You see that piece of paper there with my 5-year-old daughter's writing on it? It says "japi" on it three times. I'm not going to lie, when I first saw it, I was very confused and maybe a tad concerned. I mean, why would she write "japi" multiple times on a piece of paper. Sheesh, I thought, I hope it's not some kind of racial slur. Where would she even hear something like that?
Then it hit me! It might look like is says "japi" if I read it in English, but that's not what she meant at all. This little piece of paper is proof that her bilingual education is working. How so?
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My daughter goes to a bilingual immersion elementary school and it was not an easy choice to make. We live in San Francisco where we get a choice about which public schools our kids go to. My husband would have preferred a school closer to our home, but I was adamant that the school we chose had to have a Spanish program.
I want both of my children to be able to be fluent in Spanish. I do my best to speak to them in Spanish at home, but I'm the only one that speaks to them in Spanish on a regular basis. I live far away from extended family and my husband is neither Latino nor bilingual. It became apparent to me early on that if my children were going to be bilingual, I was going to need some help.
So we put my eldest in a Spanish immersion program and although I KNOW she is learning Spanish, I yearn for the day that I ask her a question in Spanish and she answers me completely in Spanish using complete sentences. Sometimes it feels like that day will never come, but finding her paper with "japi" all over it made me so happy because I realized that if I sounded out the word in Spanish what she was really trying to write is the word "happy" in English.
She wrote it the way it the way a child learning to write in Spanish would write it. She sounded it out and since an "h" is silent in Spanish, she used a "j," which totally makes sense to a bilingual mind. My baby wrote happy in Spanish!
I'm thrilled because it means that even if she isn't speaking to me in fluent Spanish yet, she is thinking in Spanish and that is enough to make any bilingual mami japi as pie!
Image via Claudya Martinez/Unknown Mami
