Questionnaire for our New Upcoming Website

Let us all try to #EatTogether

First, watch the video below and then read my commentary and share your thoughts in the comments below.


When I first saw this commercial, I thought the woman was nervous because she was going to a Muslim’s house for dinner.  But then as the commercial evolved, I saw that there was so much more to it.

This commercial #eattogether made me think of the friendships I have formed with most of my neighbors. There are only two families that I don’t know very well because they both live on the top floor and our paths rarely cross. We do say Bonjour though, when we do see each other but nothing more than that. For the rest of my neighbors, we exchange plates of food or delish treats at least a few times a week or for some every few months or so. My golden girl neighbors that’s what I call them, or my three older Jewish sisters that live on the first floor in English or rez-de-chausee in French have made us macaroons, chocolates, bread and hanaukah cookies amongst other things. I have happily made cupckades, muffins, cookies and lots of other American delights for my neighbors since American desserts have been all the rage in France recently. For the exceptional few, though,  I’ll send them baklava when it’s around the two Muslim Eids. Once I have given out my plates, I anxiously wait for their return with my neighbor’s delish goodies.

Homemade Vanilla Pudding with Fresh cow’s milk

Just like in the commercial #eattogether, my neighbors are not all the same nationality either ; there are French, Turks, African, American, Haitian, Kurds, Algerian, and maybe Portuguese. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that most of my neighbors are bilingual and that most of their children if they try enough hard in school could become trilingual or multilingual. Just as I have decided that most of my neighborhood is bilingual or trilingual.  Once I had a little boy come for an English class, the same age as my little boy  of 2 years,  who was learning Arabic, French and the native language of Mali (unsure of it’s name) plus English ! So there actually might be neighbors of mine who are multilingual that I have not found yet.

For the most part, we are one big happy family. We will tell each other flat out if they are bother us or are making too much noise.  For example, a little over a month ago, my downstairs neighbors complained for the first time in the four years that we’ve been living here, that the kids were making too much noise like rolling marbles on the tile floor around at 9pm. So we used that incident as a golden learning opportunity to explain to the kids that we needed to start practicing our inside and outisde voices / noises. It’s still a work in progress, but we will get the hang of it, I’m sure.

This video I think reiterates that we need to try to be nice and friendly to our neighbors, no matter how nice and friendly they are to us.  Just like the golden verse says “Treat others with the respect that you would like to be treated.” We often need to remembering that everyone’s time is precious and to make sure not to bother the other too much. I’ve seen signs in other apartment buildings saying “Please don’t run the washing machine after 10pm” or “we are not your mother, please throw your trash in the right spot”.
 
This video has encouraged me to start a spotlight feature (like a humans of newyork) of telling a story from people we’ve met in our many adventures.

This is one of my last posts for awhile as I will be renouvating our blog and transferring everything over to a new offical website to highlight better our multilingual family adventures in culture, food, language, learning, religion and travel. 

Who’d like to hear one of the Golden girl’s  adventures ? Do you have any stories to tell ?

Trip to a Hospital while Abroad on Vacation

Imagine you are on vacation in Paris or another place of your choice (preferably somewhere where you have a limited understanding of the language) and everything is going great until BAM! Your side starts aching or your blood pressure is skyrocketing, or something hits you or that pain somewhere just won’t go away. You try to convince yourself you’ll be fine because you only have an x number of days before you’re home and then you’ll be able to see your doctor, because you really want to avoid an unexpected trip to a foreign doctor or emergency room.

 

But, then you realize that it might actually be better to go to that foreign doctor who might not speak and understand English (even though most have a working knowledge of English, but you still might not understand what they are saying) or worse the emergency room and maybe an overnight stay or more at a hospital that doesn’t at all remind you of home. Doesn’t that sound lovely…

Actually I had an emergency surgery  while in Turkey last August and just last week my mother-in-law spent the night in a French hospital after her blood pressure skyrocketed. She actually told me that she would’ve preferred “to die” at home in our house than spend another night in the hospital. I understand what she means French hospitals are a rather interesting adventure.

My mother-in-law’s  ordeal was rather short compared to mine so I’ll share hers today and another time I’ll share mine.

She’d been complaining of a headache all weekend. I decided that since we went on an overnight trip to Metz (a 6-hour roundtrip by car) on Saturday-Sunday and then got back in time for a loud Turkish wedding on Sunday that she was tired and worn out. So I took her blood pressure on Monday morning and it was all good, in the evening though it was super high. Right away, my husband realized that we needed to go to the hospital and we left the kids with neighbors and away we went.

We waited and waited because it was packed.    It was like everyone decided to get sick on the day we went. It didn’t look this hospital below…we are in France afterall and just like you have to wait in line for everything else, you have to wait for in the ER (urgences) for a while no matter your emergency.

Finally, we got news after hours of waiting that she would need to spend the night in the hospital and have an MRI (IRM) in the morning to reconfirm a brain aneursym or something else.

So, she spent the night in the Halle d’Accueil d’Urgences Vitales like an Emergency ward and recounted later

• of trying to get up out of bed to go to the bathroom because she wanted to get some exercise (my mother in law is always busy doing something aka she doesn’t sit still well) only to be given a bed pan and told she didn’t have the right to get up and walk around.
• Also, when the nurse came to change the serum solution, my mother-in-law made a signal that she was thirsty and then asked for de l’eau (she said that thanks to Fatima she had at least learned the word for water)

Anyway the next day, my husband was able to go around with her and get an MRI but he was kicked out of the room multiple times even though they needed a translator. Finally, she was released late on Tuesday. She should keep her blood pressure in check but we were advised to see a neurosurgeon next Monday. My mother in law has already decided that if she needs surgery – she is doing it in Turkey – because she speaks the language, she’d rather be home and the cost. We got the bill for the “two days” in the hospital and it was the same price as my plane tickets home to Kentucky for Christmas.

My advice when travelling abroad is to keep a list of doctors that speak English ( your country’s consulate might be able to provide one) as well as a hospital in case of emergency. Also, purchase a picture dictionary so that in case you are unable to say what the problem is in the native language, you can at least point to pictures.

Do you have a story to tell about an adventure in a foreign hospital ? Any other tips ?

Having Fun with Bath Paint

This week, I had many ideas for posts that I was going to write about, but God had other plans. My mother-in-law has been visiting us since mid-January and earlier this week, she had a health crisis and is recovering at home now. Her experience and one of my own has inspired a post I hope to share with you later this week or next about having to go to a foreign hospital while on vacation.

This week, we’ve also been really busy and somehow giving the kids a bath kept getting pushed back and back. Don’t judge me it was might have been more than a week! Today we were finally able to take one, so I made it fun ! BATH PAINT !

We made homemade bath paint, it’s really easy, (cornstarch, food coloring, water and baby soap). They had a fun time painting for the most part it was just the walls and the bath tub, but then it turned into painting each other’s stomach and feet. Since, the mess was only contained in one area, they ended up helping to clean the bath tub too and all the paint washed away without any scrubbing. It’s like a super win for both Mommy and kids!

Here are some pictures of them painting :

Multilingual Homeschooling Questions

When I was first interested in homeschooling my children, I was often confronted with the issue of mutli-language learning. I kept asking myself questions like is it better for them to learn English first and then French, but then what about Turkish and Arabic ? Is four too much ? How about reading and writing ?
As I was researching and trying my hardest to find answers to these tough questions, I stumbled upon this website, multilingualparenting.com and their weekly Q&A sessions. I quickly sent Rita Rosenbeck a question hoping to have some answers so that I could start planning my school year.

I have been following your Facebook page for a while and I have really enjoyed the articles that you post. I may not have read all of them, but I have saved most for later when I find time.
I am contacting you to seek some advice or possible resources to implement in our multilingual and multicultural family. I am American and my husband is Turkish (he speaks two other languages as well). We live in Paris, France with our two children (two and a half and one) and we are a Muslim family so we are learning Arabic all together at the same time. My husband and I speak French together as we are unable to communicate in each other’s languages.
We follow the one parent, one language approach but sometimes I speak French in with my kids. We are going to be homeschooling our oldest in preschool next year and I am concerned that she will not be exposed to the French language as much as she would if she was at school. We will try to visit the library and go out and do activities as much as possible but I am still afraid that she will not be speaking it as much as English or Turkish. Both my husband and I are not fluent in French, I do however speak French a little better than he, so my questions are:
1. How do we teach French to our children as a non-native speaker? My daughter has already started speaking a little French, thanks to La Maison de Mickey that she watches daily.
2. Will she pick up my English accent when speaking French? Will this cause problems later down the road if she goes to school?
3. How do we expose our children to all our languages throughout our homeschool day? Should I do one day in French, one day in English or alternate throughout the day? We’ve been reviewing the alphabet and numbers in French. I have decided that at least one day a week will be dedicated to French, exclusively speaking French. Please let me know if this is or isn’t a great idea.
4. How do I start reading and writing with all the languages?

Although I didn’t get the answer as soon as I would have liked, her answer did help and provide me with the resources so that I could start answer my questions and eventually planning my activities. Still 6+ months later, I am referring back to the answers and using her tips to enhance my activities.
Here is the link to the answer I received : http://multilingualparenting.com/2016/06/12/qa-bilingual-homeschooling-how-to-successfully-integrate-more-than-one-language/

Ocean Theme Unit

I decided that I would start planning month-long units to help save time on planning and prepping – because I’ve been struggling to find time for all the stuff that I “try” to do daily/weekly.

This is how I plan a lesson : I start pinning a board based on theme of the unit : ocean, for example. Then I look through all of the ideas that I pin, decide on what I would like to do with the kids, print out worksheets, gather the needed materials (like manipulatives), laminate the worksheets and then decide when and how I’ll present each activity.

Currently we our studying about the ocean : sealife, animals, story of Prophet Jonah (Yunus) and the whale, water and land formations, etc.

Here are some the activities we have been enjoying so far:

Will the egg sink or float ?

The egg definetly floated in the salt water (above picture). But the activity quickly turned to be more of a bath than a science experiment, Z enjoyed sticking his hand in the cup and then splashing the water around.

 

Introduction to Land vs. Water animals

Blue bowls represent water and the green represents land

“Starfish” beads transfering and counting in land and water trays

Z decided to create a drum with two spoons and an empty container while we explored our ocean sensory bin – he came with the idea himself

Coloring sorting “smartie” (french m&ms) in the matching boats

We either read this book in French (like it is written) or we translate it into English

F has an interest for penguins. She likes to waddle around like one and talk about them all the time

For more of our activities : follow us on Instagram - @resourceful_muslimah

Welcome / Bienvenue / Hosgeldiniz

Assalamu alaykom, Hi, Bonjour, Merhaba, and everything else in between. Welcome to our blog about the multlingual and cutlural adventures that our family experiences while living in Paris, France.

I am an American ; my husband is Turkish ; although we do not speak each other’s languages, our common language is French. My husband (Y) speaks three mother tongues : Turkish, Kurdish, and Zaza. We are also a Muslim family striving towards learning Islamic Arabic and as non-native speakers, the pronunciation is often difficult, but we are up to the challenge. So, we are on the track to learn six languages.

We have two kids : F (girl, 3) and Z (boy, 2).

We homeschool (école à la maison or instruction en famille) and we enjoy exploring and discovering at home and our world around us.

I am always asked why I homeschool instead of sending my oldest to French preschool (maternelle), so here are my top 5 reasons :

1. Islamic responsability – as Muslim parents, it is our responsability to show, encourage and teach our kids how to become responsable Muslims and adults

Homeschool Mission Statement :

We begin with Bismillah (In the Name of God), Responsable for our children’s education, we will strive to love, teach, correct, and encourage our children on a daily basis in a clear and simple manner to become pious, wise Muslims who will strive to uphold Islamic values and have a strong relationship with God.

We also believe that learning pariculary fro the Quran and SUnnah will encrouage a lifelong adventure of seeking knowledge. We believe in facing each day with minds open to knowledge and hearts open to love. We believe in the freedom to wonder, to ask, to explore, to imagine, to create.

We believe that every one of us has special talents and that the talents of each of us help all of us. We belive that success means doing our best, being our best and feeling proud of our effort.

2. Overcrowding in maternelle – we live in an area where there are 3 maternelle (preschools) and two primary schools all right next to each other and still there are not teachers and place available for all the kids ! Plus, islamic school is rather expensive too.

3. Multi-languages – Since we are currently learning four languages – English, French, Turkish, and Arabic – I have decided that it is best at the moment to learn in an at-home setting, and switch between the languages (for example every two weeks we will have class in either English or French – I’ll write more about this later)

4. Hands-on discovery and learning through play, games, and exploration based on the child’s interests

5. Enjoyable – I’ve always wanted to be a teacher and I am very happy to be my kids first teacher. I’ve found it very enjoyable so far to see all my hardwork pay off (the benefits outweigh the time planning, prepping and presenting)

Now your turn :

• Introduce yourself, how many languages do you speak or would like to learn?
• What adventures would you like to hear about ?
• If you homeschool, what are you reasons for homeschooling ?