Oma is for grandma

What does a two-year-old do in the kitchen with a raincoat on, on top of a chair in front of the sink?

Easy … her daily Maths lesson!!

While I do the dishes M occupies the sink next to me (and there I was wondering what huge double sinks were good for) and pours water from one cup into the next into the jug into a pot back into the jug and counts how many of what fit into what. She and the floor, and I too sometimes, get thoroughly wet but she’s having fun and is learning too.

I remember reading in one of my baby/toddler books that it’s imortant for a child’s early mathematical thinking to be doing this sort of thing (pouring that is … but flooding the kitchen is probably part of the deal) and I can see why that is true. While it might just look like she’s playing, having fun and making a huge mess, she’s learning about size, volume, qualities of liquids and probably a lot more and I get my dishes done. How easy is that!

As you might have noticed I changed the image of my previous post.

I really liked the picture that was there before, cause it was a perfect example of some clothing I found absolutely inappropriate for a toddler. However, my dear husband has alerted me to the fact that I was breaching copyright by using their image and than bagging out their clothes.

So here’s a new image of an absolute adorable little pair of overalls that I bought myself a sewing pattern for. This is what I call “toddler-clothing” … the little girl actually looks like a child and not a miniature teenager including attitude and all.

Those of you who know me, will probably wonder and shake your heads about a fashion statement coming from someone like me. To say the least, I’m not fashion conscious at all. So what would I, who doesn’t understand a bit about modern clothing, have to say about fashion.

Recently I was confronted with the grim reality of having to start making decisions about what my daughter (my eldest daugher, M, that is, as E gets all her hand-me-downs) is to wear. Until now we’ve been awfully blessed with tones of hand-me-downs for her. And while they weren’t always the clothes I would have chosen, they were perfectly functioning and free clothes. But unfortunately she must have caught up in size to the little girl the clothes used to come from. Now it’s up to me to decide what my daughter is to wear.

So I set off to go shopping for my 2.5 year old only to find that the style of clothes available is more “2 going on 16″. I was walking through the aisles of the shops and just didn’t know what to buy with a permanent question pounding in my head: why can’t a two-year-old be dressed like a two-year-old??? Why do we have to dress them up like teenagers. I have to admit that the clothes were rather cute but why turn children into miniature grown-ups?

All I wanted were some basic clothes that would dress my daughter decently. Yet, even plain t-shirts were turned into some statement, that I personally find totally inappropriate, with slogans on them like “charming”, “baby doll” or “ocean angle”. Why put labels on our children and give them teenage attitudes when they’re just little kids who want to play? I seriously think that the way children are dressed changes the way that we treat them or think about them.

When we got given a beautiful toddler-style pair of overalls recently (with a big bottom and lots of room to move in) I realised how little she actually still is and that I often forget about that because the clothes make her look a lot older.

Therefore when shopping, I bought one style shirt in two different colours and then in protest went to the boys section and bought a “Thomas the tank engine”-overall and t-shirt set (M was very excited about that one). And then I decided that I might just have to start making her clothes.

Sewing mashine here I come!

I’m still frustrated, worried and slightly down about the difficulties involved in raising bilingual children but I can see a little light. Not that I’ve found the answer to all my worries or a sure way of solving them but I’ve found someone else who is taking part in the same struggle and that’s very exciting.

I met Anna!!! She lives just one suburb away from me and is also trying to raise her daughter bilingually.

So we’ve decided to start some sort of German-speaking playgroup in the Blue Mountains (Deutsche Krabbelgruppe, deutsch-sprachige Muttergruppe, zweisprachige Spielgruppe or German mothersgroup … whatever you want to call it). At the moment it’s only the two of us and our three children (two of which are too young to talk) but we’re hoping to find more parents who are on the same journey and want to join us.

BTW if this is you PLEASE leave a coment or write an email!!!!

It’s been an awfully long time since I last sat down to write something or since I last looked at my blog. Not too sure … maybe this thing isn’t really for me though I like the idea of reflecting on things that are happening or that I’m thinking about. And I think it’ll be wonderful to reread and relive my current experiences in a few years time or maybe when the girls are grown-up (scary thought!).

Regarding the language situation at the home front I’m finding myself struggeling in vain to hold back the floodgates. I’ve been trying so hard over the last 2 1/2 years to create a bit of Germany inside our house. This probably sounds ridiculous. What I mean is that I’ve been trying to present a German-language environment to the cildren at home and compensate as much as possible for the flood of English that comes streaming into their lives.

This has worked pretty well as long as Michael was speaking German as well but around 6 months ago that just wasn’t possible anymore as Mim’s life has gotten more complex than what Michael was able to express in German. But it seems that that tipped the scales and English is taking over now.

Mim is talking more and more English increasingly at the expense of her German. She’ll talk to herself in English and unfortunately she’ll also talk to E in English and what hurts me the most is that she’ll talk to me in English the majority of times. I try to just say “Kannst du das auf Deutsch sagen?” (Can you say that in German?) and she’ll repeat it in German, but I fell if I don’t keep doing that she’ll loose her ability to express herself in German really quickly. It just is so tiring and frustrating, she must feel like I’m forever criticising her.

As if raising children in itself isn’t demanding enough: teaching them about themselfes, about the world around them, skills, manners, discipline … well no, I’m also on her back about this language thing. I feel like crying at times. I feel like I’m loosing this battle. How can one single person substitute an entire society?

Whenever I feel this way I want to buy more resources for the children to make myself feel better and hope that more books, CDs and DVDs will back me up and enforce German in our house. But that’s just where I get even more depressed about this whole thing because it is just unaffordable. Having to buy every single piece of German language that I want to expose the children to is just impossible which means that they’ll always only ever have a few books which will further weaken my hopeless attempts to keep their German equally strong as their English.

I know giving up is not an option, but I do feel increasingly that it would just be the easiest and most pleasant thing for all of us (in the short term at least).