Big news, some changes and “the limping wolf”

Big news! There´s a brother/sister for Dani on his/her way. What?, having another baby? Now? With this awful crisis slapping our faces every day? You´re nuts! Hell yeah! If everything goes as planned we´ll be parents again in March 2013.

When things are tough like this country going bankrupt and the European economy shrinking, we tend to rely on the important things of life like your loved ones and the time that you share with them. In our case we are positive about the future, we don´t pursue expensive cars or gigantic flat screens. We know that we could live with less. We have done it before and we would be able to do it again, here or in any other country (preferably one where they speak Spanish, English or German, Chinese is not in the menu yet…).

Now that changes are expected in the short-medium term, we are working to reorient some of the patterns that we have with our little man. We need him to be less dependent on his Mami because she´ll have to pay a lot of attention to the baby soon. The main change we have made is at the moment of going to bed. Now Mami and Papi go to bed with him, then Mami stays with us for some time, then sneaks out to the other room while Papi is telling an amazing story about the trending topic of the day-week. On the first night there were some “Papi, move! Go away! Go and get Mami!” for a while. We have been talking about how tired Mum is and how much she needs to go to sleep and after only 2 days he has assumed very well that he´ll chat only with Papi until he falls asleep every night.

This is having an immediate positive impact on his English. Here are just 2 pearls from these last nights, as an example:

-       It´s raining: He loves the song “it´s raining, it´s pouring, the old man is snoring, he went to bed and he bumped his head and he couldn’t get up in the morning”. He made me sing it like 20 times in a row, and then he said “Papi poor man, he got a bump in the head”. It´s the first time he expresses his own conclusions after observing something in English.  

-       The limping wolf: There is a statue of a wolf without one of his paws in a roundabout near home. He saw the statue and we started talking about the poor wolf, the story that we made up is that he got a wound on the paw and that´s why he couldn´t walk well and he was limping. That day the little man got a little scratch on his foot and after curing it that night he said: “Papi, the wound! It hurts so bad! I have a wound on my foot LIKE THE LIMPING WOLF!!!” I just looked at him in the dark in shock, half LOL, half tremendously glad he is catching things so quickly.

My ME time/our couple time before going to sleep is gone, but I think it´s being very beneficial for his English skills, so I think it´s just temporary and a fair price to pay!!