Why I Keep Pulling Matty Out of School for Mexico Trips

Spanish at Home vs. Spanish in Mexico

Brian and I do our best at home. Spanish at dinner. Spanish books at bedtime. Bluey dubbed in Spanish on weekends, which has its own cursed energy. It's fine. It is genuinely fine. Matty's home Spanish is solid — the kind of Spanish where he can describe his day, ask for what he wants, joke around with me. That's a real win and I'm proud of it.

But home Spanish is small. Home Spanish is me, Brian's halting attempts, and a couple of cousins on FaceTime. Real Spanish, the kind that lives in a kid's bones, comes from a week at Abuela's house in Guadalajara where there are seven people in the kitchen all yelling at the same time about whether the pozole needs more orégano. That's the Spanish I want him to have. That kind only happens by airplane.

The Five-Day Abuela Trip

Every year, usually April, we fly Austin–Guadalajara, three and a half hours, easy. We stay with Abuela in her house off Avenida Chapultepec. She's eighty-three. She has been cooking three meals a day for sixty years and she will not let me help. The first morning Matty wakes up groggy. By dinner he's asking for the salsa verde in Spanish. By day three he's running errands with my tío to the tortillería on the corner — solo, with a coin purse, like a tiny adult. By day five he is dreaming in Spanish, no joke, I've heard him talk in his sleep. Híjole, niño.

Sophie's four and the same magic happens, just smaller. She doesn't speak in full sentences yet but she comes home using "ándale" correctly and she's started rolling her R's, which Brian — God love him — still cannot do.

What I Tell the Teacher

Here is the email, more or less, that I send Matty's teacher in February. I'm putting it here because every year a Texas mom DMs me asking how I phrase it. So.

• Subject: Matty out April 14–18 — family trip to Guadalajara
• Body: Hi Mrs. ___, just letting you know Matty will be out of school the week of April 14 for our annual visit to his great-grandmother in Guadalajara. We're a bilingual family and this immersion week is a big part of how we maintain his Spanish. Happy to pick up any work in advance or have him submit it on return — let me know what works for you.

That's it. No apology. No long justification. "Bilingual maintenance" is a real, named, educator-recognized thing. Most teachers — at least every one I've had — are visibly relieved when you frame it that way instead of pretending it's a medical appointment in San Miguel.

What He Actually Comes Back With

• A new tortillería recommendation he is very serious about
• Three new cousins he can name and roughly place on the family tree
• Slang. So much slang. He came home last year saying "qué onda" to the dog.
• The ability to order in restaurants for the whole table. He has done this since age six. Brian still doesn't.
• A Mexican aunt's phone number written in his journal because she promised to text him recipes
• Roughly 4 inches of growth in his Spanish that does not regress

The Counter-Argument I Keep Hearing

People say: "But what about the academic disruption?" Mira. He is in second grade. They are reviewing place value. He will live. The disruption of pulling him out for five days is, in raw academic terms, minimal. The opportunity cost of NOT going — of letting his Spanish atrophy through another long Texas school year — is enormous and largely invisible until he's twelve and has to relearn things he should already own.

I'm betting on the long game. So far the long game looks like: a seven-year-old who reads in two languages, jokes in two languages, code-switches mid-sentence at the dinner table without thinking about it, and has a relationship with a great-grandmother eight hundred miles away that he could not have any other way. Vale la pena. A thousand percent.