Six Months

Last Tuesday, Nico turned 6 months old. Today, he weighed 21 pounds. I’m still reading to him every night (at least… I’m now working hard to incorporate reading during the day as well, but the days are less routine). I keep trying to think of ways to add more Portuguese input, because I’ve read that babies should hear 20,000-30,000 words a day. Considering I am solely responsible for his 20-30k Portuguese words, it’s daunting, but it’s getting more and more natural.

For my birthday in July, my boyfriend got me several Portuguese children’s books from Language Lizard. That was a nice boost to the collection, but I’m still dying to add more. I was all excited when I remembered the Portuguese publisher with reasonable shipping prices (Assírio & Alvim) until I looked at their web site and saw it was undergoing maintenance, and has been for weeks (possibly months). I started looking at other Portuguese booksellers’ websites, and for four or five very small books, the shipping costs quoted were €55. One New York-based Portuguese bookstore (the Luso-Brazilian Bookstore) that had an online presence is having some kind of issue with their site, which I’m assuming means that either the store doesn’t exist anymore or they’re giving up on the site.

I wish I could call Assírio & Alvim and order, but I don’t know what exactly I want. My local library has five books each in French and Spanish, and “My First 100 Words” in Japanese, Italian, French, and Spanish– no Portuguese, even though I know that book exists, because I have it!

Who knew it would be so hard to find resources to teach one of the world’s top 10 most widely spoken languages? I guess I may have to resign myself to spending more than half of the book budget on shipping, but that just feels…wrong.

Anyway, I’ll keep looking, because I’m determined to make this work.

I'm pretty sure Nico is working on a guest blog post.