My son thinks that the father in Knuffle Bunny is a mother. And it's all my fault...

The other night when Max handed me Knuffle Bunny to read before bedtime, I told him that I couldn't read it because it was in French, "papa's language". I showed Max the English copy and said "this is Mommy's". We read Knuffle Bunny, Knuffle Bunny Too and Knuffle Bunny Free all the while Max was pointing to the father in the story saying, "Mommy".

When Suzanne was his age, we would refer not to French and English but to Papa and Mommy's language often saying things like "how does papa say it?" when she used the other parent's langauge with the wrong parent. Suzanne seemed to take the information, file it away and be on to something new. But Max is different. Max is less analytical than his sister and more in the moment. So whatever we tell him, he puts into action immediately. So it's quite understandable that since there are two copy's of Knuffle Bunny in the room, and I told him one was Papa's language but they look exactly the same, so you could reason that the other book is Mommy's and therefore the papa in that book is also a mommy.

I often wonder how my children process their languages. It's an interesting phemonenon to see at the bilingual storytimes I do. You can see that the bilingual kids are happy to hear both languages because for them, their brains are already doing what the librarian and I are doing outloud.

And then there are the questions of why we speak English sometimes and why I don't speak French. A couple weeks ago, Suzanne asked me if we could speak English sometimes so we wouldn't go to prison. She seems convinced now taht we won't go to prison and that speaking English is pretty cool. But then yesterday, she asked me why I speak English better than I speak French. I explained to her that I didn't learn French until I was at school so I always spoke English at home with my family. I like her interest in other people's language capacities and find it rather reassuring that she is wondering about her own language skills. Because it's all so very normal for her to speak two languages so why isn't it for everyone else?

Kids are amazing...