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 skin happens

Storytime Bilingüe featuring “Buenas Noches Luna”

This week's Storytime Bilingue features Buenas Noches Luna , the Spanish translation of the beloved children's book Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. We love the vivid language and images, and the black and white contrast pages are particularly compelling for the little ones whose eyesight is still developing. You'll see how much Mateo interacts with the book during this reading! This is a story I have nearly memorized, because I read it to Maya consistently before bed during our bedtime routine. We've read it so much, she practically has it memorized, too. Sometimes she likes me to read it aloud, and sometimes she likes to "read" the book by describing the images. I actually wrote about her as an emerging bilingual reader in my earlier blog post, Today a Reader, Tomorrow a Leader , but the highlight of that post is that research shows repeated readings of the same book really benefit early literacy and vocabulary acquisition. For that reason I

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

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