Weekly-daily schedule

Our daily schedule concerning English has developed slowly. E. is 11 months old and for a month now we've had a more or less fixed weekly agenda. Here it is:

60% is in Hungarian and 40% is in English - I wish we could keep this balance

We've just started Helen Doron English (in a later post I'll write about our experience), but it definitely increases the time spent on English and we are not at home using the minor language at last. Tuesdays and Thursdays are clearly dedicated to English. Mondays and Wednesdays are the Hungarian days. Still, on these days we have 2 or 3 hours of English input. (What is not in the chart is the 20-30 minutes when D. takes the dog out for a walk in the evening. E. and I change into English and lay the table, put away the toys or watch some videos or books in English while they're away.)

Fridays are changeable, but in general half of the day goes in Hungarian, the other half in English. Before our Hungarian playmate comes to visit us, we go out for a walk together or to the market and then we use Hungarian as English would be unnatural.

My only problem is the weekends. As the whole family is together, it's really difficult to find time and natural situations when we can use English. At weekends 1 hour of English per day is "forced" into our programme (singing, video watching, reading out) but not real communicative interactions. I'll try to find out something for the weekends. If you have any suggestions, just feel free to share it with me.

In the table above you can't see food time (which is in the given language according to which day it is) and daily sleeping time, however the latter takes away 2-3 hours per day.

At the beginning of January we took up baby swimming on Saturday mornings. I found a course at Budapest Moms (you can find the group's facebook page here), which was held in two languages. The tutor is Hungarian and in the water one of the moms do the interpreting. As the swimming pool echoes a lot it is hard to hear the Hungarian words, not to mention the English ones, however, we met a lot of non-Hungarian families (Russians, French, Dutch, Canadians etc). As for the English language, it doesn't make a big difference whether we take part in this swimming course or another, but the trainer is really professional and the pool is clean, the water is warm. So all in all we, and most important of all, E. enjoy it. It's a good family programme for the weekend. The course is finished in a week, now we are thinking of continuing it, but not sure. Good weather has arrived, we might want to spend time outside instead.

I'm a little worried about being able to keep this schedule. One thing is permanent in a baby's life that nothing is permanent. As I'm planning to work part-time soon, probably in a month or two our agenda needs to be revised.