Teaching The Kids Too Much Spanish?

My wife scolded me at dinner yesterday.

"You're trying to teach our kids too much Spanish too fast."

"How can you learn too much of a language?"

"Well McKenna's only 3 and Owen's only 2, he doesn't even know a whole lot of English yet, and she's still working on the alphabet.  I don't think we should be focusing on only Spanish."

I smiled.  "So you want me to work on his German too?  How about Hindi?  I can start teaching him Hindi!"

"You know what I mean.  I don't want him to only speak Spanish.  They both watch Dora, she's learning Spanish words in school, and now you're running around teaching them Spanish.  What's gotten into you?"

"I just think in the next 30 years, more and more people are going to be speaking Spanish, and it will benefit our kids if they have a command of both English and Spanish."

She grunted and shrugged while she chewed her food.  I stared out the window for a minute before I continued.  "I hope that I can get them started on Chinese and Hindi before they leave high school...and obviously German, so they can talk to my relatives."

Heather put down her fork and rolled her eyes.  "Seriously, it's too much."

I didn't say anything else.  I don't want to push it on the kids.  I'm not looking to fall into that trap of pushing too much on my kids.  She knows that's a sore spot for both of us.  Neither of us want to be that parent that's driving to 18 different events and the family never eating dinners together. 

And I understand where she's coming from.  She's able to understand German, and she spoke it very well when she lived there in the 80's, but when dealing with all of the craziness that's part and parcel of living with kids, the last thing she wants to do is have to figure out what language they're talking in and then try to formulate a response.  A screaming 2 year old is hard enough to understand even when you're sure he's speaking the same language as you, but given a bilingual toddler, well, it could be all kinds of frustrating.

When I look at them I see tremendous potential in my childrens' brains, especially when I watch them learn.  Learning foreign languages comes easy in my family.  My mom came from the Alsace region of Germany, on the French border, and she speaks French, German, and English with ease.  In seminary she swiftly picked up the Greek and Hebrew she needed for lessons.  My dad was equally talented with languages and used his skills at the State Department.  I inherited some of those same skills, and I harbor this hope my two kids did as well.

I think they did, so I'll wait a day or two for my wife to forget our conversation, and I'll start with the Spanish again.