An Introduction to La Mamita Barrios

Introducing... La Mamita Barrios con su Vaquita Lola y Pollito Pio Pio

I'm stay-at-home mom for the year, and while I can attest that this job is harder than teaching middle school, I am so thankful to be able to have this opportunity to see my two littles grow and develop every day!

Momming is hard, and running a bilingual, bicultural household can be hard, too, so I decided to start this blog to share my experiences of how we keep it fun and fresh.

California born and bred, I learned rudimentary Spanish in school and on mission trips to Mexico, but I really became fluent when I met my husband and started spending time with his Guatemalan family and friends. In 2014, we adopted his youngest brother and sister from Guatemala, and since they spoke no English, Spanish became our primary language at home. When I went back to work after having my daughter in 2017, my husband's cousins came from Guatemala and stayed with us to help take care of her when I was at work, so Spanish is actually Maya's dominant language (although she knows a lot of English, too!)

In 2018, we began fostering my niece, who also has spoken English and Spanish since birth, but she prefers English. So our home has become a special blend of pizza and tortilla, tamales with ranch dressing, and reading Buenas Noches Luna before bed.

Check back here often to see the chronicles of my preschool class of one and what it's like to raise emerging bilinguals.

Follow us instagram, too! @LaMamitaBarrios

#raisingemergingbilinguals #bilingualathome #bilingualfamily #bilingual #EnglishEspanol #espanolencasa #terribletwos #homeschoolpreschool #preschoolathome #bilingualmama

Comments

Is 5 Little Monkeys Racist?

I’ve seen a lot of Tik Toks debunking children’s nursery rhymes lately. I have two toddlers, so now whenever I hear one of those rhymes, I think about their unsavory origins. But my son loves, loves Five Little Monkeys. He’s just learning to talk, and can almost say it by himself. I’ve thought about telling him to stop singing it since I learned in the original lyrics it’s not monkeys jumping on the bed, but he just gets so much joy from singing it as he jumps up and falls down, I thought... no harm, no foul, right? As long as he thinks the song is about monkeys, it’s ok. Until my niece came over one day, and the three toddlers were playing on an old mattress we have on the living room floor for them to jump around on. My son asked me to sing 5 Little Monkeys. At first it was cute, because they literally were jumping on the bed, but then I took a good look at the three of them. My kids are half-Guatemalan but very fair, like I am. Whereas my niece is half-black, and her ski...

Why You Should Travel with Little Kids

I took my first cross-country road trip when I was six-weeks-old. My parents loaded me up in an old Ford Wagoneer and drove me home from my dad's hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to my hometown of Ojai, CA. After that, we traveled back and forth between the East Coast and the West Coast every summer of my life. A few times we flew, but most years we loaded up the car with the suitcases, the dogs, and the children and drove 3,000 miles across the country. This early exposure to travel instilled within me a joy of seeing the world, and since that first trip I have visited 34 states and 14 countries. And I hope to share that same joy with my own little ones. Traveling with children can be hard--it disrupts their nap schedules, may involve crossing timelines, and definitely pushes everyone beyond their comfort zones. But seeing different countries and different parts of our country as children gives them a greater appreciation for cultural and regional differences, and it widens their exper...

Toddler Morning Schedule in Spanish

Do you struggle to get your toddlers ready and out of the house on time in the morning? The past few morning in the Barrios house have been absolutely terrible. Maya usually wakes up early with me, but I let Mateo sleep until the last possible moment before we need to wake him up to get to school and work on time. This worked for a while, but this week we have left the house in tears. Since this is the kids' first year apart during the day, they miss each other so much. They want to play with each other in the mornings instead of getting ready, so I tried to think of a way to keep all of us on track. In order to help build their independence and organizational skills, I came up with a morning schedule for us to follow, with words and images. Then I placed a Maya copy and a Mateo copy in a clear dry-erase pocket and hung it in a central place by the kitchen. Now the kids know exactly what they need to do in order to get time to play with each other before school each mo...

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