Se Habla Dora - January 2005

The other day, I was walking to the park with my 2-year-old, when she hopped up on the curb and exclaimed what sounded to me at first like, “Santa!” I explained to Sara that Christmas was over and that Santa went back to the North Pole to start his liquidation sales. She gave me this perplexed look (like the one you probably have right now), and continued walking and hopping up on the curb saying, “Santa!”

When we got home, I started making dinner and Sara needed her “Dora the Explorer” fix. So I popped in the DVD, and listened to the all-too-familiar “D-D-D-D-D-Dora” theme and the annoying “I’m the Map” and “Backpack” songs for the billionth time. Then during the episode, something clicked. Dora was explaining to us that she and her friends needed to jump somewhere, and she said, “Say ‘¡Salta!’. That’s when it dawned on me that when Sara was jumping on the curb earlier, she wasn’t pining for the jolly old elf; she was saying, “Jump!” in Spanish.

So I’ve been encouraging her to learn more Spanish. It’s not just good for her, but it’s great for the whole family. After four years of Spanish in high school and two years in college, I used to be almost bilingual, but as they say, you don’t use it, you lose it. These days, I can watch the novelas on Telemundo and understand the basic plot. But I don’t think you need to know much Spanish to understand that the “lady” with the obviously-bleached hair is having an affair with the guy with the cheesy mustache, who is married to the other “lady” with so much collegen in her lips that in her effort to looks like Daisy Fuentes, she looks more like Daisy Duck. Then again, that’s pretty much the plot of any soap opera or reality show these days, and there are other things that we could be watching on Telemundo, like uh, international news maybe? Anyway, I digress…

So I’ve been trying to teach Sara the Spanish words for things as they come back to me. I think if she’s old enough to understand that “cat” and “kitty” mean the same thing, she can understand that “ball” and “pelota” also mean the same thing. It’s been fun for both of us, and as the world becomes more integrated, it will certainly help her future.

This was one of those parental moments in which I was proud but also frightened. Sara is learning at such an exponential rate these days, it’s hard to keep up. At 2, my daughter’s brain is a sponge, whereas at almost 40 (more about that next month!), mine is a sieve.

It also occurred to me that about the time she’ll be hitting puberty, I’ll be approaching menopause, and my poor husband will probably be ready to jump off the roof. I just hope he understands us when we say, “¡No Salta!”