About Us

I am a mother of 8 bilingual children and we live in the Pacific Northwest. My husband and I met in the German program at college (BYU). He spoke English and French (having served an LDS mission in France). I spoke English and German (having lived in Germany for 5 1/2 years during my childhood). We are both native English speakers from the United States. I studied German Teaching and Language Acquisition. I was working on my masters in Language Acquisition when our first child was born. I was fascinated by the idea of raising a bilingual child. So, as soon as he was born, we both started speaking German to him. My husband's German was limited, since he had only studied about 5 semesters of German and had never been in Germany...but we persevered. He worked on his German. I memorized German lullabies and broke into our meager savings to invest in a few German children's books. Well, a little to our surprise, it worked! Our baby's first words were in German. We both continued to speak only German to him. Two years later, twin girls joined our family. Two years after that, another boy and then two years after that another girl. Our home was completely German speaking, except that my husband and I spoke English to each other. But we only spoke German to the kids and they only spoke German to each other and to us. As they entered elementary school, they started speaking more English at home, but we kept up many of our German routines. Nine (yes, nine) years later...we find out that we are once again expecting. We held a family meeting and all the teenagers decided that this next member of our family should also speak German...since that's what our family does: We speak German. A year later (so that our little caboose wouldn't be all by himself), we decided to have one more child. And, lo and behold, we were blessed with twins again. So, just in case you haven't been counting, that makes 8. With the arrival of our second batch of children, the German in our home has increased substantially. All the 5 older kids decided that they would all only speak German to the 3 little ones. It's been fun to observe all the bilingual language acquisition happening in our home over the past 20 years. 

I always wanted to write about my experiences while raising our first batch of children, but life was just too hectic. It's so exciting that I actually get to raise another set of children and that I get to do it in German again. We are just tickled to be able to travel this same fun bilingual parenting road a second time and I'm excited to share it with anyone who is interested.

First Batch of Kids

Second Batch of Kids

All Kids Together