Saturday 20 September 2008

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.
"

5 comments:

Emily Pitts said...

elisa, this is amazing! i love what you did with the challenge, it's a great thing to record for your family. and the design is fabulous! thanks for playing, i hope you play again this week :)

Sandie said...

Fantastic layout! Journalling is big downfall of mine. I think it's great that you speak to your children in Portugese :)

Lynn said...

Wow, what an interesting bit of journaling Elisa. It's so interesting to find out these kind of things about people (or maybe I'm just nosey!!) Great LO.

Sweet Peripety said...

What a fabulous page! love it!

eva birdthistle said...

I really love this! The LO is inspirational but the journaling is fantastic! It's a real insight into you and your family!