I literally went on a binge for baby books in Spanish last year when we visited Madrid, Spain. One of my picks was not quite a baby book, but given that my Spanglish is probably better than my Spanish, I figured it would come in handy as my daughter grew up -- for both me and her. It's the Album Larousse de la Naturaleza and it's a nature book with pictures of fruit, vegetables, trees, flowers, birds, plants, insects and more -- plus, the word for it in Spanish.  

Some of the words in here:

abeja = bee

saltamontes = grasshopper

luciérnaga = firefly or lightning bug

frambuesa = raspberry

petirrojo = robin

gorrión = sparrow

coliflór = cauliflower

alcachofa = artichoke

I love this little book because it will help build both mine and my daughter's specialized vocabulary in Spanish. I mean, it's pretty easy for us to teach kids about the different fruits and vegetables they eat because it's something they are around every single day. But what about flowers? Just as flower just isn't a flower, a flor isn't just a flor. It's a rosa, tulipan, jacinto, geranio, peonia, margarita, lavanda, hibisco and amapola. Now that my daughter is a full-fledged non-stop talker, I'm really into building up that specialized vocabulary, especially because I've found that I don't even know all of my flowers and trees (elm, oak, magnolia, pine, mango, olive, banana -- soooo many trees!!! thank goodness for the arboretum).

I actually never really thought too much about my own specialized vocabulary until my husband and I got married and bought a home and decided to plant flowers. And then a bird family decided to move into our porch. What kind is it? That's a question this book will help me answer, en español, for my daughter.

  

So a little more about our Spanish T-shirt and onesie B de Burro, V de Vaca. Some people get it, immediately. But for those who may not have heard the saying, here's a little background on this Spanish saying.

In a former incarnation right out of college, I was a high school Spanish teacher, and one of the common mistakes that I saw amongst my native Spanish speaker kiddos was their confusion between the letter B and V. I'd often see words like "haver" instead of "haber" or "travajar" instead of "trabajar" or "escrivir" instead of  "escribir." So why are the B's and V's so hard to nail down for those of us who grew up speaking Spanish? Here's an explanation:

B and V are pronounced exactly the same. In fact, one of the few spelling problems that many Spanish speakers have is with these two letters, because they don't distinguish them at all from their sound. Generally, the b and v are pronounced like the "b" in "beach." When either of the letters is between two vowels, the sound is formed kind of like the English "v," except that the sound is made by touching the lips together instead of the upper teeth and lower lip. 

And I am the last person to be teaching phonetics, as I remember sitting in a college class and not being able to distinguish sounds. My ears apparently cannot fine tune. But here's more on that. And more.