Habla Espanol

Eric and I took Hannah to a trial Spanish class this morning designed for kids ages 2-1/2 to 3 years taught by a woman from Columbia who speaks very little English, both inside and outside the classroom. Hannah was the youngest of the three in the class, but probably not by any more than a year, if that. The class was great, and I stand to learn just as much as Hannah. Today's class focused on animals, specifically, pejaro, perro, and gato. We sang songs that I couldn't understand the words to, played games, and did crafts that focused on emphasizing the words for bird, dog, and cat. We also learned the words for fly, walk, and run, and, when one of the crafts involved gluing eyes, ears, and noses on a cat and dog, we learned all those words too, but I forget them now....

My guess is that Hannah will pick it up way faster and easier than me, although she stayed pretty timid, clingy, and off-to-the-sides today. She had plenty of good reasons for being in a bad mood though. She's had a pretty severe ear ache all week and was up screaming for most of last night so she was exhausted today, and it doesn't help that the class is really late in the morning. Most of our activities start between 9 and 10, but this didn't start until 11:20 and it's an hour class. Hannah's other classes are 45 minutes, so about 50 minutes into this one, Hannah was fussy and ready to go, and we were eager to get our over-exhausted and long-since expired munchkin down for a nap.

Given the time of this class, we probably won't register her for this semester. I liked the program and see the importance of exposing her to another language while she's young, but that time just doesn't work for us, and the only other time frame for her age group is during nap time on Mondays. There are a lot more options for classes once she actually turns 3 so we'll revisit the idea then. Of course, we're leaning toward a Montessori education right now which will mean that she'll start learning French as soon as she starts.

If you're in the Baltimore/Towson area and interested, check out Fun with Foreign Language. They teach Spanish and Mandarin Chinese to ages 18 months to 10 years.

As for the ear ache, no clue what's going on there. Thinking it was an infection, I took her to the doctor on Tuesday. Apparently there's a ton of wax lodged in her ear canal, some of which the doc pulled out, and there's a little water in there, but no infection. Certain that it would turn into an infection in a few days, the doc wanted to put her on an antibiotic anyway. Although I'm pretty anti-antibiotic, I allowed it because her waking up screaming all night is getting exhausted, and also because she's had mucous coming out of every orifice since the beginning of December. I don't think I made the right call though because if it were an infection, she shouldn't still be in pain after 4 days on an antibiotic, right?  Swimming yesterday was probably a terrible idea...We tried to get her to sit still with peroxide in her ear today, but she freaked out within a minute which is not enough time for it to clear out all that gunk. We tried a little alcohol too, the main ingredient in Swimmer's Ear, but by then she was freaked out and wouldn't let us anywhere near her ear. Eric said he used to get ear aches a lot and that Grannah put drops of sweet oil in his ear. I have no clue what that is but am thinking I should look into it....Any other advice anyone?? Peroxide always works for me...