I Heart Glenn Doman

This weekend I was a little... Well, shall we say peeved at the fact that we had a course at work which meant having to stay until 8.30pm on Friday and from 9am until 7pm on Saturday (It was originally supposed to be 6pm but overran by an hour!)

I´m not saying I was very happy at being at work half the weekend, in fact I was definitely NOT happy about it, but in the end the course was very interesting (although intense!)

I work, as a teaching assistant in a private bilingual school in Madrid, my class is a class of 18 three year olds and in three years old, we teach everything in English. The course in question was Early Stimulation (which lazily i´ve translated directly from "estimulación temporal", but probably has another name in Enlgish)

So as I sat down at 5.30pm on Friday, after having been working since 8am that morning, I was ready to be bored and even more peeved, but when the teacher started talking about Glenn Doman and his methods on teaching babies and young children, using a range of exercises to develop the body and flash cards to develop the mind, I started to pay attention. This was interesting!

Glenn Doman was a physical therapist who founded, in 1955 The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (Sounds like something out of X-Men right?!) Well, this was originally a non-profit organisation to help children with brain damage, to develop their full potential as the name suggests, using the exercises and flash cards to develop their brains and bodies as much as possible, rather than just leaving them to a life stuck in a wheelchair or a hospital bed unstimulated.

In the 1960´s they began to use the methods on children with no disabilities aswell and the results were pretty amazing!

All over the world centres are using the Glenn Doman methods to develop the minds and bodies of children to their fullest, training teachers, schools and parents in how to develop the minds of children everywhere.

Unfortunately a lot of the exercises have to be done between birth and two years to awaken the areas of the brain, such as exposure to language and my children are three and four years old. We can teach them languages, of course, they are learning English and doing an amazing job I might say! Also I only started to learn Spanish almost two years ago and since a year ago, outside of work I only speak Spanish.

However, there is a point in a childs life (at around six months) when the brain stops being able to distinguish the sounds from different languages which makes pronounciation so difficult when learning a language later in life, which is why Spanish people have difficulties pronouncing English words begining with an S, followed by a consonant, because these words don´t exist in Spanish, they always have an E at the begining, like Spanish in Spanish is Español and Spain is España. Also it´s difficult for English people to pronunce the letters J and G in Spanish which have a very throaty sound which doesn´t exist in English, but from zero to six months, the brain is able to learn all the sounds, which is why it´s the best time for language esposure, not necessarily to learn other languores but to develop that part of the brain to its fullest.

I am dying to use my new found knowledge, and yes, of course there are some of the methods that we can use in the classroom, such as crawling, which sounds a bit daft but is very important in a childs development, but until me and Mr. Millennial decide to have baby millennials i´ll just have to wait for the rest!!

Twitter - Is Tweeting Still a Thing??

I used to be a big fan of Twitter, long before I discovered Instagram and Pinterest, my main go to´s were Facebook and Twitter. Then, I don´t really know what happened, I got bored or forgot my password or something but I stopped Tweeting and kind of forgot all about it.

Until today! Well let me tell you first of all that i´ve suffered a bout of Karma and i´m sick. Karma why? Karma, because I was making jokes last week about how Spanish people always say you can´t go out when it´s cold or you´ll catch a cold and get a fever and be really sick, and every time you mention that you have a headache or you cough in the vicinity of a Spanish person they will more than likely hand you a thermometer!

Well this for me is very funny, as someone who has never taken her temperature... probably ever before, and being from the North of England I don´t really believe that going out in the cold is going to make you sick, but here I am, after my lovely weekend away with a stinking cold which I suspect is sinusitis as my head has been killing me all day too, not great when you have a class full of three year olds to deal with, and no, today i´m not laughing at people asking me if I have a fever! (Which I don´t by the way, no such luck, back to work tomorrow!)

Anyway, so I thought, in a moment of feeling sorry for myself and needing a distraction, that it would be a good idea to start a Twitter account, so you can find me over there too @millennialhwife That is if i´m not too out of touch and people do still Tweet...

A Weekend Away - Spanish Style

What better way to finish a particularly stressful week (one that ended quite dramatically with a horrific downpour that turned the street into white water rapids) than a weekend away! Long overdue and very much needed!

We packed a suitcase and picked up my husbands brother and his girlfriend and off we went to a little village about two and a half hours from Madrid called Trujillo.

It´s nice and all and I love being away from Madrid and from home for the weekend (still getting used to living in a loft rather than a house with proper walls and doors!) and Trujillo is beautiful, we stayed in a Parador which has no translation but it´s basically somewhere like a castle or a monistary that they have turned into a hotel so that they can pay for its upkeep... but it´s when we visit the villages of Spain that my English side comes out...

Well, maybe not my English side, maybe it´s just me but I don´t find visiting castles and churches all that fun... Sorry Spain!

It´s something the hubby is used to, he knows i´d rather be sitting in a cafe eating chocolate cake, or in a square drinking a beer but when we´re with other people I have to keep schtum and go along for the ride, I managed to get out of the guided tour, only because it was cold and about to rain and Mr Millennial was tired so we stayed in our room but when we were re-told the history of the village when the in-laws got back it got me thinking.

I know NOTHING about history!

I know this sounds like a trivial thing, and in the grand scheme of things it´s not really that important, but almost all Spanish people that I have met know a lot about the history of their country and of other countries, and Mr Millennial is a bit of a history buff, but I know nothing about Spain, or England or any other country. My knowledge of history begins and ends with the fact that Henry the eighth had six wives who were Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived and sometimes I feel a little bit.. Well... Stupid.

So my mid-year resolution - i´m making that a thing - is to learn more about history, in particular Kings, Queens and at least a brief history of Spain and England so that I can join in on some of these conversations. 

It can be frustrating at the best of times trying to explain something in another language, one that you don´t know all the words to express yourself. You don´t lose your intelligence but you lose the power to be able to show it at times. Luckily my Spanish family is very patient with me and the hubby more or less understands what i´m getting at!!

So while I go and attempt to memorise names and dates, here are some photos from the weekend, enjoy!

      

The Name Game

My Facebook page has been filling up recently with articles about weddings. Not inusual, as it´s now spring, we´re officially in wedding season. Usually this doesn´t interest me much but seeing as i´ve just got married some of the titles have caught my eye, especially those on the topic of name changing.

I understand that changing your name after getting married can be a difficult decision, you´ve had your maiden name for your whole life, it connects you to your parents, brothers and sisters, other family members... But please don´t drop the F-bomb when talking about why you don´t want to take your husband´s name!!

Being a feminist should not be the reason why you don´t want to change your name after marriage. We all know that men don´t own women anymore, and i´m getting tired of the abuse that men get from these so called feminists that can praise a woman for posting a naked photo onto social media, UNLESS said woman is steriotypically beautiful with big boobs and a tiny waist (How stupid was all the Kim Kardashian hate?!)

The poor men of today can not be blamed for what men did in the past, nor can the mayority be blamed for how very few men treat or think of women.

Feminism can not be the excuse. You can not say: "I won´t change my name because I am a feminist and not owned by my husband" because if you feel like that, you could say: "I have to  have a name which is completely unrelated to anyone in my family because I am not owned by anyone"

It´s the exact same thing. Your surname at birth is usually that of your father (and your mother if she changed her name after marriage) so are you owned by him?? NO!!

My personal opinion is that my surname shows which family I belong to, who are the people who I love and who i´m closest to in the entire world, which is why I chose to take my husbands name after we got married, and I didn´t have to, here in Spain women DON´T take their husbands surname after marriage, they keep their own and the children take their first surname (they have two) from their father, and the second from their mother.

This can cause a lot of names like Juan Fernandez Fernandez popping up but it´s the tradition here, such as traditionally in England women take their husbands surname.

Sure, hundreds of years ago it probably was to show possession, but times have changed and I for one am proud to use my husband´s name, we are a family, and when we have children they will take, as is traditional here both surnames, they will have a Spanish one and an English one, something we have discussed as I am quite happy to relinquish my surname and use both of my husbands, but he would like them to have part of their English herritage in their names too.

I completely agree that everyone (women and men included) has the right to choose whether they keep their surname after marriage, or change it and take that of their new husband/wife, or to change it in any other moment of their life. But don´t think badly of your new husband, don´t say you won´t take his name because you are not owned by him, it doesn´t make you sound like a strong and independant woman from a Beyonce song, it makes you sound like a paranoid bully. Men are not the enemy, and if you felt like that you surely wouldn´t have married one in the first place.

Rant over. Sorry feminists...