Some days I’m not sure why I bother, because it tends to be quite complicated.

Many people in our lives don’t even know the language and the ones that do, often don’t use it, but still I keep persisting because I really, really want my children to know Pennsylvania Dutch.

Why?

There’s no big reason really but it’s the language I grew up with, a lot of the people we socialize with speak it so I want my kids to at least understand it.

In Thailand we worked with a family that was teaching their kids three languages! Mom was Thai, Dad was Dutch and they both knew english and they were teaching their boys all 3 languages. I thought that was pretty cool!

Besides many people pay (with real, legit money) to learn a second language, so why wouldn’t I teach my kids for free?

Maybe, because it’s not working out so well?!

We spoke dutch to Kenzie until she was almost 2, then we did a D.T.S. (just as she was starting to talk) and everyone around was speaking english so when she started talking it came out in english.

Then we had Kyna and I decided I’m going to talk dutch to him then maybe Kenzie will pick it up too.

It worked!

Kenzie learned to speak the language quite well, and I was sure Kyna was learning it as well!

I took great pride in my success right up until Kyna started talking.

Yup, his words came out in english!

Oh well, we added baby number 3 recently, so I guess we’ll talk dutch to him now to teach Kyna the language. 🙂

It worked once, but I’m not fully convinced that it’s working this time around because this morning I spoke to Kyna in dutch and he looked at me with a little grin on his face and a look that said he’s fairly certain I might have lost my senses and said:

“Mom, I’m not a baby!”