This is us - The Achour Family and founders of Pherean

It's the mix that matters

It is no surprise that if an American and Algerian meet in an Israeli restaurant, something special has to happened. Yes, Anne could have taken the global political situation under consideration, while choosing the restaurant. Thankfully, Réda couldn't have cared less. Not long after this fateful encounter we were blessed with our daughter Phéline in 2017. She is the inspiration for our bubbly bibsi-book.

With our multicultural background, we faced the challenge in raising our daughter multilingual. Just like many families: according to fmks.eu two thirds of the people worldwide grow up multilingual. For us that means: German, English, French and Arabic. In their early life, children learn languages very easily. That is no problem for them. The challenge is to be consequent yourself as a parent and to stick to your mother tongue. But also we did not find the right tools to support us.

Making a virtue of necessity

We decided to start with three languages with three distinct contact persons: Anne speaks English ("Mommy language") and Réda parlés French ("Daddy language"). German is our family language, because Anne's French is - how can you put it nicely? - non-existent. After a few glasses of Wine she gets better, but that is definitely not an everyday option. Ok, so we divided up the languages. Finding the right tools, turned out to be a lot more complicated, if not to say impossible. So: the idea was born! Sort of like a second baby, born in August 2019. We launched bubbyl bibsi in fall 2020.

Where do the inspirations come from?

Everything you see in the book is real and authentic. The objects are everyday things in our life:

Phéline's favorite animal (and favorite food) in the zoo, Mommy's key chain, our car (aka "Bibsi Mobile"), Daddy's new bicycle. Grandpa is a professional horn player, Grammy plays the guitar. A good friend works for the green busses. The photographed sand we brought home from the Algerian Sahara. And the picture of the gravel path was taken in the grandparent's garden. The street car is from Nuremberg, our home town... We could just go on and on like this, there is a story to every object in the book. Don't let us get started...