I can speak enough Spanish to go shopping, order in restaurants and be at least a little friendly with the people I meet. But anything that requires much more than putting a few simple words together and I’m pretty lost. 

Luckily, I almost always have a translator nearby.

He recently turned four, wears superhero underpants, rides a bike with training wheels, sits on the shoulders of his dad at parades and removes everything but the cheese on his pizza. He also speaks Spanish with the ease of a native even though he’s been here the same ten months that I have.

As he regularly tells random strangers, “Mi abuela no habla espanol.”

At his suggestion (or sometimes foot stomping insistence), we play a game at the dinner table almost every night where someone says an English word or sentence and the rest of us raise our hands if we can say the Spanish translation. Needless to say, I finish my fish sticks way before everyone else since my hand is rarely up. On the rare occasions when I do know an answer, triumph is fleeting since my pronunciation is promptly corrected by the know-it-all four-year-old. 

I’d find it irritating if I didn’t rely on him so much.

“Ask the man if we can park here?” I told him yesterday when we arrived at his day camp to find double parking the only option that didn’t involve walking several blocks carrying a Spiderman backpack.

“Tell the guard we’re here to play soccer,” I said as we approached the visitors’ gate to get into the Universidad practice fields.  We were always quickly waved in as long as he hadn’t fallen asleep in his car seat. 

It turns out we’re a pretty good team. I took him with me to the computer store to help explain my computer problems and to the office of his day camp to navigate signing him up for a field trip. He’s willing to go pretty much anywhere I need him as long as there’s a promise of a popsicle at OXXO on the way home. 

So far he hasn’t figured out that he could tell the OXXO clerk to throw in a few extra candy bars and I’d never be the wiser. Or that some people get paid for translation work in a currency other than popsicles. 

That day is probably coming. But I’m not worried.  

His two-year-old brother should be fluent by then.