Oma is for grandma

We’ve been here for three weeks now and things are still pretty crazy, but everyday is different and so we’ve got days where things are just too much and other days where we’re coping pretty well.

For the first time since getting here little M has not needed any attention during the night and has woken up at his normal time of 7am (rather than 5.45am, which is what he’s been doing so far) … so today is a pretty good day and I’m coping really well.

We’re starting to find our way around this big city although sometimes I’m still contemplating putting on a fake accent and speaking with really poor German … people might just be a little more understanding. Somehow there’s just no category for people like me and I must seem incredibly weird to everybody around. I just feel plain stupid half of the time. I look German, I speak perfect (or nearly perfect) German, I am German but somehow I just don’t know how any of this works.

• I don’t know which way to look when crossing the road, and that wasn’t exactly helped by the fact that in our little shopping street people drive all sides of the road anyway.
• I’ve got way too many children for the average German.
• When looking for money in my wallet I just never know what the different coins look like (the Euro was introduced after I left Germany) and I take ages completing a simple procedure like paying someone in cash.

But I’ve also learned a lot about things I’ve never had to do, not in Germany or Australia:

• I know how to choose and join the right health insurer.
• I learned how to find a good home and contents insurance and complete the form
• I now know how to apply for child assistance money
• We found a good phone and internet deal.
• I learned about the differences between energy providers and how to choose the right one for us
• and we learned what to look out for in a rental contract and how to go about finding the right unit for us.

So, all things considered we’ve been doing amazingly well although in amongst all of this the children have also learned that negative attention is more desirable than no attention at all.

But with Michael in his second week of work I’m finding my own rhythm and things are certainly slowing down to some degree so realistically life can only improve. And people have been telling us that the children are beautifully behaved so things mustn’t be all that grim after all (given that everybody is being honest here).

Hold that thought … I’m considering changing my mind. Little M has just been woke AGAIN by the flush of the toilet in the unit above. The toilets are so loud that every time someone needs to go he wakes up (doesn’t exactly make for a happy life and easy settling in) even the girls for the first few days after getting here would evacuate the toilet in a great panic when we needed to flush.

Now wasn’t there a slogan in the depression to help people safe water: “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down”. In our case it wouldn’t just safe water but also my sanity.

I would have never thought that we get this far.

The last year has most certainly been the most stressful, adventurous, eventful and exciting time of my life. Right now I’m feeling exhausted but also thrilled to my finger tips.

In the first half of 2007 Michael took part in a professional development program and had to create quite an enormous portfolio of his work as a teacher, he also started a new job (alongside his existing one) and we had our third child born (with the first not even 3.5 years old). That has certainly been a push getting through but we managed and then just as things were calming down and little M started sleeping through the night, Michael got a job offer in Germany and we started to pack up.

From the day Michael got the offer to when we left our house in the Blue Mountains it was only 7 weeks and then we had another 7 weeks living in Sydney with Michael’s parents (thank you L&D for taking us in, looking after us and making all this possible for us!!). And now over 800 ticked to-do items and 36 hours of airports and planes later we’re here.

So let me tell you about the herculean effort of flying with three children under 5 from Australia to Germany as well.

Leaving Sydney our plane had a 3.5 hour delay, which meant the kids were tired and hungry getting onto the plane already. But they enjoyed their first meal on the plane and actually slept a little afterwards. Though big M felt motion sick with the changing air pressure, middle E couldn’t quite get comfortable with her head flopping forward all the time and little M cried and slept intermittently.

We arrived at Singapore feeling hopeful. Here we had to totally empty the plane for another security check, which meant that we had to wake little M, who’d only just managed to get back to sleep during landing, take the girls, our five pieces of hand luggage and the two car seats, that the children were sitting on of the plane and make our way through the customs check. Luckily a very nice Singaporean officer spotted us and helped us carry our stuff and got us to the top of the line (we had to learn to accept help very quickly on this trip). An hour-and-a-half later we were back on the plane but little M was desperately hungry and tired by now. I had to strap him into his chair for lift-off only to have him scream like I have not heard him before. Sitting right next to him that was too much to bear and so the two of us had a good cry together. In the end we defied all safety regulations and I breastfed the little guy during lift-off for the mental and emotional safety of myself and the other passengers on board.

Luckily I took my GP’s advise and had a mild sedative just for this sort of scenario so I gave the little boy a dose of that and he managed to sleep a few hours peacefully. The rest of the flight to London went pretty well all things considered. The girls made good use of the in-flight entertainment and little M was happy to coo at other passengers, when they weren’t sleeping.

By the time we arrived in London we had missed our connecting flight from London to Berlin and had no idea where to go. We had to change terminals by bus all the while carrying the five suitcases of hand luggage, the two car seats and little M with just our four hands. Not having a hand free to hold E’s hand she was a little like a sheep who had us running around the back of her pushing her in the right direction and us rounding her up like a sheep dog.

Having made it to the right terminal Michael found us a few seats to sit, while he went to find out where we should go for a connecting flight. Not knowing where he was off to or how long he’d be I tried to make the most of waiting around with the children while Michael had to wait in a cue for 45 minutes only to be told that he can make a run for the next plane but they certainly would not be waiting for us. After that we were just like two totally ridiculous looking chooks without heads. Michael raced ahead to try and stop the plane pulling, pushing, carrying four of the hand luggages stopping every ten metres to change hands. And I followed having little M in a sling and carrying one car seat in each hand the girls straddling behind me, big M pulling her trolley and E dreaming and singing away. We had to run like this for over a kilometre through Heathrow Airport with not a single baggage trolley in sight. But we did make it to our gate just as they were boarding the plane.

We felt so indescribably relieved to be sitting on this plane, the last one we were to catch for a while, only to realise that our luggage probably won’t have made it onto this plane. It was to take us another couple of days before all of us would have their clothes. But we’ve been managing really well. We were welcomed by my family ready to help out in any way they possibly could. And so we were driven to our furnished unit (which is to be our home for the next 4 weeks) and fed with a hot meal.

Currently we are counting day 3 of our German adventure and we have been incredibly busy and productive already. We have registered with the local authorities, applied for a new ID-card, did an emergency shopping trip to IKEA, signed Michael’s work contract, made an appointment with the aliens office, went exploring the nearby Schlosspark and did multiple trips to any of the various supermarkets in walking distance of our unit. The other morning Michael (and little M) were seen like this dashing out quickly to get some cereal for breakfast … it’s quite nice to be living right in the city. Though I might still change my mind about that one so stay posted for more about our German adventure.

You might have noticed that I’ve been absent from this space for quite some time now. Well here’s the beautiful reason why:

So, visiting the internet or paying my computer any attention whatsoever has dropped right of my list of priorities (and things are probably going to stay that way for a while to come).

Right now I’ve got 3 wonderful reasons why I’ll stay away and they are 3, one-and-a-half and 2 weeks old.

Don’t we all love to be agreed with? Well, I do!

I love it when I read something in the papers that I can agree with or that supports my point of view (so much about forming an unbiased opinion with the help of the media … hahaha)

I read an article in the SMH the other day by Wendy Harmer. And here is someone that agrees with me. I have found another example for a person who’s regretted not having more children like I explained in my previous post “you’re kidding!”.

I find it terribly refreshing to read the following words in today’s world where children aren’t valued and people look at you strangely when you keep going after two:

I had two children late in life and I regret I didn’t have four. My children regret it, too. They look at photos of me and my three siblings and love to fantasise about what it would have been like to have two more live-in playmates, just as I look back at photos of my father’s seven brothers and sisters and like to imagine.

After explaining how many people stopped after two children to support the ideal of “zero population growth” in order to make the world more sustainable, she concludes her article by saying:

So by all means let’s make our cities environmentally sustainable, but not at the expense of family size. We need to encourage the next generation to have more children than we do now, and to have them earlier.

Otherwise parents will have to play with their kids - and no one wants to be crawling into a cubby house with 50-year-old knees.

Believe me, I know.

Coming from a comedian the article was laced with humour. I have found it such an enjoyable and refreshing read … but maybe that’s because she backs my cause?!

Go and read it here if you’re interested!

M is starting preschool this year and yes she is very, very excited (and so are we). Nearly daily she checks the calender to see how long to go. For a few weeks now her school backpack has been one of her favourite toys. She’d frequently put it on and say “Mama, ich gehe zur Schule. Du kannst mich abholen! Tschüß!” (Mummy, I need to go to school now. You can come and pick me up when I’m finished. Bye!). She’ll trot off to the other end of the house, where her imaginary preschool is and there she’ll welcome all her imaginary friends “Hello, all my friends!”.

Unfortunately, many children her age are missing out because their parents can’t afford to send them. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) New South Wales (NSW) has got the lowest preschool attendance rate and the highest fees.

In Western Australia preschool is free, and in other states the cost is a fraction of the NSW charge of about $30 a day. A Productivity Commission report this year found NSW spends less than any other state on children’s services and has the lowest preschool attendance rate.

Kerry Grigg, a rural spokeswoman for Children’s Choice, said a preschool in Albury will charge $28.25 a day a next year while over the border in Wodonga the cost will be about $8.75 a day. A further inequity is the historic division in NSW between the community preschools funded by the Department of Community Services and about 100 preschools funded by the Department of Education. An Education Department preschool in Albury charges about $2 a day.

I couldn’t believe it when I read this. Unfortunately, there’s only 100 Department of Education preschools in NSW in comparison to 800 community preschools, who have to fight for their share in a tiny budget allocated to them.

The sad truth is that this non-attendance of preschool disadvantages children at school as a further SMH article describes.

Bert Oldfield Primary School, in Seven Hills, said many parents were unable to afford fees for preschool and their children had fallen behind as a result.

“Their literacy experiences in particular are very limited, which puts them behind some of their peers and certainly behind the state,” the school’s response said.

The article also states that children who didn’t attend preschool

were more likely to display social and emotional problems, difficulties with fine motor skills and lower academic standards. “Generally, the children who start school at Rouse Hill without preschool experience come with little or no sight words,” the school said.

The article finishes off by reporting on a mum who is prepared to spend $65 a day to send her son to preschool in a suburb of Sydney.

That was too much for me bear. At this point I have to agree with John Marsden, an Australian author and school founder, who said in a recent TV show that Michael and I watched that

Education is really struggling. It’s a funny thing that in Australia we claim that we value young people, we talk very beautifully about that, but we show our contempt for them by the amount of money we allocate to education, for example, by the way we structure schools. There is evidence everywhere we look, at just how little we value children. And so we talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. (emphasis not mine)