Anecdotal Evidence.

The Language of Love, Part II

Our nanny is a lot like Tony Montana.  She is tough as hell, has a killer accent and does not get high on her own supply.  I know this because she gets high on my supply—assuming she gets high on Raisin Bran.  When you’re approaching 40 (or past it… whatever), you have certain preferences that quickly turn into stockpiles.  I happen to have a large supply of Raisin Bran.  I like Raisin Bran (I am capitalizing it because it’s that good). My nanny likes Raisin Bran too.  And she’s eating it… rapidly.  Behind my back.  It’s like an octogenarian nightmare, but obviously for me it’s only half as scary.

I digress…

Now I’m not sure if out nanny has ever killed her best friend for sleeping with her sister, but she sounds exactly like Tony Montana:

Nanny: “I cannot find The Beast’s chew.”

Me: He took my chew?

Nanny: What?            

Me: What?

This is a typical morning.

Per part one of this post, her kick-ass accent is filtering its way to the Princes and the Diva. For them, there is no silent T in ballet… it’s ball-ET.  Their friend is Wheel, not Will. And they have started referring to their toys as “llello”.  

She is teaching The Beast Spanish, which is great. Except my some of my first son’s words are in Spanish and I have NF idea what he’s talking about.  But now I get to learn Spanish. Which is nice.  Who knows what that kid is going to sound like, but I’d rather have him sound like Tony Montana over one of the Wiggles.

A little Spanish accent is a small price to pay for a great nanny. I mentioned earlier that The Diva still sounds like a nanny that we had over a year ago…. before she could talk.  You gotta think if they can remember how something sounds after so long, they will probably remember what they heard.  Just because they don’t talk, doesn’t mean they aren’t listening and what we say now is what we’ll hear later.  I guess it’s time to curb the F-Bombs.  Maybe we should dispense with Pinkalicious and start reading Homer and Hemmingway… or maybe something in Mandarin.  And I guess it’s probably not a good idea to let them watch so much Scarface.

The Language of Love, Part I

Our first nanny was from an island in the Caribbean.  She absolutely loved our kids and was extremely good at her job.  We were sorry to leave her (we moved).  But she had one glaring flaw that we really didn’t appreciate until several months later.  Even though English is her native language, she absolutely butchered it. She got the tense wrong: “She go to the store.”  She got the case wrong: “I gave it to she.” And every now and then, she’d just omit a word or two: “Angelina Jolie she my girl!” Now I ‘m certainly not judging… and I’m sure this is a combination of a lot of things.  Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s wrong; maybe they aren’t even mistakes, just a local dialect.  Actually… no.  It was shitty grammar… plain and simple. But at the time it was actually kind of charming and frankly, pretty damn entertaining.

Until the kids learned to talk.  And now The Diva sounds just like her. It’s like a trip down memory lane.  Fortunately, we really liked our nanny.  Unfortunately, her grammar really sucks.  The crazy thing is, she started talking a few months after we moved. It’s a little too coincidental, which means she had been harboring poor grammar for several months, waiting for the skills to unveil it. It’s pretty wild that the things we say now come back out of those little mouths so many months down the road.  It makes me wonder if 16 months is too young for The Beast to be listening to so much DMX.

So not only has Sarah started sounding like a St. Vincent tour guide, it seemed to have sparked something in our oldest daughter and now she’s hopped on the Island Express. It’s like a Reggae festival around our house (minus the weed), which obviously solidifies our house’s position as the coolest house on the block.

It is a sad fact that if you have a full time nanny, they spend more time with your kids than you do (at least when the kids are awake).  It makes sense that they have such an impact on the kids… not just the way that talk, but their mannerisms, interests, beliefs and even their morality.  This is particularly interesting at the moment because our current nanny sounds exactly like Tony Montana.  Stay tuned...