I've started uploading new pictures of Erel to Flickr. You can see them by clicking on that link, they are tagged with "erel". There are also lots of nifty tools you can use with Flickr, for instance I've put a feed of pictures on the side of this site.

As of yesterday! Congratulations Brandon and Carla, welcome to the family Tyler!

Ozlem and I have been asking parents we run into about their experiences raising kids with different languages, to get an idea of what we'll do ourselves. I'm now poking around on the Net a bit to see what's out there on the subject.

One of the more common situations we hear from parents who have different native languages is that it's important that each parent consistently use their own language with the child. An article by Marsha Rosenberg Raising Bilingual Children expands on this a bit, according to her the importance is consistency of situation. So it's not that the parent has to only and always speak the same language, but that they have consistent boundaries about the speaking of each language.

This fits with some people we've met recently, who both speak Portugese fluently (although the mother is not a native speaker) and speak it consistently with their daughter at home, but use English when outside. Rosenberg also suggests parents might alternate based on the day of the week, but that seems weird to me. The important thing, though, is that parents don't mix languages in a single conversation, otherwise the children will tend to learn it as a hybrid language - they won't easily distinguish the two lanuages.

Parents we've met who both speak the same language, but a different one than the community they live in, don't seem worried about speaking the local language at home. Certainly by the time the kids start school they will pick up the local language, and end up speaking it, possibly better than the parents' language. I do know one person raised in England by Greek-speaking parents, whose parents decided that one of them would use English with him, but it doesn't sound like that's strictly necessary.

One useful not from Rosenberg is that children should be exposed to the non-local language "in a variety of situations and with a variety of speakers. Rich language experiences in both languages are essential for good bilingual development." So for us, if the kid only speaks Turkish at home with Ozlem, over time (especially after starting school) their Turkish won't develop as well. I have a friend raised in Germany whose father speaks Danish with him, but he tells me when he visits Denmark people think he's retarded. I think we'll have an easy time of it since we know plenty of Turkish speakers in London, and hopefully we'll also get fairly frequent visits to Turkey to spend time with family.

One thing I haven't yet found any comments on, but is a concern of ours, is how we communicate with each other. Ozlem and I speak English to each other, because my Turkish sucks (and that phrase can also be turned the other way around - my Turkish sucks because I don't use it). Will this confuse the kid? Maybe not, but when Ozlem says something to the both of us, she'll want to use Turkish, which I may not understand, rather than English, which will dilute her use of it with the kid. The answer will probably be for me to raise my game. I should be able to improve my Turkish along with our kid!

More links:

• the bilingual families web page, is maintained by Cindy Kandolf, apparently in conjunction with a mailing list, looks to have useful resources.

My friend Iain is running 10k this weekend for a charity that's helping a friend of his who has cancer. Consider pledging a bit of cash for this good cause.

I have to say though, that picture of Iain running - dude, what's with your arms, they scare me! We need to get some protein into that boy.

I want one of these: The GoodFather.

While I'm on the subject of former Syzygians, it seems that Irakli West is starting up a new venture, TRND, The Real Network Dialog (all in Deutsch, unfortunately for us non-German speakers). He describes it as a Web 2.0 based word of mouth marketing system, similar to bzzagent. He's also got one of Germany's top blogs, about Firefighting. Cool stuff, or at least I assume it is.

Fellow ex-Syzygian Iain Tait has been blogging for a month now. Iain's a smart guy who's a Creative Director at Poke, and it's fun for me to read what an old friend thinks about things going on today. He's mainly posting on technical/business trends, things like Web 2.0, and he's got a keen eye for quirky new gadgets and toys. So far Iain has been keeping up a good blogging pace, with frequent posts that are tight and to the point.

Brief posts are really the classic weblog style, and obviously makes it easier to keep the posts flowing. Personally I have a very difficult time writing short posts. Even when I start with a small, simple concept I want to post about, I tend to ramble on. Like starting a post about a friend's new blog, and carrying it on into a discussion of weblog posting styles. The result is I post a long, incoherent screed or two every few months.

Gotta work on that.

Update: Iain protests that he's not a Design Director, pointing to his blog's design as evidence.

My uncle Charlie has started this year's UK tour with his band. Like last year, they will end up at the blues festival in the Orkney Islands, but unfortunately hasn't got any London gigs. Check out his tour schedule, under the "Gator n' Chips Tour". Charlie's been playing professionally for over 20 years now, and has gotten damned good - his latest CD is superb. If you know me and are in London, and don't have a copy of this disc, let me know, I've got a bunch that I haven't done a good enough job of giving away.

One thing I've realized is that I haven't heard Charlie play in ages, and Ozlem hasn't seen him at all. I'm not sure quite how that's happened, mainly I guess we see each other when he's got a break in his touring (usually we visit them in Switzerland when he's got time off to hang and 'board with us). We would love to catch his gig in the Orkneys, because a) I know they had a great time last year, b) there's lots of other bands to check out as well, and c) it'd be cool to check out the Orkneys. But I doubt we'll make it, mainly because of the expense. We're plotting though, we're determined to check out at least one of their gigs, even though it means an overnight trip.

We just moved to a new flat over the weekend. What a nightmare. We hadn't wanted to move, but our landlord decided to sell the place, since the london real estate market has started what is likely to be a long dive. Of course, if we owned our own place we wouldn't be subject to the whims of a landlord, but buying a place now is a) very difficult for first time buyers, thanks to the property bubble, and b) probably not a good idea at this point in the bubble.

The new flat is not far from our old one, but it very close to transportation - we can see the tube platform from our kitchen window. We can hear the trains as well. Although they're not as loud as the place we lived last year, which was right next to the mainline tracks, combined with the busy street (with crosswalks that bleep every half minute or so) and air traffic landing at Heathrow, the background noise level is pretty high with the windows open. A compensation is the large rooftop terrace, from which we an see the London Eye, the Gherkin, BT Tower, and Wembley Stadium.

It's a recently building, one of these "luxury" flats which are the only new housing being built these days, i.e. a shoebox crammed with shiny chrome fittings. The kind of trendily designed place that shows very nice, but turns out to have various practical flaws once you actually try to live in it.

It's going to be a week or two before we get our ADSL line in - only 1 Mbps instead of the 2 Mbps we had at the old place (luxury my ass!), and the only wifi signal anywhere in this 7 story, yuppy-packed building is an encrypted one from a nearby estate agent that I can pick up, but not use, on the balcony. So my email access is limited, but the worst thing is not having Google at my fingertips.

Friends, family, I'll try to send our new contact details around once my data drip-feed is restored, in the meantime both of our mobile numbers are still the same.

Just stumbled across the weblog of an old friend, Chris Larson. Hi Chris!