I am a regular contributor for www.spanglishbaby.com where I write about my attempt to raise a trilingual baby. I am also very interested in writing about my experience with nursing and having a natural/medicine-free/intervention-free birth. Please contact me if there is a chance I can contribute my stories about nursing and birthing to your blog.
That being said, several experiences have led me to create a blog. The following are a few of the roles that influence what I write about:
Mother: nursing and stay-at-home mom…attempting to raise a trilingual baby.
Wife: it was “mi media naranja’s” idea for me to start a blog
Sister: they made my childhood memorable.
Graduate Student: with an interest in social positioning and identity construction.
Daughter: to parents who immigrated to the US as teenagers from Northern Mexico
Writer: I attribute part of my interest to my B.A. in English Literature
Teacher: of Spanish or English depending on the school, M.A. in Elementary Education
Hope to hear from you!
Hello Suzanne,
I do not know how I came about your site but my kids are trilingual (English, Spanish, Turkish). I do not speak or understand Spanish at all myself. They all attended a dual immersion program from K-gr.8. Two of my kids are in high school now and are doing great (4.0 gpa’s), while the other one is in grade 4. Right now in our district they are trying to cut our dual immersion (English/Spanish) program over others to save money. The frustrating part is that the program doesn’t cost much money at all and it took over 10 years to make it the success it is today. For some reason we have been a target. I am actually calling out to you to possibly throw out some advice to our board, the costs of eliminating such a program. I am hoping that through your education you have facts we can enlighten our board with to discourage them from eliminating the program this Tuesday. Any help would be appreciated. Please contact me via my e-mail address. The school in question is the Barbour Language Academy in Rockford, IL.
Thank you,
Sule Bertram
Hi Sule,
I am sending you an e-mail.
Suzanne
Cool! We found a lot of things in common between you and me. We are both bilingual (Chinese and English). I had a 100% natural birth and I breastfed my baby for almost a year. My daughter is now 14 months and half. I would like to expose her to a trilingual environment – Chinese, English and Spanish. I also live in Austin and I actually just graduated from UT-Austin with my Ph.D.
Hi Jing,
That is so cool how much we have in common! Congratulations on your recent graduation! That seems like a very far moment for me….what did you study? Maybe we should organize a play date sometime?
Suzanne
hi Suzanne, I speak 5 languages and am also raising my child trilingual (for now). What languages are you teaching yours other than Spanish and English? I am from Iran, grew up in Austria and am now in the US so we need at least Persian, German and English in the house. We started oznoz.com to help parents with tools for language learning. Pls let me know if you can check it out and if you would like to write for us some day. thanks again Shabnam Rezaei
Hi Suzanne,
I’m a senior journalism student at UT working on a story about bilingual education in Austin. Would you be available for a brief phone interview sometime soon (Sunday, May 6th at the absolute latest)? Please e-mail me and let me know. devontincknell(at)gmail.com Thanks so much!
Devon
Hi Suzzanne
Thank you for sharing your ideas and thoughts in your blog!
I am also considering homeschooling my daughter using three languages (Spanish, English and Arabic). I wonder if you can recommend a book about homeschooling in different languages, one that gives you a good overall picture to get started…(i dont have much time to read these days…). Let me know pls. Thanks a lot!
Maria
Thanks for writing.
We are doing Spanish at home with me, my son’s father, and Chinese classes weekly. Also a few French classes thrown in. Having a blast.
Hello Suzanne,
I am an undergraduate (bilingual Polish&German) student from Germany and working in the field of Multilingual First Language Acquisition. My latest task is to do research in trilingual Fist LA. I wanted to ask you whether there is any literature you could recommend?
Thank you very much in advance
Yes, check out Simona Montanari, Ph.D.books about trilingualism. Also, google scholar is very helpful, too.