Oma is for grandma

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)

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!

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!!!!