The Backstory

I guess if anybody is going to read this, it might be helpful if they are familiar with how our family came to be. So, here is the “story of us”. (At which point my wife says “Ahhh, wie süß!”)

My wife and I met shortly after I moved to Germany for work. The fact that we were able to communicate at all was thanks to the small wonder that is my wife’s English, because if it had been left to my skills with German we would have only talked about numbers and colors. I tried learning German as we went along, but somewhere around when we moved in together I decided to get serious about it and declared to my very patient *then* girlfriend that from then on we would only speak German! I think taking a class may have helped, but who’s counting?

By the time we got married I was taking a second class and had covered the entire apartment with different colored sticky notes to help learn my articles (der, die, das). My German had become good enough to fool the wedding official into believing that I understood everything she said. I hope writing that doesn’t get me in trouble!

By the time my wife got pregnant with our son, my German was actually pretty good. Now, this was thanks to a TON of teaching and explaining from my wife, plenty of crossword puzzles with my father-in-law, and a lot of patience and assistance from my wife’s family and our friends.

At this point is where we started discussing and researching raising a child with two languages, so this is where I will start with more specific posts. I’m still nervous by the way. I don’t know why, it’s just the internet. If people like it, cool. If not, then nobody has any taste!