The first part of our trip we spent visiting with Vijay’s family. Our kids met their Indian cousin for the first time in Australia. My husband’s family speaks Telugu in the house exclusively, so aside from the television my niece hadn’t had exposure to English prior to day care. All of her conversational English was learned through the show Peppa Pig (who apparently is a huge star in Australia. You can find Peppa everywhere). Peppa also speaks with a British accent and vocabulary. My niece has picked up Peppa’s style. Her little British accent is incredibly adorable – especially considering the fact that she is living in Australia.

I’m sure her new daycare experience will tease the Peppa out and put the Aussie in, but it made me smile.

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The second half of our trip was dedicated to visiting with long time friends that Vijay and I met in graduate school. One of our friends is living in Sydney. The other is lives in Singapore and was able to fly down for the week.

Our Singapore friend has a daughter a little younger than my oldest. The kids hit it off. By the second day they developed their own language. They both share English as a common language, but they choose to make up a new language with partial words from sounds they have heard from the languages they know and others that were new to them both. They talked to each other for long stretches of time in this new made-up language with great enthusiasm. They used hand gestures, nodded and pointed as they spoke to each other, bantering back and forth as good friends do. There was a tiny bit of Mandarin, Nepali, English, Spanish and Hindi mixed in – but most of the sounds none of the adults could identify.