Mommy's Spanglish Cooking Show with Lily

Lily is a very curious little girl. She has definitely never been the kind of baby who likes to be left alone with a pacifier to keep herself happy. I am okay with this, but it does mean that I essentially have to keep her entertained all day long. I don't mind; I just drag her around the house with me and sing her songs and tell her, in great detail, about everything I am doing in ridiculously animated, silly voices.

This means that every evening when I am making dinner, I basically host our own little private cooking show. And since I am hoping to raise a bilingual(ish) little girl, I attempt to do this in Spanish. The problem with this is that my Spanish vocabulary is not very large when it comes to things like kitchen objects. I can talk about business, the gospel, or a whole number of abstract ideas in Spanish. I can conjugate and my grammar isn't too bad. But when it comes to cheese graters, pastry blenders, and spatulas, I am pretty hopeless. I am improving, though, since I keep Google translate open on my computer constantly. I now know that a cheese grater is a rallador and a spatula is an espatula, and I think a pastry blender is just called a mezclador (let me know if you have a better word for it!).

But overall, let's just say I'm glad my new neighbors are Asian and not Hispanic because if they heard my mutilated kitchen Spanish every day before dinner time, they would probably laugh their heads off. Our dinner preparation "conversations" generally go something like this:

"Look Lily! This is a potato. It is brown. I am going to use this metal thing to take the--oh, darn, what's it called . . . oh yeah--peel off this potato so I can chop it up and put it in the soup for our dinner. We can't eat the peel because it tastes very yucky. (Singing:) So we take it off, take it off, take it off. I am taking the peel off so we can eat this potato!"

"And now we are going to put the potato on this wooden thing that comes out of the, um . . . surface . . . so we can use this knife to chop it up into little tiny pieces, and then put them into the, um, container of water that is boiling on the . . . thing that is above the oven."

Anyway, let's just say that my daily Spanglish "cooking show" would not be very interesting (except to laugh at) for anyone over the age of 6 months, but hopefully it is more helpful than detrimental to Lily's language development. At least it keeps her entertained every evening so I can make dinner.