Little Kids Think I'm Dumb

My fella has one niece and three nephews, all pre-teen and incredibly bright funny young people. They all call him Tonton, which is some kind of french slang for uncle. As the family back home is on the traditional side, I was slowly introduced to the kids as Tonton's fiance, rather than trampy live-in girlfriend, so as to side step any pesky questions about why Tonton's lady-friend is always having sleep overs with him, and does she have her own bed. You get the idea. Plus there's the fact that I don't speak much Arabic, or any french, and they don't speak much English yet.
When we Skype with the kids, I usually just lurk quietly in the shadows, trying to pick up what the discussion of the day is with my limited vocabulary. Last time I was awarded a full access pass to talking and, essentially, meeting the kids. They asked questions in perfect French, and Tonton answered. Eventually I was persuaded to speak. Now, the first words and phrases I learned in Arabic were better suited to the men's room of a very dirty bar than Saturday Morning cartoons. But I pieced together what I thought was a pretty impressive, albeit simple phrase; Would you like to eat some watermelon? Here we have small watermelons, as big as your head.

They laughed their cute little ass off at me. Which is fine, because I'm sure it's hilarious to hear a grown ass woman speak like a retarded 5-year-old. I guess I'd made an error in conjugation, and used the masculine version of the verb eat. Whatever. That's not the worst part. I'm used to being made the object of fun, and making children genuinely laugh is always a great thing. The worst part was when Yasmine, the oldest, then asked me, in perfect English, to "say the watermelon sentence again, please".
So, the way I figure it, these kids are fluent in two languages, and functional in a third. Seriously. I think her English is better than my Spanish. For this, of course, I blame the U.S. public school system, which gave me four years of Spanish but never required me to actually learn a second language. It's the U.S. public school system's fault that I can barely string together more than a few paltry sentences in any other language, while these kids are being raised tri-lingual. And in two different alphabets!

But these kids don't know about the U.S. public school system, and my Arabic isn't good enough yet to explain it to them. So, for now, they just think I'm stupid. Funny, but stupid. I was really hoping it would take them longer to figure that out.