Journaling in scrapbook pages

I enjoy looking at challenge blogs - there are so many of them and so many talented people around. But I hardly ever do the challenges. I always mean to, but I never do.

Lately I felt the need to have more "meat" in my layouts. Instead of concentrating in pretty photos or papers, go for the content. I had the Journaler's Junction blog in my Google Reader for a while, but finally I made my first layout based on last week's challenge. It helped that I had 20 themes to choose from!

I have been meaning to write about the fact that I speak Portuguese with my children for a while, but since I didn't have a recent photo with me and the kids which I liked enough to scrap, I always postponed it. Challenge #1 was just the kick I needed. It ain't pretty enough to be one of my favs, but it is done.





Should have run the spell checker but I don't have Word in my laptop - excuse any errors your find.

"I write {most of} my scrapbook pages in English, I blog in English, I write notes, emails and shopping lists in English. In a daily basis I speak English. English is embedded in my life so much that now, I even dream in English. But just so that you know, my main language and most importantly the language I speak to my children is Portuguese. And they speak back to me in Portuguese. Well, sort of, sometimes they speak a kind of Portunglish, and you have to be able to understand both English and Portuguese to know what they mean.
I am proud of them. They are so much better that I was. Because technically my first language is Japanese but as soon as I started learning Portuguese at the age of 3, I slowly forgot Japanese. And Lucy, aged 6, is an fluent Portuguese speaker and able to communicate with my parents and my brother. And so is Luke, aged 3.
I am so lucky that Roger also took the time and effort to learn Portuguese.
So we are a bilingual family.I speak to my children in Portuguese. I speak to my husband in English. And the children - regretably - speak to each other in English.
Often I recount the conversations I had with the children in translated to English, because I figured that they might not be able to read Portuguese when they grow up.
But we speak in Portuguese.
Just so that you know.
Portuguese."