No Habla Espanol

OK – to write this post, I have to ‘fess up to something very shameful for a stay at home Mom to admit.

I use a maid service once a month.

I know, I know. I am a failure as a homemaker. But I DO perform all of the upkeep cleaning – they just come in and do all of the spotless, deep cleaning stuff.

Before you rain down condemnation on me, here’s a bit of background and explanation (aka excuses). We used a maid service when I was working full time as a Manager, because it was long hours and lots of stress, but quit once I came home. Chris always offered to let me keep me using them, but I knew that it was a reproachful thing to do. But when I took over the books for Chris’ company as well, I couldn’t see how I could manage to work two jobs from home, be a good mommy, cook, AND clean the house, so I took him up on his offer. And now that I’ve taken on a third job as well, I definitely need them. For the record, between pre-Ali-wakeup time and naptimes an our occasional trips into the offices, I work 5 to 6 hours a day. Hard to fit cleaning in there.

OK, now that I have that out in the open and have attempted to fully defend my weakness, on with the story.

Ali has this thing about breakfast. I feed her fruit and a Nutri-grain bar and maybe grape tomatoes From Gramamma’s garden, if we have them (her FAVORITE food right now). Sometimes while I’m feeding her, I’ll warm me up a plate of mini-pancakes, with a few extras for her. Since the pancakes are “special treats”, she absolutely LOVES them, and she will devour them as quickly as possible in order to ask for “more peeease” before I eat them all. It’s like a game to see how many she can manage to get before they’re gone.

The other morning, we were eating breakfast (including an aforementioned pancake race) and getting ready to vacate the house when the two cleaning ladies arrived. They spoke and read VERY LITTLE English. So little that I saw on their sheet that told them what to clean that someone had written out for them the words for Kitchen and Bathroom (“Cosina” and “Bano”). Surely they could have figured out that they needed to clean the kitchen and the bathrooms without the translation. But nevertheless.

They were talking back and forth fast and furious in Spanish (I was shocked at how much I understood – I have never taken Spanish, but I could tell that they were arguing about whether we had three or four bathrooms).

Ali has never really been exposed to foreign languages, except for her Baby Einstein singing dragon from G’ma Kitty that says “Hello” and “Goodbye” in three languages in a row.

So she was utterly mesmerized. She quit eating completely, INCLUDING THE THREE BITES OF PANCAKE LEFT ON HER TRAY, and just stared at them, looking back and forth while the conversation about our number of “bano’s” continued.

And for the record, I didn’t break in and clear up the argument, because they definitely didn’t speak enough English to understand me and I speak NO Spanish.

I kept saying, “eat your PANCAKES. . . don’t you want more PANCAKES???”, and even those tempting words did nothing to pull her back to task at hand.

She was so confused, and so focused on trying to understand them. I just think she had no idea of why she couldn’t understand them like she can understand Mommy, Daddy, and everyone else. Because she definitely understands just about every word that comes out of our mouth these days, and repeats them all as well. But she just couldn’t get it. She had no idea what they were saying, and she didn’t like that at all.

I now know the one thing that is more important to a toddler than eating: understanding what everyone else is saying and doing! Yes, nosiness definitely trumps food.