Gastro is the worst! Sorry to hear it dude.
Also, a shoutout to anyone out there trying to work from home with kids about for the school holidays. My 5 year old got me a belter by yelling “Daddy pooed his pants” when I was on my daily WIP meeting this morning.
Maybe you shouldn’t have pooed your pants then…
Yep end of the first half, trying to drive the team to close deals across APAC whilst looking after a 9, 6 and 3 year old (especially as I just banned their ipads last week!).
Could’ve done with a heads up Gladys.
That is absolute gold!
I’d be appealing that ban at the High Court. Nobody would judge you for overturning it.
Became a dad for the first a few days ago to a little girl!
A question for those who have raised bilingual children…
My partner is from Rome so we obviously would like to raise her bilingual, speaking English and Italian. We live in the UK, so we go to Italy quite often. She’ll have plenty of practise speaking in Italian with her grandparents.
Question is: how did you guys do it during day to day? I speak a bit of Italian, but I’m not 100% fluent. Our plan then is for me to speak and interact with her in english and my partner to interact in Italian.
Anybody do similar? Was there one language that turned out stronger in the first few years?
I have a Japanese wife, she spoke to them in Japanese, I spoke to them in English. Worked just fine, kids could adapt their conversation to who was talking with them and even hold 3 way convos in both languages.
English will be their dominant language by School year 3, just because of exposure. Ours also wen to Japanese school on Saturday mornings for a few years to boost the Japanese.
Hammer the non-English early. They get English from 5+ (school). I was anxious about them not having enough and did too much English.
Congratulations! I’m only 5 months in to being a father, but I’m loving it.
My wife is German and we are defiantly planning for our son to be bilingual. She talks to him in German a lot of the time. I speak to him mainly in English but a little German too (I’m not 100% fluent either).
We have friends who are in the same situation with older children who took the same approach, and the kids speak Germany fluently. Our son will go to Kindergarten at the German International school (and perhaps primary school) which may help too.
Congratulations!
My wife is Chinese and we have a 5 year old and 10 month old. We’ve been doing similar to that, with my wife mostly speaking Chinese and me English to our 5 year old. I think babies learn a lot by watching their parents speak to each other though, and we almost exclusively converse in English so I was a bit worried.
But as it’s turned out the 5 year old is more or less bilingual now. We moved from Sydney to China when she was 3, so she’s had preschool in both languages at different times, and I think that has helped. Our 10 month old has only lived in China though, so we’re interested to see how he goes without the immersive English environment that his sister had.
I would say that the language native to where we are living has always been a bit stronger, but the second language as always been strong enough to converse with the other parent.
This is interesting to hear. We are about to start that transition into primary school over here so I’m wondering how literacy will develop. Were your kids able to develop any Japanese literacy alongside their speaking fluency? I guess the Japanese school must help.
Our neighbours are a German couple who have a 5 year old. They both speak German in the home so their daughter’s German is her strongest language. In the first 2 so years of her speaking, so really only spoke German, with a little bit of English here and there but once she started going to daycare a couple of times a week her English improved a lot without her parents having to focus on her learning English.
My older brother went to kindergarten (early 70s) with an American accent because his only exposure to English was watching Sesame Street.
Lol.
My younger sibling had an American accent as a kid because my step mum (their mum) is American. My dad is Australian but the American accent seemed to sick.
Our eldest daughter can read and write Japanese at a reasonable level, our youngest has very little reading and writing capability, but she did 2 years less at Saturday school.
Neither had any issue with English reading and writing, in fact both could read English at a 2nd grade level before they started school thanks to daily interactions with books from a very young age.
I have two nephews, both learnt Polish as their first language. The oldest had a few issues in daycare but within a month or so he was all good. The best was when he had a Polish accent trying to speak English. Was cute as hell… now he’s speaking predominantly English, but he’s completely fluent in Polish plus Polish school on Saturdays. The younger one is definitely less fluent, mainly as the older one speaks to him in English.
I have a 5 wk old girl, first baby. Stayed up to watch the GF with me at 2wks old but no good luck charm apparently. Guess I’ll be enrolling her in tennis. My wife has a Hungarian background but no language, which is such a shame. Opportunity to be raised bilingual is fantastic. So many benefits for development to learn early.
Thanks all for the advice.
Think we’ll stick to one of us speaking Italian and one for English.
Makes me really wish I was raised bilingual. Must be a great skill to have at such a young age.
The greatest advantage of being bilingual, is being able to talk about people without them realizing… 
Since learning Italian to a passable level over the last few years, this has become a pastime for me haha.