Today has been a very good bilingual day for us, or even trilingual :)

I started out 100% English, much helped by the fact that my husband left for work today, which meant that there is no-one in the house I feel like I have to speak Norwegian to. I’m home ‘alone’ with just the It boys now as Christi is staying at Mormor and Morfar (maternal grandparents) for a few weeks.

Ben will answer me in English about 50% of the time when I speak English to him, while Nic will probably do it 75% of the time. Nic will often slide into Norwegian mid-sentence if he is struggling to say something, while Ben will either start out in Norwegian to begin with or just go Norwenglish all the way, borrowing Norwegian words where he lacks the English ones. LOL It was mostly for Ben’s grammar’s sake that I started this project although I’m sure Nic’s vocabulary will benefit from it too.

Today I realised Ben uses ‘to do’ a lot. If I say “I saw you playing with Nic” he’ll respond “I did see you too”. Or (me:) “Have you found your socks?” – (B:) “I did find them”. It seems to me like he does this simply because he’s not sure how to conjugate the verbs. In Norwegian he’d say “I saw you” and “I found them” but he hates being wrong and by applying ‘to do’ he can use the verb in the form he knows is correct. Of course this also shows that he knows how to use, as well as conjugate the auxiliary verb, which to me is really quite impressive, so I’m not worried. I just repeat his answer the easier way to sort of remind him that there are several ways of saying the same thing.

The reason I said the day ended up trilingual is that we started the morning by learning a new Spanish word. After visiting Italy in April, and well before I decided to study Spanish, I started calling apple juice ‘succo di mele’ just because I thought it sounded fun. Now the time had come to find the Spanish word for it. I found two words for juice; zumo (used mainly in España) and jugo (basically used everywhere else in the Spanish speaking world). I decided on which to use by the ‘most hits on Google’ method and landed on jugo de manzana as word of the day.

We also ended up speaking quite a bit of Norwegian later on as friends of the kids came by, some of whom aren’t too comfortable speaking English yet.

We also went to the lakes for a swim as the weather was gorgeous!