17 October 2016

Disneyland Surprise!

I just watched this video from earlier this year. We had just arrived at a vacation condo in Anaheim, California and the three little kids still didn't know where we were or why we were there. They had no idea that they would get to go to Disneyland the next morning. We had kept the whole trip a complete surprise for them, only telling them that they might get to see their grandparents. The beginning of the video shows us telling them that we have a surprise and asking them if they can guess what it is.

It's an interesting video because it shows that we really do sometimes just mix up our languages quite blatantly. In the video you can see that even though we know the German word for surprise, we just simply use the English word. Not sure why, we just did. I've talked a lot about language boundaries in the blog. We still do mostly stay within our boundaries. Inserting English words in into our German conversation still counts as German for us (as long as we're using German sentence structure and syntax). Sometimes, it's just necessary to insert an English word here and there: See Post on Mixing Languages.  Most of the video is in German, but we do switch to English. At the end of this video, I'm speaking mostly English because I planned on sharing this video with family members who don't speak German. I usually wouldn't use that much English with the kids.

I also think it's cute to hear the older kids interacting with their younger siblings in German. This is just how our family rolls.


And, by the way, Disneyland was SUPER fun and magical!!


What a magical time for our whole family.
(We brought along a cutout of our son who is on a mission in Brazil
so that he could be a part of the fun.)


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Bilingual Baby Dream Team

Going on 20+ years of raising our bilingual babies...
I'm so grateful for a sweet husband who was willing to give this whole experiment a try and and that he was willing to speak German to our kids, even though his German exposure had been limited to a few semesters of college German. It's been one of the most fun and rewarding things we've done. The fact that our family speaks German has given us our own identity and helps the kids feel like they are a part of something special. And anything that helps your family feel special and connected is a good thing.