How We Became a Bilingual Family
When my husband and I were newlyweds, I thought it would be fun to speak Spanish together. I was a Spanish teacher, after all, and my husband had completed 5 years of Spanish, including an International Baccalaureate Spanish class, which is comparable to AP classes. I envisioned us having great fun as he increased his conversational skills and I would have one more person to speak Spanish with.
Unfortunately, speaking Spanish as a couple didn't work well for us. He found me frustratingly difficult to understand. I didn't know how to be easier to understand, and that hurt my teacher ego. So, normal conversations were off the table, but there was something I couldn't stand about limiting myself to simple conversations with him, even for short periods of time. I also didn't want the teacher/student dynamic to hurt our relationship, so I didn't really push the whole Spanish thing. I taught him my favorite birthday songs in Spanish, and talked about Spanish with him, but we didn't speak much Spanish to each other.
Three years later, we were expecting our first kid, and attending a birthing class. Each couple was sharing what they were looking forward to doing with their kids, and one very non-hispanic looking dad said that he was looking forward to speaking only Spanish to his kid. Now, I may be self-conscious about my every mistake when I'm speaking Spanish, but I did learn Spanish as a child living in Mexico, and I've met very few people from the US who speak better Spanish than I do, and I thought, "How on earth does he think he could do that?" And then, it hit me, that I could speak Spanish to my children, and I had a head start compared to him. Why waste it? So, I owe him a lot! His courage to raise a bilingual child despite the challenges helped me to have courage to accept the challenge myself.
So, my husband and I agreed to become a bilingual family. It wasn't natural and easy, but it was easier than just trying to speak Spanish to each other. When our son was born, we found ourselves repeating ourselves so much (once we'd looked up the word on wordreference.com), that my husband was able to keep up. We continued talking English to each other, but we were both speaking Spanish to the baby, and so our son brought Spanish into our family.