bate, bate chocolate
When Grant was a baby, Michelle and I thought it would be valuable to teach him Spanish. When Spanish isn’t your first language (in my case) or you haven’t spoken it much since you were a child (Michelle’s case), you tend to switch back to English as soon as you run into any vocabulary trouble, or when you are tired, or when you are tired of sounding stupid. Because of our poor efforts, Grant really only ever learned a few phrases and quite a few individual words. Compared to Evie though, he is a polyglot. We’ve never really tried to teach her and her Grandmama is not close enough to help, so she has been reduced to yelling, Chocolate! (in Spanish) any time she hears anyone speaking a foreign language. She’s quite the citizen of the world.
We let her watch Dora, which is the most pathetic attempt to teach her Spanish ever, but I don’t think she has picked up a single word. She has picked up one helpful phrase though. Last night she was scared of the “tiny pink dinosaurs” again. I heard her crying and went in to check on her and found her yelling, “Swiper, no swiping!” over and over while waving her hand at the dark (If you don’t get that, you don’t have kids). She told me it worked though. The dinosaurs ran away. Good thing they weren’t Spanish dinosaurs though, I’m not sure “Chocolate!” would work.