How it all began...with Baby Ben!

I came across this little snippet from almost 25 years ago. It reminded me how far we've come in the last 25 years. I remember having no idea if our little German experiment would work. Ben was our first child. We were college students at the time and dirt poor and so we only owned a handful of German books. But we read them a lot. We loved the picture dictionary books. The book that I'm reading to him in the video really helped us all to improve our German vocab.

My little Baby Ben is turning 25 this year and he is still fluent in German. When he calls home, he talks to his little siblings in German. In this video, he is saying some of his first German words. It was fun for me to find this video of my sweet little baby Ben and to remember our early years of non-native bilingual parenting. During these years, we were still very unsure of ourselves. We weren't sure if we were going to mess up our kids or if we'd succeed. But I still remember the thrill of hearing Ben respond to us in German. It was so exciting for us.

The following video is only a year later, and Ben's vocab and his ability to communicate have increased tremendously. By this age, he spoke almost exclusively German to us. The whole non-native bilingual parenting thing was still so new. Each day, we seemed to be forging into unknown territory. It's interesting how much easier and more comfortable we got as more and more kids came along. It just makes me so grateful that we stuck with it and continued, even when we weren't 100% sure of the outcome. And, it's just so fun to look back and see the beginning stages of our non-native bilingual experiment!!