I say la mesa, you say...

Being the over-informed and freaked-out modern parents that we are, Katie and I take Ada to a toddler Spanish class every Saturday morning, concerned that our collective foreign language skills, being barely sufficient to order a ham sandwich in Paris, will permanently stunt Ada's ability to pick up other tongues.

Neither Katie or I have studied Spanish, so we struggle along with Ada trying to pick up the new vocabulary. This is fine in class, where the ever patient Miss Linda encourages our feeble attempts to help out as if we were just a few more two-year old students, happy if we just make an attempt at saying the words and make it through class without wetting ourselves. At home, it's a little tougher. As parents we feel duty-bound to reinforce Miss Linda's teachings in spite of our complete incompetence with the subject matter. This primarily consists of repeating colors and numbers in Spanish while reading with Ada, but occasionally we'll chuck in a random word out of the blue.

The other night Ada was sitting in her high chair finishing up with dinner. As usual, a good portion of her mac and cheese had found its way on to the chair's tray, the surrounding floor, and probably some not so obvious places we'll only discover when we move out of the house. I grabbed a sponge and handed it to Ada, asking her to clean "la mesa" - no doubt this clever use of Spanglish was delivered with the perfect diction one would expect from mid-western Canadian. Leaving Ada to her cleaning, I stooped down to pick up some errant mac. When I stood up, Ada was looking at me with a puzzled expression while dutifully using the sponge to clean the top of her head. No doubt she found it odd that her dad would ask her to clean her "cabeza" while "la mesa" clearly had a mess on it. I took heart that she was willing to follow instructions from her dad, no matter how idiotic, but I fear her foreign language skills may still be doomed.