Alas. Recently J has started to default more to L1 words when speaking L2, even rather basic ones like "money" for Geld (two instances of this in the last two days). My wife has also said she has started to notice small discrepancies and divergences in his comparative fluency.
All completely inevitable, but still kind of hard for me to take.
In better news: As his reading skills improve, J has been doing a lot more independent looking-reading through books. Usually he spends most of his time with his L1 books. Since he gets pushed in kindergarten with his L1 reading, I deliberately haven't been making him do extra L2 reading to boot after school, since he is after all a child and he needs to have unstructured time. However, he is now starting to spend more time with his German books. When we read together in L2 and I point out words, phrases, and sentences, he usually can read them quite well.
Moving forward, my basic L2 goals with J continue to be:
1) Keep his L2 grammar and syntax healthy and not allow L1 patterns to intrude and fossilize.
2) Keep slowly and steadily building his L2 vocabulary.
3) Maintain his L2 accent.
4) Foster his independent L2 reading, such that he can read close to as easily in L2 as in L1.
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