parenting | Lessons from my daughter

We moved from a French environment to a completely English one when Emily was 5.

She started kindergarten in English in our new town.

My education was in French with some basic English.

I didn’t know the Oh Canada in English, only in French…. Words don’t rhyme the same in both languages… My husband was making fun of my inability to rhyme properly.

I was failing my daughter miserably.

Kindergarten was hard… for me.

One afternoon Emily came home singing and moving her hands in a really strange way… She was really excited to show me this new song she knew…

I had absolutely no idea what she was doing… She was getting annoyed… I still had no idea what she was doing… Eventually Jon paid attention to what was going on and saved the day!

“It’s the Itsy Bitsy Spider right Emily?”

Daddy knew what she was doing, they both looked at me like I was some sort of alien who didn’t know the Itsy Bitsy Spider..

I’m FRENCH!!!

And I don’t like spiders!

Over the following weeks, months and years… I have worked really hard at learning the languages, the nursery rhymes, the stories, tv shows, the culture and more.

I’m still struggling but getting better with every grade Emily passes…

I still don’t know most of the tv shows my husband knew from when he was growing-up and from time to time, I have still no idea what Emily is learning…

This school thing for Emily is like me re-doing my years of school but in a foreign language.

One day I will be bilingual!

But in the meantime, I will continue learning with Emily.

There is no end to her desire to
Learn and grow so I’m in no position to complain about this… I will continue to learn and grow with my family.

Maybe next we should move where they speak another language and try to pick it up!

Where do you think we should go?

A couple of years ago, when I opened our Rogers bill I discovered a couple of things.

1. The Movies on demand option that we password protected must not have been set-up properly.

2. Although I had no idea how to order a movie on our tv, Emily did!

3. Rogers finds it acceptable to charge 3 times for the same movie over a really short amount of times (we are speaking minutes here…)

In a couple of days, Emily ordered for over $130 worth of kids movies.

We called Rogers to explain that we believed that once we had set-up our account with a password that this would not happened. They told us each tv needed to be done. It’s per receiver, not per account..,

We pointed out that the same movie was there 3 times within minutes, we were told that they were ordered so charged.

We explained our situation where a mentally challenged kid was playing with the remote. We were told that it wasn’t their problem.

Fine!

We made one more call… We told them to come get their receivers as we were canceling our account.

We tried to explain to Emily what happened that she picked paid per view movies instead of free but that meant nothing to her…

We got a new tv provider.

Emily was a little upset that her favorite channels were no longer the same… I wasn’t fond of the new system either but I have to say… She got use to it and found her tv shows faster than we did.

How amazing is that?

How would have handled with your kids and with your tv provider?