Cool (yin) Foods: Bamboo shoot, banana, bitter gourd, clam, crab, grapefruit, lettuce, persimmon, salt, seaweed, star fruit, sugar cane, water chestnut, watermelon, lotus root, cucumber, barley, bean curd, chicken egg white, marjoram, oyster, pear, peppermint, radish, strawberry, tangerine, and yogurt, broccoli, cauliflower, zuccini, corn, tomatoes, pineapple, turmeric.

Neutral (balanced yin and yang) Foods: Honey, corn, abalone, apricot, beef, beetroot, black fungus, carp, carrot, celery, chicken egg yolk, cuttlefish, duck, fig, kidney bean, lotus fruit and seed, milk, olive, oyster, papaya, pork, potato, pumpkin, radish leaf, red bean, plum, sunflower seed, sweet rice, sweet potato, white fungus, yellow soybean, brussels sprouts, snow peas, sweet potato, taro, dates, figs, raspberries, raisins, sage, rosemary, thyme, brown rice, apple.

Heaty (yang) Foods: Pepper, cinnamon bark, ginger, soybean oil, red and green pepper, chicken, apricot seed, brown sugar, cherry, chestnut, chive, cinnamon twig, clove, coconut, coffee, coriander (Chinese parsley), date, dillseed, eel, garlic, grapefruit peel, green onion, guava, ham, leaf mustard, leek, longan, mutton, nutmeg, peach, raspberry, rosemary, shrimp, spearmint, sweet basil, tobacco, vinegar, walnut, jackfruit, durian, leek, shallots, spring onion, , apricots, blackberries, black currant, mangoes, peaches, cherry, mandarin orange, grape.

I liked your blog about raising multilingual children. We are an English family living here in Sao Paulo. I thought the issues you highlight about raising bilingual children here were spot on. When we arrived here, our twin boys, then aged 4, could already speak Portuguese albeit not fluently, because of the Brazilian nanny we had in the UK. We would like them to be fully bilingual. To this end, we speak English at home and they get Portuguese in the Brazilian school they are enrolled in. However, having changed schools twice in three years (ie we are now on our third), we have discovered that Brazilian schools (meaning Portuguese-speaking schools) do not cater for children whose maternal language is not Portuguese and maybe more importantly, whose culture is not Brazilian. To deal with this we have converted their bedroom into a classroom and got a bilingual private teacher, to help them transition to the Brazilian schooling system. We are toying with the idea of starting a school to help other families in our situation transition their children into Brazilian schools, so that the children get the maximum exposure to both languages.

Anyhow, it has all had its painful moments, but we are getting there.

Cheers,

Carol.