Achievements

I managed to turn the heel of a sock successfully in the first attempt - Finnish Integration, Stage 2: COMPLETE

Other achievements of the evening include:

• Finally managing to listen to the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being without falling asleep.
• Learning the lesson that audio books are doing the dishes "reading" or knitting "reading",  NOT lying in bed "reading".
• Picking out a movie worth watching for the second time in a row after along run of movies that make you wish you had just spent that time studying. (the movie was Rare Exports (a Finnish movie about Santa (not to be watched with children)) and the previous one was Apa (Father)(a Hungarian movie directed by Istvan Szabo).

Small gains, perhaps, but combined with the frosty morning this morning, I fell good and very alive.

Yes dear

I think Gábor may be kicking himself that we didn't go to Occupy LSX last week after seeing this:

Zombie Bank Run vs Government of the Dead from Jon Cheetham on Vimeo.

He has a thing for zombies at the moment. He laughs when other people don't get it (particularly the smartypants folks around uni), I smile at him supportively  but quite frankly, I don't get it either.

To Occupy or not to Occupy...

A couple of weeks ago I said (only a little seriously) to Gábor that I would like to use all the student loan money to buy tickets to New York to join Occupy Wall Street (or somewhere a little closer like London). Gábor wasn't happy. I think I caught him in a particularly bad mood. We got into an argument. 

Gábor felt (feels actually since I don't think his possition has really changed) that if we are going to do something we should do it here, here in Finland, here in Oulu. He argured that it would be more than a hint of irony (hypocrasy) in using money borrowed from the bank to join a protest againd corporate greed (I can't really arque with that, he has a point). He was also against flying to be part of the protests (we are generally trying to reduce the amount that we fly) arguing that it was somewhat contradictory to the aims of the movement (again, he has a valid point). However, there is very little happening in Finland, let alone in Oulu, and I am not prepared to be a leader (I'm chronicly shy and I'm too polite handle direct confrontation) but the Occupy movement ins something that relly could be something big in our time and I want to be part of it. 

Gábor may not be entirely convinced by his own arguments, a day or two afrter our argument I caught him checking flight prices to London.

Somehow he managed to push the issue asside again, this time the argumet was to with keeping the kids entertained. I don't think he even heard me when I said our (extremely) social kids would be in their element amongst such a group of friendly and energetic people (I doubt we would see them for most of the days since they would be too bust making new friends). I almost had him last week. It was a holiday week here for both my Uni and Lily's school, we could go on Wednesday and be back on Sunday but then I started arguing against myself. How offended would my family be if we managed to scrape together money to go to London for a protest when we have't been to visit them in Scotland in a year and a half? No, I couldn't make myself do it. We agreed that we wouldn't go (and siletly agreed not to talk about it again until after the holiday).

The temptation came again today after watching this BBC report:

 but again I talked myself out of it. I think I was shocked to realise that when it comes down to it I 1) am reluctant to give up my own comfort and 2) am concerned with what people will think. I think my parents sometimes think of me as a (slightly brainwashed) hippy (that they love dearly of course) but I guess I am, after all, just like everybody else.

Representing Reality

I just came back from one of the most hectic excursions I have ever been on; 4 days, 5 cities, 2 countries, 9 galleries, 2 castles, 3 churches, an artists community and a medeival settlement. I saw well over 3000 images in theses galleries, some were huge whole wall instalations. I saw Monets' , Miros', Munchs' and Picasos'. Yet of all of these, the one that stood out for me was this note (not even a photograph) by Duane Michals; no larger than a postcard.

Image courtesy of:  http://www.reframingphotography.com/content/duane-michals
(this is not the exact one that I saw but almost)

Text reads:

A FAILED ATTEMPT TO PHOTOGRAPH REALITY


How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearences of trees and automobiles, and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearences to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph reality and can only fail. I am a reflection, photographing other reflections, withing a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

When it comes to are as research, it is true that such reserch will not depict reality; rather a reflection of a reflection. But is that realy any different from other research?

Duane Michals lecture on Photography and Reality for the International Centre of Photography

Find Numbers (to me)

I have been missing Gábor blogging; his blogs are some of the most entertaining blogs I have come across. Maybe I think so because of my personal connection to the writer and the content or perhaps it is that my husband's writing is a wonderful balance of whit, the mundane and thought provoking intellect (maybe you could offer a more objective opinion). Either way there is a new blog for me (and you) to enjoy; Numbers.


In his first post, one, I am given I am given credit for passing the idea the idea to him (more like he stole it but since ownership of ideas is a complex issue that I am still debating with myself over I will let it slide this time). The concept is simply to photograph numbers sequentially...simple. Gábor found his number one on the spine of a collection of Foucault's works on ethics. Gábor also suggested that I "must have read about it" which isn't entirely true. The idea came to me after I encoutered this poster (which was part of an exhibition in Szeged):

Poster by Ferenc Kiss

For weeks (maybe even months) after I payed attention to every doorknob in the city, which in turn opened me to other small details; the door numbers for example which then spread to numbers in general. I love how this simple poster utterly transformed how I experienced the city I lived in, challenging me to fully be in the moment, to notice where I am in all it's rich detail. And so I am glad in fact that he stole my idea and would be glad if you did too and I am pretty sure that Ferenc Kiss wouldn't mind is you stole his too.

Art for Nowhere

This semester at uni I am taking :

• Global Education
• Educational Policy Planning and Leadership
• Art Minor (painting, drawing sculpture, photography, art history evironmental art...etc)
• and continuing work on my thesis (topic: Art As Research in Education - focus on A/r/tography)

 
 

...This article by John Tusa (reposted from nowhereisland.org) manages to bring together everything I am studying at the moment (and also made me smile and LOL)

Week 5: 8 October 2011

Sir John Tusa

British arts broadcaster and journalist

An arts policy for Nowhereisland

No child will be denied a full education in the arts at their widest.
 
Every child will be read to each night.
 
Every school will start its day by singing songs together.
 
Every child and young person will be able to learn a musical instrument to the stage where they can – if they wish – play in public or with others.
 
Every education establishment  will base its teaching on the knowledge and belief that the arts benefit learning of every kind.
 
No child or young person will be told that “the arts are not for you”. The arts belong to everyone.
 
Every child will have the opportunity to look, learn, listen and make.
 
Every pupil will learn about the traditions on which contemporary arts practice is based.
 
Every teacher will be qualified to communicate enthusiasm for and knowledge of more than one art form.
 
No school or educational establishment will divide its teaching into either the sciences or the humanities. There is only One Culture and each reinforces the other.
 
Every child will have time in its curriculum to do nothing and learn how to be bored.
 
All higher education and all arts venues will integrate their learning and performance activities.
 
All government policy will be based on the assumption that healthy and vibrant communities are centred around the arts.
 
All government policy will address education and the arts in the same department.
 
No government will regard the arts and education as the workhorses of business and commerce.
 
No government will tell education and the arts that they should be “like businesses” or “more business-like”. All governments will acknowledge that the arts and education run themselves in ways that are relevant for their disciplines.
 
All arts organisations will accept full responsibility for running themselves efficiently and effectively.
 
Every arts organisation will have one or more representative from business on their governing board. Every company will have one or more representatives from the arts and education on their governing board.
 
Government will set a strict cap on how much money arts organisations can spend on management consultants.
 
No arts organisation will set out its aims and priorities in “powerpoint” presentations which consist of bullet points only and contain no verbs or complete sentences.
 
No arts organisation will use in its Vision or Mission Statement words such as “excellent”, “passionate”, “leading”, “world class” or any other word, phrase or notion derived from management speak.
 
No arts or education establishment will regard, treat, deal with or otherwise think of its audiences or students as “customers”.
 
Every arts and education body will officially proclaim and announce that its activities are fundamentally and intentionally useless. They will ignore and disregard any request or demand to demonstrate that they are useful before they are valuable.
 
No arts body will be funded if they declare their aim to be primarily instrumental.
 
Arts and education bodies will not be asked to demonstrate the ”relevance” of what they do as a condition of funding.
 
Every elected representative will spend at least one night per week at an arts event or performance of some kind.
 
No prime minister will avoid attendance at arts events on the grounds that they court unpopularity by doing so. On the contrary they will earn it.
 
No prime minister will attempt to court voter popularity by claiming to like current pop groups when in truth they do not listen to them.
 
Every government will ensure that those who give money to the arts in their lifetime receive the benefit of tax concessions in their lifetime.
 
No minister will refer to the arts as “elitist”, “irrelevant”, or merely “nice to have”.
 
No Secretary of State for the Arts shall be precluded from becoming Prime Minister.

Dear Friends in Oulu,

By chance, last week, I came across info on this seminar on Minority and Indigenous peoples Rights and decided “what the heck, I’m going to go” and signed up. On Monday I will take my backpack and leave my family for a few days and travel on my own (I think the last time I actually did this was when I came to Finland for my university entrance exam and interview in June 2007 – so this is a big deal for me).

While I know Gábor is more than capable of holding the fort for 3 days (he is the stay-at-home-parent in our family after all), I am sure he would be very happy if you were to pop in for coffee or take the kids to the park for an hour, come by and  help cook dinner and eat with them or cycle with Lily to school (Sari, we are taking you up on your offers now). I am sure these little things would really help maintain his (in)sanity while I am gone. I would also like to warn you in advance that I will need some similar company when Gábor goes to a conference on “Making Marginalized Voices Heard in the UN Processes” in November.

I thank you in advance for your kindness.

Chasing Tractors

    

We have lived in Finland for 3 years but until now we haven't seen much of it other than Oulu, however, thanks to Kitty, we are able to venture a little further afield and experience a bit more of Finland than "city" life. Sari invited us to help with the potato harvest at her grandparents place. I was so excited about it, I'm not really sure why though, after all we were going to bend over and dig around in a muddy field...and the weather forecast was predicting rain. But I was right to be excited, it was a great day. Four generations of people working together, being welcomed as part of the family; working and feasting. It was a wonderful taste of the life I want for my family's future.

The kids had a great time, Lily and Sari's niece were I think 2 of the fasters potato pickers in Finland and Ernest spent most of the time riding in the tractor on Sari's grandpa's lap. It was quite a special experience for him; my children will never know my grandparents and they don't often see their own grandparent so it was very sweet to watch my toddler make friends with this gentle old man.

The post I wrote about Ernest's early language development has been included in September's Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism. Each month one member of the carnival plays host, sharing links to posts that other blogging-parents-of-bilingual-children have written about their experiences raising bi/multilingual children.  This months carnival is being hosted by Jan at Babelkid so go over and have a look at the other posts too.

You can sign up to recieve notification about submitions for the carnival here.

I ♥ free food.

Last Monday when I took Lily to school I was greeted by my dear friend Päivi, with a bag of delicious treats. This summer she has rented a garden and has been growing (among other things) various salad leaves, peas and beans (which is what my gift bag contained. As I cycled home through the forest I couldn't resist stopping for some blueberries...the season is almost over and I had a spare bag so really I had to. Sometime later I emerged from the forest with about 700g of blueberries and continued on my way home. By this point I was obsessed, I HAD to pick some rhubarb (1kg) from in front of my balcony before going inside and on my way to university an hour later I had to stop to gather some lingonberries (aprox 600g). 

I am starting to gather various contacts for getting free food/food where I know its story. This weekend my whole family went north to help harvesting Sari’s grandparents’ potatoes, for our help we got some of the delicious potatoes . 

Also, the father of some of Gábor’s Hungarian students is a full time software engineer/part time wheat farmer; his grain has been harvested ready to be milled in the winter. After telling him about how Gábor has been baking our bread since being back in Finland he has offered us flour once it is milled.

I have been re-watching River Cottage (season 2) with Ernest recently; he likes to watch the animals and I like to dream of days that might be. Days when all our food will be grown ourselves, collected from the wild or bartered with friends.

"Homework is more important than playing with your friends!"... umm... are you sure about that?

One of the problems with studying education is that you start to for some serious opinions (and arguments) about what the purpose of school is and what school should be. It becomes impossible to find a school that matches exactly with your educational philosophy. One of the things that we like about Waldorf-Steiner education is the importance it gives to play and imagination; play and imagination are intrinsic to a child’s development (yes, we went with the Steiner school – the story of that will come soon).

When I had heard the Lily's teacher had told her today that doing her homework was more important then playing with her friends I got seriously pissed off. Personally, I don't agree with homework (I will discuss exactly why in some other post sometime) but wither you are with giving homework or not, the question of which is more important, homework or play, is a separate issue entirely. Her homework was to write out a line each of the letters "d", "e" and "f"; repetition of work already done in school. If we compare only the "learning experience" of playing with her friends, there is a (as far as I am concerned) a clear winner when it comes to "importance".

Last week Lily spent an afternoon playing at her friend Milla's home.  Milla is an old friend of Lily's from daycare; she’s a shy, quiet girl and when they play together Lily tends to take the lead. Lily didn’t speak a word of Finnish (despite understanding almost everything after only a few months) which meant that whenever she was playing she always just joined in or followed along.  She rarely challenged the “rules of the game” or initiated play. “Following” remained Lily’s way of playing even once she started to speak Finnish and when we were in Hungary so playing with Milla helps her to develop initiative, it makes her feel comfortable and learn how to express her wishes and ideas.

Aside from character development, taking the lead means that she is generating speech in Finnish, and a lot of it.  While Steiner school (in theory) puts an emphasis on play, the classroom activities are mainly teacher led – listening, which is a whole different cognitive process to speech production.  Lily didn’t use Finnish at all last year (and forgot almost all of the language) and we don’t use Finnish at home so she is kind of “playing catch-up” with the other kids in terms of vocabulary and complexity of language use.  Any chance for her to be in an environment where she is using Finnish will be of a huge benefit to her when it comes to being in a Finnish classroom.

It isn’t even just the Finnish language that Lily gains from being in a Finnish home but also Finnish norms. In any culture (and its institutions) there are certain things that are just done or just are, that need no explanation. However when you are not fully living within that culture sometimes these things just don’t make sense and do need to be explained. Spending time in more “typically Finnish” environments help Lily (and us) to understand why some things in her school are as they are.

This is only one afternoon with one friend. How about when she plays in the playground in front of our apartment? The 3 kids she plays with most are all native German speakers with limited Finnish and/or English – Did I mention that German is one of the languages they are learning in school? Where do you think she will learn more German? School or the playground?

What about what others can lean through Lily. Also last week we had one of the neighbours’ kids at our place for the whole afternoon. The child’s father is a supporters of Perussuomalaiset (True Finns (or The Finns – they recently changed their English name)), a far right/ anti-immigration party, yet the child is now playing in the home of immigrants, building a friendship with an immigrant child. And through Lily we are making connections with the whole family. We are making an effort to try to understand their perspective and we are challenging their perceptions of “the immigrant” or “the other”.

So what do you thing Lily learns more from? Which is more important?

But then all this rant of mine is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what she learns or which teaches her more. Frankly the simple argument is. She is a child. There is nothing more important for children than play.

...thrice!

I am on a serious winning streak apparently. This morning I got an email from jojoebi at A Bit of This & A Bit of That telling me I had won the book "Playful Learning" by Mariah Brueh in the blog tour giveaway. I had come across the Playful Learning blog when a crafty blog I read advertised a photo/visual journal course for kids. Although I couldn't do the course with Lily (lack of funds again...sometimes I really hate being poor), the stuff Mariah does looked interesting and when her book came out I followed along on the blog tour. The prize not only included the book but also a place on her Playful Learning Spaces eCourse.So  I will be doing a course with her after all.

Thank you Mariah and Jojoebi for the prizes.

I won...twice

Not quite the lottery but still, I never won anything then I won twice in one week.

There is is a really nice quarterly, online magazine called Nuno which  is loaded with with patterns and instructions for sewing, knitting and other crafty projects, but the reason I like it so  much is that all the projects use recycled materials. I discovered the magazine a few months ago but our finances have been so tight (particularly for the last year) that I couldn't even justify (to myself) spending the $5 that the magazine costs. Instead I read accompanying blog; checking out the sneak peeks and taking advantage of the occasional free tutorial...and of course, entering a give away when it came along. The most recent of which was for theses Matchbox Dioramas, which was my first win of the week.

Image from Painted Desert by Nuno

Each box was filled with little hand carved beads (which Lily loves) and have now found a happy place to live on a shelf next to Lily's wooden 3D pyramid puzzle...it seemed like a fitting place for them.

Picture from this Nuno blog post

As if original (and featured) art work was not exiting enough, later the same week, in a give away from Sew, Mama, Sew! I won the actual magazine. Woo hoo, finally I can have a look at the whole thing. I guess most people will be getting upcycled gifts from me this winter. Here is a peek inside the magazine at some of the things my dear friends and family can look forward to receiving.

Open publication - Free publishing - More acoma

What a great distraction to receive right at the start of the school year.

"My mum won't understand if I write it like that"

Although I didn't keep track of Lily's language development from the beginning there are still so many things I could write about. 

• Lily took 2 years to start speaking Finnish despite understanding most things after a couple of month in daycare (Lily can be very stubborn (I have no idea where she gets it from...I don't know anyone like that, do you?), she one told me, after I had told her it would take a lot of time and practice to learn to ride her bike, that first she will learn to do that then maybe she will learn to speak Finnish).
• She very rarely codeswitches or borrows words from the other languages, I suspect it is to do with the fact that rather than being in a multilingual environment, she has been in multiple monolingual environments (probably also because up until last year, Gabor and I were pretty "strict" with the one person/one language thing and rarely codeswitched ourselves.).
• One of the few multilingual settings I can think of is when she and Gabor would go to the library and Gabor would read to her in Finnish, she would ask questions about the story in English and he would answer them in Hungarian.

Just a month ago before we returned to Finland, Lily had almost completely forgotten Finnish. She hadn't had to use the language in a year and Gábor and I don't really speak well enough to encourage her to. I knew that one and a half months would probably be enough time for her to remember the language before she would start school (in Finnish), I knew it, but somehow hadn't really believed it I guess since I am utterly amazed at how quickly she picked it up again. After literally only 2 or 3 days playing with some old friends and she was chatting away almost like we had never been away (almost) - in some ways even better. In the first 3 years we lived in Finland, Lily never spoke a single word of Finnish to an adult. Not even a "Kiitos" or a "Hej hej", but now she is talking her friends’ parents and even family friends in Finnish.

When I was packing up our things for the move I came across some old pictures and cards that Lily had made. I took some picture of then because they give a really sweet example of how one language can influence another and of overcorrection. Both these are from before Lily had had any formal schooling or teaching so are completely here own writing systems.

The first is a Fathers Day picture for Gábor. The letter "f" doesn't really exist in Finnish so because of the similarities in the f and v phonemes, Lily would represent them both with "v". I tried to explain that there is a slight difference in the sounds (again, it would have been useful to have paid more attention in phonetics) and that in English "f" is used to represent the sound at the start of "fathers".

Valarste - Father's Day (November 2009).

However 6 months later, when Mothers day came around I realised there had been some misunderstanding. When I picked her up from päiväkoti (daycare) she and Jonna (her carer) handed me the card bellow. "Hyfää Äitienpäiffa". Jonna had tried to tell Lily that the correct way would be "Hyvää Äitienpäivää" with v's. Lily to ld her "no, my mum won't understand if I write it like that.".

Hyfää Äitienpäiffa - Hyvää Äitienpäivää (May 2010)

Often people’s responses to Lily’s language abilities are along the lines of “wow, that’s incredible” or “she so smart”.  And yes, I think she is incredible and smart, but I am her parent, I’m not exactly objective. The truth is Lily isn’t able to speak three languages because she is super smart; she can speak three languages because she has been exposed to tree languages and because she can recognise that there is a need for her to know all three languages in her life environment. There is also some truth to her being super smart though; there is even a connection between her intelligence and her multilingualism. It’s not that she is smart so can speak lots of languages; rather she speaks lots of languages which makes her smart.  

There are loads of cognitive benefits which go way beyond the “it will make learning other languages easier” that people take for granted. It can improve the ability to recognise patterns and structures in general; it can also improve the ability for abstract thought and creativity. Bi/multilingual children can recognise earlier that not everyone thinks alike and therefore a likely more interculturally competent and since they are aware of the differing language needs of others around them they also become more aware of the needs of others in general. So yes Lily is wonderful (perhaps I should say marvellous – it’s her favourite word at the moment), yea Lily is marvellous, but part of that marvelousness comes from being multilingual.

Marvellous

Trippin’ – 20th-22nd June

Stop 3 - Velka Domasa, Slovakia & Stop 4 – Lublin, Poland

Slovakia had some of the most beautiful and dramatic scenery which mesmerised me as a gazed at it out of the car window (no, I have no photos – I was mesmerised, I told you). Mountains, forest, dramatic dark clouds and sunshine breaking through. Spectacular. The scene we were confronted with next however, was gut wrenching.

I was shocked by the poverty I saw in the village in Hungary where Gábor uses to work; poverty that I had never seen in Europe before but even that was paled by the full on shanty town we drove though when we left the mountains in Slovakia. It was comparable to those that I saw in India – but this is Europe! This is Schengen area! This is the bloody Euro zone which supposedly has strict economic criteria for joining! We had to stop the car; I couldn’t breath.  I made a note of the name of the town so that I will remember the people, remember the place and remember that poverty and suffering is not something that happens somewhere else or that you can take a break from. It is here in my home and here in the middle of my holiday.

One I had collected myself we drove on. We were heading to Velka Domasa, to the lakeside, to relax. We just spent the last week in Szeged, packing up our apartment, carrying all our stuff downstairs and loading it onto the truck, doing the moving out clean (Gábor spent 3 years as a cleaner, often cleaning apartments that had not been cleaned properly when people move out – he has very high standards), preparing for the trip and saying goodbye. We were exhausted and were looking forward to spending a couple of days by the lake recuperating.

We had checked out the area and it looked fairly nice (although our Slovak is pretty poor so we were just gauging by the pictures) and there were quite a few campsites marked on our map so we didn’t bother with finding a specific place we would just see when we got there...Well when we got there we found that he lake was a reservoir, the beach was clay and that the campsites were non-existent. Oh yeah, and it started raining as soon as we stopped the car. We found a little patch of grass with a view of the water, although we may have been trespassing but everywhere was closed so there was no one around to complain. We got our water canister filled at the bar a little way around the lake and Gábor stet off to find an ATM in the village to buy some milk for Ernest. There was no ATM (the closest one was 20km away) but a friendly bar tender gave us a couple of cartons of milk and some chocolate too. There is nothing ike the kindness of strangers to brighten your day. The sun coming out helps to brighten thing too.

Things went right back to being sucky though when I realised that the trusty little digital camera was no more(Farewell you were a good friend) and suckier still when I found that my SLR was broken too. The part that the lens screws into had broken off from the main body. I was completely cameraless. My photo challenge plan was utterly screwed. Oh, and it started to rain again.

Not the R&R we were hoping for so we decided to move on to Lubin in Poland in the morning.

Lubin we really had planed. We had found a perfect little campsite; lakeside again, forest, nature walks, just south of the city. Great for our resting place, one day chilling in the campsite and take a little walk and one day to explore the city. Great plan – but for some reason our great plans weren’t going to...well...plan. The campsite so longer existed. It had been turned into a car park. After a little bit of enquiring we found out there was another campsite on the other side of the lake but were told “it’s really bad”. We took this with a pinch of salt; we like simple sites (all we need is a spot where the nature is cared for and we can get clean water) and know that many people want a bit more than we do. But this place was really bad, it was dirty and dangerous. The grounds were set up for caravans but the only place they had to empty their “black water” tanks was the same place ay you got the drinking  water from. We had to sleep there that night though as it was too late in the day to find somewhere else.

We were getting more and more tired with each day that passed and we still hadn’t stopped to recover from the moving. We were too tired to drive on another stretch the next day so decided to stay in Lublin but sleep in the hostel in town and eat out rather than cook. We had a lovely day in Lublin, the old town is charming. It is a contender for the European culture capital for 2016 and they really are making a lot of effort to win it. And after sleeping in a bed we were a bit more rested and ready to move on to Bialowieska where we planed to stay in this perfect little forest campsite...



Gábor's posts about these days:


20th June -  Hungary to Slovakia
21st June - Crappy Campsite
22nd June - Lublin
22nd June - Lublin revised


.

Mbukka-mbukka? (Can I have a piece of that cubumber please?)

Last semester I did a course on bilingualism which I found fascinating – not only because I am raising bi(multi)lingual children but that was a huge part of it. While doing the course I realise how useful it would have been to keep a record of Lily’s language (speech) development. I figured that here is as good a place as any to keep a record of Ernő’s not least because it will show his development in the context of the events in our lives (not that I think you are particularly interested in the details of what words Ernest says when). I am starting a bit late though since he has been using words for quite some time now.

Side note:           The main textbook for the course was :

                               Grosjean, Francois (1982) Life with Two Languages Harvard University Press

 I know it’s old but my lecturer claimed that no better, comprehensive book on the topic has be written since. Grosjean has a current academic blog with more up to date articles, since many of you have multilingual children too you might find it interesting.

What he calls/called us:

“Apa” (Hungarian for dad) was the first word he used to address both Gábor and I; I really meant “Parent or other grown up person, I need your help”. Since he was saying “Apa”, I also tried to encourage him to say “Mum”. I don’t know if he thought I was correcting him or if he just thought two different words was unnecessary, but “Mum” completely replaced “Apa”. Soon after that though he noticed that the other kids in the park called their grown up “Anya” (Hungarian for mum) so, since Gábor was the one who took him to the park most often, Gábor became “Anya”. And this is how it was for quite some time; a language destination but not a gender destination.  Gábor has recently become “Apa” again.

Since being back in Finland Ernest has pick up another word from the other children. He uses it when he is stuck in the swing or when he falls over. The word is “Aiti” (Finnish for mum).

“L” is pretty difficult to say so Lily is “Ee-ee”. Ernő likes to help us cook dinner and is pretty perceptive when it comes to knowing when the food is just about ready. He sets of to find his sister “Ee-ee! Ee-ee!” and drags her to the bathroom to wash hands. While he knows that his name is Ernest or Ernő he never really refers to himself yet, however he does say “Ernő” although he normally uses it when someone is doing something that he doesn’t like or misbehaving.

One of his first words (if not the first (I told you I should have started this earlier, I am already forgetting specifics)) was “tessék” (it’s a Hungarian word that you can use to mean “there you go” ie. when you are giving something to someone, or it can be used to mean “here you are” for example the stall holders in the market use it to call in customers). Ernest uses it when playing these games of passing items back and forth to mean “there you go” or “can I have that now?” or “thank you”. The other day though because I was responding to his handing me things with “thank you” he started to use “tes-you” with me.

“Tessék” (or tes-you) only means “can I have that?” in the context of these games though, in other circumstances he says “dub-a-day” (now is where it would be useful to have stuck with the phonetic transcription classes (if any linguist friends want to help out with this project skype me or something)), that is unless what he wants is a fruit or vegetable when he uses “mbukka-mbukka”, which we suspect stems from uborka and paprika (cucumber and pepper in Hungarian in case you couldn’t guess).

I have also recently noticed him starting to differentiate between “bye bye”, “pá pá” and “hej hej”, he hasn’t completely figured out who to use which one with and when but clearly knows they are the same/same but different.

This is of course not the full extent of his vocabulary (more an introduction) but this (I hope) will be an ongoing project.

Tessék

HELP: Does any one have access to “The International Journal of Bilingualism” from 1997? There is an article I would really like to read, “Language Contact in Bilingual Two-Year-Olds and Code-Switching: Language Encounters of a Different Kind?” ,but the subscription through Oulu University only goes back as far as 2003.

This post has been included in September's Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, please check out the other articles on the carnival list.

Settling in @ home

We get the keys to our new apartment in 6 days and I am really looking forward to it. The place is huge, it’s 85m² (our last apartment in Oulu was 65m² and the one in Szeged was just over 50 and only one bedroom so I was a bit concerned how we were going to fill it. Based on the last week though I don’t think we will have any trouble. We took a trip to the recycling centre, spent 60€ on furniture (including delivery and got 3 beds (one double, single and one loft bed for Lily), a writing desk for Lily, a cute little telephone table, a shelf unit, a bunch of lamps (since all the student housing in Oulu now come without light fittings). There may have been other things, I can’t remember, we will see when the stuff gets delivered next week. 

We have also rescued a chair and a sofa bed from the bin. The chair reminds me of the one in van Gogh's bedroom and the sofa bed seems to be more comfortable than the one we spent all year sleeping on in Szeged. With a good clean and a little bit of gluing both of them will be perfect.

I am still on the hunt for some dining chairs though, we only have 3 and we are now 4 people and we like to have people over to eat often. One of the neighbours has 2 chairs identical to the ones we already have but is using them as garden chairs. You can’t believe how tempted I am to steal them in the middle of the night. I am considering offering to buy them but then that would completely eliminate the possibility for night time burglary.

Trippin' - 20th June

Aggtelek to...some lake in Eastern Slovakia that I can't remember the name of right now

We were in no rush to leave Aggtelek, we were only planning on driving a few hours to a lakeside in Slovakia and although the weather had improved it wasn't exactly swimming weather, so we had a relaxed morning and took a walk over the hills (rather than into them like the day before).

I don't know if the trail had a name but surely it should be called "Butterfly walk" (or something more imaginative but butterfly related). I have never seen so many butterflies in their natural habitat before; we had to watch where we stepped - they where everywhere. The photos don't show it so well, like I said yesterday, the zoom was playing up.

The abundance of butterflies probably had something to do with the abundance of wild flowers.

Gábor tends to avoid using the camera, but sensing that it was coming to the end of its life, he took up the challenge and took up the camera (meaning that for once I feature in the pictures...my friend Gail has a fear that if something were to happen to her there would be no pictures of her with her son, as time passes and I have so few pictures of me with my kids I start to understand her fear...maybe I told this before...I have a very bad memory and tend to repeat myself...or ramble; I ramble a lot too, like now for example...sorry).

Frankly I think he did great.

Perhaps he could do with a little praise from people to encourage him to do it more often...well maybe it will take more than praise, a new camera might be necessary since later that day the camera gave up on us.  

Before we set out I made Lily an explorers utility belt, complete with, sketch book, crayon (for rubbing), pencil, magnifying glass, pocket knife, matches (yes, I put a knife and matches in the hand of my 7 year old) and colour scavenger hunt cards (might do a crafty post on the bely and cards at some point).

After our walk it was time to leave Hungary after spending a year there and head to Slovakia, adding a new country to the list of countries I've visited. I will save the tales of Slovakia for tomorrows installment and leave you with one image of the lake there...one of the very last taken with our camera.

From this point on all pictures are from Gábor's phone or Lily's mp4 player.

Gábor's blog of the day as always has more pictures, more videos and more languages (his blog is in booth English and Hungarian).