Dear Vanessa,

I have watched every episode of Bluey ever made. Four times.

Not my four favorite episodes. The entire series, four full passes, spread out over the last two years. There are grown adults on the internet who call themselves Bluey superfans, posting on Reddit, making tier lists of six year old animated dogs. I could destroy them in Bluey trivia at a bar.

Luciana watches it to placate me.

If you were thinking I was using our daughter as an excuse to watch cartoons, well, I was. For a while I pretended it was for her. I don’t even know if she liked it in the first place. She’d rather watch YouTube videos of other kids playing with Bluey toys than watch actual Bluey.

YouTube is brain rot. I’d rather she watch Bluey. She likes brain rot. And apple juice. Pretty much allergic to anything I like or anything the least bit healthy.

So I watch a preschool cartoon about dogs alone, at night, after she goes to bed, completely unironically.

Bluey is one of the most famous shows on the planet. The dad is the internet’s favorite fictional father. I’ve heard his voice maybe twice, in passing, on YouTube. I couldn’t pick Bandit out of a lineup.

Because I have only ever watched Bluey in Spanish.

I told you in June that my Spanish is better now. When you’re learning a new language, anything entertaining is gold. Especially if you can understand it. There’s a fancy term for this. Comprehensible input.

Comprehensible input is a very academic way of saying “watch cartoons until your brain gives up and learns Spanish.” I’ve used this method before, actually. For Luciana’s first word. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Hundreds of times a day. Ask Luciana what her first word was. She’ll tell you.

No, she won’t. She’s three. She doesn’t know what it was yet.

Now the method is being used on me. I’m the toddler, and a cartoon dog is the teacher.

The first pass was humbling. I caught maybe every tenth word and guessed the rest from the pictures, like a two year old.

Somewhere in the middle of all those hours, I started hearing you. Después. It was just a sound you made on the phone with your mom. Now I know it means later. You talked to her eight times a day. Two years later and I remember the cadence better than my own name. Linda. Pretty. Every time something cute showed up on the dogs’ Instagram. Now those words have context. Like I’m living in an alternate dimension where I knew Spanish while you were alive.

Then, on the fourth pass, I got to Baby Race, the episode where Chilli tells Bluey the story of how she learned to walk.

You don’t know it, because you’re dead and I’m the Bluey expert in this marriage. Bluey was a late walker. Chilli spends the whole episode convinced she did something wrong as a mom. Then another mum (this spelling is so I don’t get in trouble with Reddit) with nine kids leans over and tells her the thing she needed to hear. You’re doing great.

I understood all of it. No subtitles. No pausing. No guessing from the pictures. A mother doubting herself, in a language I didn’t understand two years ago, and I followed every word.

You would be a bubbling ball of goo. I didn’t cry. I was too astonished to cry. Learning a language is the slowest grind on the planet. There is no progress bar. And for one scene, I leveled up in real time.

People have said that exact sentence to me for two years. You’re doing great. You’re doing such a good job with her. It bounces off me every single time. I argue with it in my head like a lawyer. My whole case is one sentence. But I could be doing better. I win the argument every time. The only loser is my mental health.

This time, nobody was saying it to me. It was in your language, aimed at a cartoon dog who thought she broke her baby. And it landed. Apparently the only way I can hear it is secondhand. In Spanish. Addressed to someone else.

The episode ends with baby Bluey standing in the kitchen, looking up at her mum. That’s the whole reason she wanted to walk.

I understood that part without any words at all.

Besitos,

Michael