Anna Sharp (July 20, 2011) - It was only a month into our first semester of Parent and Tot French, and I couldn't believe my ears. Barely a year old, she sat in the little red chair and echoed the teacher's exact words, intonation, and rhythm with absolute precision: "Beaucoup de Cheerios, s'il te plaît." It was a moment to make any mother's heart swell with pride...or so I'd imagine. My own daughter, Allie, also one, was hiding under the table, gnawing on a block.

"Her parents are French?" I asked the girl's caregiver. "No? Grandparents, then?" Suddenly I found it hard to keep my tone of voice casual and friendly, instead of anxious and neurotic. "Did her mother play her Rosetta Stone on a loop in utero?" The nanny's polite smile didn't waver, but she inched ever so slightly away and busied herself with a ribbon that had come loose amid her little girl's golden ringlets.

For the rest of the class, the rosy-cheeked cherub continued responding with ease to all the teacher's prompts, each guttural R more authentic-sounding than the last. Allie made progress, too: she traded her rubber block for two glue sticks. She spent the last fifteen minutes of class rejoicing in her bounty, shaking them with wild abandon.

"Your daughter will be fluent before you know it," the nanny said to me after class, "It happens so fast..." She gestured toward the girls, who were bundled up head to toe in winter hats, mittens, and puffy coats--coats that in February were already becoming a tad snug around their little buddha bellies. .

It happens so fast. Children learn and change and grow so quickly it takes your breath away. Within a few weeks Allie whispered her first "bonjour," and there hasn't been a quiet moment since. Now three years old, she chatters on and on, in and out of class, making observations and posing questions from the second she wakes up till the moment she finally, begrudgingly surrenders to sleep. This fall she'll be going to a French immersion school that starts in Pre-K and goes through 12th grade. All too soon I'll be the one who's asking incessant questions, while she sits in silence on her cell phone, texting...but at least, perhaps, those texts will be in French.