Jan-Feb Update

Greetings and Happy Way Belated New Year, dear reader. The people have spoken and they want an update. Ahh, my public! I haven't had much to blog about so I needed to wait until we did a bunch of stuff.

We had a good slide into the New Year, as the Germans say. My parents were with us for Christmas again for the third year in a row overseas. By the way, we recently hit our third anniversary of living abroad! It feels longer, like at least eight years. Feeling out of place and elated when I actually manage to communicate is my normal.

So, the folks...We had a very nice Christmas together this year. The boys were on cloud nine having a grandma and grandpa around to play with all day for two weeks. There was no snow, but it ended up being kind of nice to have a warmish Christmas so we could go outside.

Decorating cookies

Christmas morn

Doren got a Cabbage Patch baby

 "Isn't this book hilarious, Papa?!"

"Yeah, its a riot."

At a traditional German restaurant.

Muther and one of her famous Fairy Gardens made from stuff they found outside. She actually sewed the door out of pine needles!

Their first set of matching shirts from Grandma Carol

Wondering how the boys are doing in German school? Jonah's teachers tell me he understands a lot and even says certain things in German but honestly, all they really say at his school is "let's wash our hands" , "let's put on our coats" , etc. so I think he hears the same stuff everyday. He doesn't complain at all which is pretty amazing considering we're talking about Jonah. They make cute little projects with beads and string and everyday there is something different like a puppet show or an adventure walk. One thing I find funny is sometimes Marc will switch the words in a book to German and Jonah gets so mad and yells, "Stop speaking Johrman!" yet he goes around singing songs he learns at school all day long!

I'm happy to say that Tobin is doing great at school. He has coped amazingly well with first grade in German. I moved to a new school in the middle of second grade and I thought that was rough. I can't imagine how difficult it is to switch languages on top of that. He has his rough days, mostly just Mondays, but I truly did not expect it to go as well as it has. He couldn't speak a single word five months ago and now he can speak, recognize written words, do math and write in German. He's not fluent yet by any means, but he's taught me phrases I didn't know and I took German for three years! Both boys have the accent down and can say the difficult /r/ and umlaut letters. Its an amazing transformation to witness. The dream is coming true!

One of the things I love about both of their schools is that both have kitchens with ladies cooking real food from scratch. The smell is heavenly when I pick Jonah up. Oh, how I would love to dine with the preschoolers! Has anyone ever said that before?! Unfortunately, he can't eat lunch there because he's not full-time, but Toby is required to eat the lunch at his school (fine by me!) Everyday I ask him what he had and it always sounds healthy and amazing.

I can see a change, too, in Toby's development. For the first couple months of school he wanted me to walk him all the way to the building door. Then in November he asked me to stop at the corner of the school yard. Now I have to say goodbye at the very edge of the property where most kids get dropped off (but he still wants a kiss goodbye). Its really cute to see how he's growing up.

His face is going to change so much when the big front teeth come in.

At a local crazy kid place.

I've been trying my darndest to make some friends and it's getting a little better. No besties yet, but maybe someday. This Mom Dating thing is so hard because someone's kid is always sick - mine or theirs and always the morning of the day we're supposed to meet. I tried five times to get together with four different women and each time something prevented it. You wouldn't think it would be so difficult for two stay-home moms to get together, but it is. But I have met some really nice gals (American and German) so I'm feeling less lonely and isolated. Yay!

Marc has been taking a night class in German and we both keep up with a learning app. Sometimes I feel pretty good about it, especially when I'm able to speak with someone who doesn't speak any English (even though I know I'm butchering the language). I get a confidence boost and I think maybe, just maybe, I can learn this thing. And then other times, when someone is flapping their lips and I don't understand a single word, I realize just how much I don't know and feel like there is no way I can conquer this beastly language! Someone please tell me WHYYY there needs to be three definite articles?! THE! Just THE! It could be so simple!

Why is a baby neuter? I don't know and I don't care!

And this is the least of my troubles. The sentence structure, a gazillion expressions, four cases, and the Pfalzisch dialect on top of everything. It feels like an impossible feat, but we're trying. I know English has it's difficulties but there is even a phrase in German that translates to "You can speak German, you can speak a difficult language." The thing that keeps me going is I love the way it sounds and I want to be able to sound like that and have a normal conversation.


Last weekend we took advantage of the one sunny day forecasted between a bunch of rainy days to check out Bad Dürkheim, a town about 30 minutes from us. It's a mineral spring town right in the middle of the wine country. Wine and mineral baths? Hmm, OK! Next time we'll bring our bathing suits and hit up one of the indoor pools. I had no idea there was such a wonderful, beautiful town and so close.

The entire front of the house is tile. It was really pretty.

This structure stretches along for several hundred feet. Water is trickling down the dark brown part which are tightly packed sticks. It's something to do with filtering the spring water.

Find the Toby

Of course we ended up at a playground. There was pipe organ music coming from the church so I went in to listen to it booming. And this is all set against a lovely view of the hills. Sighhhh 

The next day, a rainy one, we checked out a science museum called Dynamikum. It was full of really well done, hands-on sciency stuff for people of all ages.

The best part, obvs.

Trying their hardest to lift us up. SCIENCE!

SCIENCE?!

If you pedal fast the bottom fills up with air and they can push it around. SCIENCE!

This past Monday was a holiday from school for Rosenmontag and Tuesday was Fasching...or Carnival or Mardi Gras. It's a really big deal here and the main day for kids to dress up (way more than Halloween).

His Army man costume was a big hit.

Aaaaaand this is what I'm dealing with every day. It reminds me of something Buzz Lightyear said. "He has the destructive capacity to annihilate an entire planet!" Or house in this case.

Did I do that?

This child embodies all your typical toddler features that his brothers never did, so its kind of new for me. For example, maybe I'm cutting up grapes for him. I turn around to see him standing on the kitchen table licking the salt shaker, so I get him down and lay all the chairs down (pictured). While I'm doing this he has pulled the knife off the counter top that I left too close to the edge when I went to get him off the table, so I lunge to grab that out of his hand 'fore he stabs himself. When that is taken care of I turn around to find him sprinkling milk from his sippy cup all over the pile of books he deshelved five minutes ago, so I grab the roll of paper towels to clean that up. Since I'm down here I might as well sweep up the mountain of crumbs he left from breakfast. As I'm sweeping I see him coloring his face and the walls with a stray marker he found under the couch so I run over to take that from him only to see that he's now dancing in the neat pile of crumbs I just swept and was about to throw out. So I brush off his feet and continue sweeping before it gets worse but now he's pushing the temperature buttons on the freezer. I let that one go. I finish the sweeping and look to see that he has unraveled about fifteen feet of the paper towel I left on the floor. There is still marker on the wall, crumbs on the floor, milk on the books and the freezer is starting to defrost but he's screaming and throwing a tantrum for the grapes I never finished cutting. And he just filled up his diaper so bad that he needs a whole new outfit. Again, with the face...

Why, Doren? Why?!

I can't keep up because I don't have eight arms and three sets of eyes. Sorry! This is why it takes me a full month to write a single blog post let alone anything more important I would like to accomplish.

You have no idea what I'm capable of and I'm just getting started.

I leave you with my favorite latest find - sugar beet syrup. They grow all over the place here which makes this is a local vegetable. I put this vegetable on cereal, oatmeal, yogurt, and toast. I would send you some but there is that no liquids rule.

IT'S A VEGETABLE!!!

Berlin Trip

Last weekend we boarded a train for Berlin. It just screams, "Visit me in Autumn!", doesn't it? My favorite time of year! I was in Berlin for only one day about fifteen years ago and we've been anxious to get to Germany's big city since we moved here. We like/love cities, but Marc's last two jobs have taken us to small towns, so we need our occasional city-fix! Unfortunately, our trip got off to kind of a rocky start. We loaded the boys, our bag and big stroller onto the train and settled into our seats. Ah! How delightful! Aren't we clever! But when the ticket guy came around he told us we were in the wrong place and our actual seats were ten cars back. Oopsies. Rule #1 in Germany: Follow the rules and do not make mistakes. Because next, I had the lovely task (while carrying sleeping Doren in the Ergo) of pushing our huge jogging stroller through the narrow aisles of ten long train cars saying my best "excuse-me-pardon-me's" in German every two steps because someone's leg or bag was sticking out just a tad and I needed all the room I could get to fit that thing down the aisle. Let me tell you that inconveniencing ten train cars full of Berlin-bound Germans made me feel like a wad of gum under their shoes. I could feel their scorn burning a hole in my forehead! "WE followed the rules and are comfortable in our seats, reading our papers and sipping our tea and giggling about how clever we are! Who is this disheveled, obviously foreign mother, schlepping a baby and gigantic child-wagon through the aisle forcing me to shift my knee three milimeters to the left?! What an imbecile!"

Believe me, that is what they were thinking.*

The ride was pleasant enough, youngest child considered, but then in all the kerfuffle of getting off the train, I lost Doren's adorable navy blue pea coat that his brothers also wore. [lips trembling] So we found a second-hand store and nine Euros later I walked out with this puffball.

UH! He's so adorable! And he's 100% walking now, but sort of stumbles around like he's had a few too many.

Now he's flirting with me. 

Now he's spotted something more fun than me. Bye.

We stayed in an airbnb apartment in a really cool part of town. Tons of ethnic restaurants, boutiques, modern houseware stores, expensive stuff that I would never buy but like to look at, etc. Definitely my kind of place. It reminded us a lot of Portland, only on a much bigger scale and with ninety-nine percent less homeless people. My friend, E, asked me if we went to various must-see sites around the city. [PeeWee Herman laugh for two straight minutes] Um, no. No we did not. Do you think we can do any of those things when around every corner there is yet another incredible playground?! Basically, we go to a city with a list of all sorts of places we'd like to see but what ends up happening is us sitting on the edge of sandboxes while the boys burn energy at fifteen different playgrounds. But I do have to say the playgrounds are really amazing. My other friend, S, commented on how nice it is that they're all made of wood rather than metal or plastic. They do sort of look like they just grew out of the ground. I didn't take pictures of the really natural-looking ones, but here's some anyway.

Ok, there is some metal. I wouldn't want to slide down a wooden plank!

This was on a hill above one of the playgrounds. Gorgeous!

I'm pretty sure there is a Kindergarten on the first floor of this!

 I enjoyed many deep breaths of crispy Fall air.

Here's Doren sharing the swing with a little Spanish señorita. It was fun until it wasn't.

Ahh, this. Can you see me in there? Its some sort of play structure but it looks exactly like a hammock and it was the best part of any of the playgrounds. 

The natives were all out in their Fall finest. A lot of tweed and leather. And a lot of beards. Is this happening everywhere or just in Europe? We noticed this is Copenhagen, too. So many men with huge beards and man buns. Even the kids were so hip and fashionable in their little outfits. Not MY kids, obviously...other kids..

We did broaden our site-seeing on one of the days and went to a few iconic Berlin sites. Ahem...on the way there, we rushed to the metro station and without thinking jumped onto our train because it pulled in just as we arrived. We didn't even think about tickets because there was no turn style thingy or gate. Naturally, naturally, a ticket agent climbed aboard at the very next stop asking to see everyone's ticket. Oopsiedoodles. Here we go again. So they escorted us off at the next stop and wrote our tickets and fine. One of the agents made some comment about only the adults being fined and not the children because adults should know better. Ouch. Obviously we deserved this but I swear we're not rookies! We're just having a bad streak!

Brandenburg Gate 

Reichstag

Same place but looks different in this light

Doren was really into the street scene.

I don't even know what this is but its famous. 

Some other pretty place. We had to stop because the boys wanted to run on the lawn.

In our cozy rental

Berlin is such a beautiful city with so much diversity that makes it really dynamic and fascinating. I heard many different languages being spoken as we walked around and I realized I haven't experienced that in a very long time since there wasn't much diversity in Korea. And since we live in a small town, there aren't many options for eating anything other than German food or really bad, salty Thai. We ended up going to this Vietnamese place twice because it was so, so good, cheap and fast. You can get anything! That's what's so great about cities!

And finally, my art piece...

JFK once gave a speech in Berlin and said, "Ich bin ein Berliner." He meant to say that he was like them...a Berliner, but what he actually said was, "I am a jelly donut!" So here's me eating a Berliner in Berlin and being ironic or artistic or something.

Bis später, alligator!

*But no, Germans are extremely nice. I'm amazed on a daily basis at how nice everyone is. But, seriously just follow the rules, ok? You can do that, right? How hard is it, McFly? EARTH TO McFLY! Just follow the rules! Just. Follow. The. Rules.

German School

School started! And so their journey toward bilingualism! Hopefully all the German kid shows I let them watch this summer will pay off. I freely admit this is my wish for them. Marc doesn't really care either way and Toby would definitely rather go to an American school. But I'm pulling a Mommy-knows-best and hoping that they'll thank us later for giving them this opportunity, assuming it works out. If I know Tobin, and I do, this is going to be one bumpy ride. I assure you his attitude on the tough days will be far more painful for ME than having to learn German is for him. He gets to just sit there and absorb it like a sponge.

Delivering the school supplies on Monday, the day before school starts. I love the sign: "FUN"

The teacher gave us a long list of the very specific stuff he needs: certain types of notepads, #6, 8 and 12 paintbrushes, three-sided ergonomic colored pencils, etc. You can find it all yourself or give the list to a bookstore and they will order it for you. Then we delivered it and put it all in the classroom the day before school started.

"This is where you hang your coat and backpack."

Proud that his classroom is on the top floor!

Schultüte time! Normally these are just for first graders but we have to keep things Even-Steven around here for Jonah. Doren's like, "I don't even want a cone!"

Its a good thing our former landlady, Maria, helped me out with all this school business because I had no idea what a big deal the Schultüte (school bag) is in Germany. Starting first grade is a major event in a German child's life, kind of like starting Kindergarten in the US. All the moms, dads, and grandparents come out for the first day and every kid gets one of these cones filled with school supplies and treats. Its closed at the top and then the child gets to open it after the first day of school like a present. Some kids had really elaborate homemade cones and I can't tell you how many times I heard the word Schultüte that day. All the moms were frantic about where it was, who's holding it, don't put it on the ground, make sure little Dieter is holding it in every picture, and carrying it around like a baby. The cones!

Then on Tuesday morning, we and all the other families went to...Mass! Yep. Its a public school but the school year starts with a Catholic Mass. We've been wanting to take a look inside this church anyway so this was a fun way to see it. 

Off to church! The bells were bonging especially for this event. There are only three houses between ours and this church so it was a short walk.

Its a cute church. Not too big or too small, but standing room only with all the families there. I'm not sure what you call a female priest in the Catholic church (priestess? or nuns?) but there were two of them and a musical duo. They told some inspirational stories and we sang some songs about God blessing the teachers, the students and the school year. It was very sweet.

Then everyone made their way to the school gym to hear the Principal's welcome speech.

Each first grade teacher called their students to the front. Tobin on the right! There are a lot of Maximillians, Leons (pronounced LAY-on), Mias and Lilis.

Tobin's teacher is Frau Schöne which means Mrs. Pretty/Beautiful/Nice and she is exactly that! As soon as I met her I knew she was going to be just what he needs. She's soft-spoken, a little shy and her English is only slightly better than my German, which isn't saying much, but that means he'll have to learn quickly. I told her my concerns and she could not have been sweeter or more reassuring that she would take care of him and he would be fine. I am so grateful that out of all the teachers, Tobin got HER. He told me that she tells the class what to do in German and then tells him in English. She told me that she will only do that for the first few weeks. HoHoHo! I wonder if he'll notice.

Yay! Mrs. Pretty Nice

And there he is! I guess we're really doing this. I didn't cry. I'm too concerned about him coping with this to have any time for tears.

And on Wednesday...

Jonah had his first day at German Kindergarten which is more or less the same as American preschool. Originally, Maria helped me call around to the local schools to see if anyone had space for Jonah. None of the local schools did except one in a town ten minutes from here. Then a few weeks ago I got a call from one of the two Kindergartens in our village! There is the local community Kindergarten and right next to that is another Catholic Kindergarten, which is the one that called back. Honestly, I don't see a difference between this one and the non-Catholic one because there doesn't seem to be anything religious about it. I don't get it. Anyway, I was really thrilled he got a spot because 1) a lot of Americans have trouble getting a spot in Kindergartens, and 2) its barely two blocks from our house! and 3) its free to us even though we don't pay German taxes. There is some community fund that pays the school and teachers. Pretty nice!

Jonah in the Giraffe group

Jonah had to bring house shoes to wear at the school, sunscreen, a rain outfit, and a big package of tissues. He'll go five days per week for four hours. We only stayed for one hour on the first day because they like to be gradual with the kids. He was totally fine though. He even said he understood when Simon asked him to play upstairs.
 

It was one little girl's birthday so they celebrated by singing some cute songs and eating cereal with fruit in REAL bowls. I thought that was pretty interesting. Then one of the teachers washed the dishes while we went outside to play.

The timing of this move worked out so well, arriving at the beginning of summer with plenty of time to figure all this out. Our household goods came a few weeks ago so we finished putting everything away in the nick of time before school started. It was so nice this summer being able to get up whenever the kids woke me up and do whatever we felt like doing each day. Now I'm adjusting to waking up before the kids (oh, misery!) and hustling everyone out the door. The other challenge, being a foreigner, is that I don't really know what's going on at their schools...like, I didn't know that Tobin is required to buy lunch at the school. I didn't even know they offered this! So we got a letter in the mail (homework for me) saying that we need to pay for this. I don't know what I don't know and I can't speak German well enough to read all the signs and bulletins with information. Somehow I need to stay on the ball so my kids aren't the only ones who show up at school without something they're supposed to have. I don't want to be the clueless mom!

Wait, its picture day? As if!

That's all for now! Hopefully I can report back with some language learning by Christmas...if Tobin doesn't kill me before then.