The holidays would have been so much easier if we spoke Spanish

By rights, I should be bilingual.

My maternal grandfather lived in Cuba as a teenager and young man.  My grandmother was born in Eastern Europe but was raised in Argentina.  They spoke Spanish to each other, but never taught their kids.  Spanish was their secret language, the one they used when — I imagine — they wanted to talk about things that were too scary or interesting for children to know.

So my mother never learned Spanish, and although I minored in Spanish in college and spent a semester in Spain, I don’t speak Spanish either.  (I can order beer in Spanish. I can argue about lost luggage in Spanish.  I think I could still tell a guy to get his hands off my ass in Spanish if the need ever arose, but that’s it.)

It’s a shame that I was cheated out of this skill, really, because it would come in handy to have a second language now, one that I could purposely NOT teach to my children so as to be able to speak to my husband privately.

But alas, he doesn’t speak Spanish either.

So, we have had to come up with our own method of talking to one another with our nosy three-year-old nearby.  Although she often seems not to be listening to us, we have learned that she most always is.  And if we’re talking about her, she can hear us even through the walls.

So Country-Fried Daddy and I try to use the most high-falutin’ language we can muster up so that Miss D. doesn’t understand what we are saying.  Sometimes we spell.  Sometimes we throw in a Spanish word we both might know.  But mostly, we just try to show off our vocabulary.

I’m glad we got our act down before the holidays.

Miss D. asked for a Handy Manny tool kit for Hanukkah.  While I should have embraced this request — perhaps she will learn to speak Spanish from a Disney character and break the sad family cycle — I did not want this toy in my house.  We are “Disney-fied” enough, and I suspected she would never actually play with it.  So she got lots of nice things for Hanukkah, but no Handy Manny.

Then she asked Santa for a Handy Manny tool kit for Christmas.

Now what are we supposed to do with that?

“If we don’t acquire the implements,” I said to CFD in front of Miss D., “we may cause incredulity in the corpulent hombre.” (See how I threw a little Spanish in there?  Impressive, no?)

And so, several days before Christmas, CFD went out to The Store That Shall Not Be Named and bought a toy that I assumed would immediately end up in a closet.

Except Miss D. loves her Handy Manny tool kit from Santa, and she is walking around hammering things while the little plastic box loudly sings, “Let’s Get to Work” and “Hop Up, Jump In.”  She’s driving me nuts, but I can’t even talk about that in front of her without digging deep for $5 words and the few remnants of Spanish I have left.

“The cacophony of these implements is causing me distress,” I say to CFD. “Perhaps I could better tolerate this f-r-e-a-k-i-n regalo if I were consuming a cerveza.”

Tagged as: annoying Christmas gifts, mom blog, mommy blogger, yankee in the south