le week-end

Sorry, I haven't taken any E pictures recently. She's spending this weekend with Grandma and "Gippa" (now that she can say Grandpa that's what it sounds like).

I've always wanted her to learn another language while she's young. I may have waited too long to get her accustomed the the only other language I can speak (French). In the car on Thursday I started speaking French to her and she roundly rejected it. Everything I said she would try to repeat, but like this:

Me: "Je t'aime, Emma!" E: "No, juh tem!"
Me: "Bonjour, Emma!" E: "No, bah juh!"
Me: "Tu n'aimes pas que je parle francais? Pourquoi?"
E: "No pooh quah! Stop it!"
Me: "Tu veux que j'arrete? Arretes means 'stop it'. Can you say 'arretes'?"
E: "NO AWWETT! STOP IT!"

One of my American neighbors uses French as her primary language with her daughters, even though their family is not French. I got inspired by her and have tried it with E a few times but never more than a comment or two. I seemed to think that my French wasn't good enough to bother with. Perfectionism runs in the family - see Helen's blog post of Feb. 8th. My neighbor says if she doesn't know a word in French she uses "franglais" (aka "Frenglish"). At least the girls are getting familiar with the sounds of French and can probably much more easily learn a Latin-based language in future. E's still young, though opinionated, and I'm not going to give up.