Los Poppos

About a week ago, I was on a step ladder with socks on my feet when I felt a swift tug at my leg and had to catch my balance. It was Justin. Apparently he disapproved of me being barefooted and was insistent on putting shoes (actually, mommy's flip flops) on my feet. You should've seen the intensity. Hilarious. So, yeah... Justin's "new thing" is putting on shoes. And it doesn't necessarily have to be his shoe... or even his foot. He's just got a thing against naked feet these days. Here he is making a valiant attempt at clothing his own feet.

Poppos, by the way, are what he calls "zapatos", which means shoes in spanish. And speaking of which (because I've been meaning to work this into the blog)... raising him bilingual is taking a lot more patience than I thought it would. Not because of my weak command of the Spanish language; but simply put, the words are just harder! One syllable words that he can master in a day become multi-syllable words that leave him tongue tied. For example, here's a list of one-syllable basic words in English, along with the number of syllables in the Spanish equivalent.

eye (2) nose (2) mouth (2) ears (3) teeth (3) hi (2) bye (3) foot (2) leg (3) knee (3) juice (2) milk (2) stop (2) eat (2) food (3) bath (3) drink (2) up (3) [three syllables for a two letter word... good grief] down (3) hair (2) book (2) hot (4) cold (2)...

I simply never realized the lack of one-syllable words in Spanish. And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are dozens of others that I'm forgetting... including a few more that translate to 4 or 5 syllables. So you tell me, if you were learning to speak, which would you rather say: "knee"... or RO-DIL-LA? .... "bye"... or A-DI-OS. I think if Justin had his choice, he'd be saying "adios" to this bilingual experiment altogether. We'll see what happens.