Spanish Immersion, Morning 1

Today I started "Spanish ONLY" ... up until lunch anyway. 

During weekdays my kids (4 & 2) have "preschool" with a Peruvian gal, K, who comes to our house and plays with them and does learning activities while Hubby and I do ministry projects. She mostly speaks to them in Spanish, but sometimes my 4yo gets frustrated because he doesn't understand, so she'll give him a break and speak to him in English. Now that we're getting closer and closer to our departure from Peru, I'm wanting to start implementing more Spanish into our home life, so I spoke with K about working with me on this. I told her that even Hubby & I will be using Spanish with the kids in the AM in order to make it only Spanish across the board. I've explained this change to my 4yo so he won't be caught off-guard. My 2yo is much more go-with-the-flow. It seems she doesn't even realize there's a difference between me speaking Spanish or English to her. She responds equally and never shows frustration.

Well so I got up this morning to a bare-bottomed Cutlet telling me he'd peed the bed (which he rarely does anymore!) ... and THIS is how I'm gonna start our first Spanish only morning??? So I didn't say anything... just got up and went to take a look at the damage. I finally just picked him up and sat him on my lap and reminded him that we were gonna be speaking Spanish today. After that, I mustered up my gumption and just started in, albeit somewhat timidly... Although it was after 7AM and K would be here around 8, he wanted to lay back down for a bit, so I changed his pajamas and, to curb the crankiness he was emitting, I relented to his wishes. I didn't want his morning to be more difficult than it was already starting out to be. About 5-10 minutes later, he gets up happily and is ready to put his regular clothes on. Yay!


Well I think the morning went quite well. No fusses from Cutlet about me speaking Spanish... and definitely no attitude from Lively... she takes things in stride. I have to say that at this point I am very glad I've got K coming every weekday morning because I really don't know how I could handle 4-5 hours of only Spanish with my sweet little ones. I did notice that as I was in and out of the house during the morning, speaking Spanish to them just felt "strange". Hubby had the same sentiments. How can we do this?!? English is how we can best express our feelings and love and silliness with them! Honestly we missed that closeness. I don't want to give up yet though because this trial deserves a good test run... and I hear that it starts feeling more "normal" as days go by...