch when appropriate).

I thank you for making it this far, and I hope my logs and “behind the scenes” posts help you and yours!