Tijeras & Engrapadoras & Albondigas from Ikea.

Hola amigos.  As we enter another week of what I would like to call “AP Kindergarten”  I feel like I am the one in school all over again. 

So I get an email this weekend that said homegirl would have a Spanish quiz this week and we need to work on some vocabulary.  I am thinking ok, no biggie.   What would a kid in elementary school learn first in Spanish.  Fruit, colors, Dora & Diego?  Um no….items from the classroom.  I have had numerous years of Spanish growing up in Texas, and also here in CO.  My best friend’s parents even made us only speak Spanish at the dinner table.  I am also the person who purposely failed her Spanish placement test in College so she could place into Spanish 1 because it had 3 language credits and Spanish 5 only had 2.  I needed 3 “easy” credits to graduate and was so over trying to speak Italian with a Spanish/Texas Southern accent.  Shhh. Don’t tell CSU.  The worst part of it all is since I have no one to talk to, I don’t actually speak Spanish all that well.  Oh sure, I can conjugate a verb like no one’s business.  But if you are from Mexico and you don’t speak English and you need directions to Ikea because you have a craving for some meatballs and cheap furniture, I am afraid you are shit out of luck.  I’ll have to draw you a map with pictures.  Complete with some cute little round albondigas at the end. 

Fast forward to last night with my mini chalupa and I sitting on the couch trying to memorize Spanish words about the classroom.  No big deal right.  Paper  = Papel, check.  Pencil = Lapiz, check.  Scissors uhhhh…. WTF are scissors in Spanish?  Recently I dug an old Spanish textbook out of my parent’s basement because I knew this day would come.   Unfortunately the book is from 1965.  I figured Hell, how much could the Spanish language have changed since 1965?  Now I know they had scissors in 1965, but evidently not in any Spanish speaking countries.  So I did what any good Mom in 2011 would do.  I Googled it on my i phone.  

I then spent the next 1/2 hr explaining to a 5 yr old how the “j” in tijeras sounds like a “h” not a “j.”  Good thing she knew what everything else was because I kept answering because it just is.  Hopefully next week they will have a quiz on something easier like clothes in the laundry basket or how to order a top shelf frozen margarita.  Things I don’t have to Google.  Knowing my luck it is likely to be words like carburetor or pomegranate. 

I did hightail it to B&N today to purchase the English/Spanish Oxford Picture Dictionary.  It was written in 2009.  So now we can give Gidget back her Spanish textbook  from 1965 and I can go back to doing more useful things on my phone like pinning rugs  for the living room on Pinterest. 

Now if you will excuse me I am off to find my engrapadora someone took it along with my piece of torta.