Wed 13 Feb 2008
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.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:09 am
If you would care to share some names for contents insurers, I’d be very interested. That’s one “to be done” I haven’t handled yet.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:25 am
I’ll send you details via email but test.de is always good for things like that.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I just discovered your new entry, great!!
April 5th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Herzlich wilkomen in Deutschland!
Ich bin froh für dich, das dein kinder Deautschland sehen kanst!
September 26th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I enjoy your blog and would like to offer you a few thoughts on bilingual children.
I am English and was married to a Frenchwoman. It didn’t work out in the end, but it was OK for 22 years which I suppose isn’t bad by present-day standards.
We lived in England and had three children. It had been agreed that boys would have English names and girls would have French ones so there was a boy, Alexander, and twin girls Nathalie and Chantal. But Alexander we called Sacha from the beginning (the French got this from the Russians) and at fifteen he decided he wanted to change to it officially; we had no reason to object although it meant all our children had French names.
We had great plans to bring them up to be bilingual but this didn’t work at all. Since my wife’s English was better than my French we generally spoke English at home and very quickly the children worked out that it was silly to speak French to Mummy when she spoke English with Daddy, and they spoke it at school and with all their friends. But we took them to France often, they had to communicate with their French cousins so the result, now that they are in their forties, is that they all speak excellent French although they consider English to be their mother tongue.
They could not pass for native Francophones but so what? I have met allegedly bilingual people who do not speak either language quite perfectly and this strikes me as sad.
One of my daughters lives in Spain and her daughter, at six, really is completely and happily bilingual in Spanish and English; she hears practically no English except from her mother, who is a single parent.
So these things generally work out in time; it doesn’t do to worry about them.
When we spoke English to our children they called me Daddy and in French I was Papa. Over the years it was telescoped to Daddypa, then Dadpa, and now it is Dpa, which I rather like,
September 28th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Thank you for visiting, Tony. I wouldn’t have thougth that anybody still reads this after months of silence on my part. The move and settling in has just taken a huge amount of time and energy so this blog has been quite neglected.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I always love to hear what other families have done and how it worked out.
I’m really happy with our decision to expose our children to German language and culture by moving here and so far it’s worked out marvellously as the kids really happily and confidently speak both languages.