And this is what it’s all about, IMC has got a project called “Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” and this is some information from their press release:

Hunger and malnutrition kill more people in the world than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. As food prices rise, this funding is even more critical. More people are being driven deeper into poverty trying to afford basic staples. Many have nothing to eat at all.

For severely malnourished children, we offer a step-by-step treatment program that gives them what they need to recover, including nutrient-dense food supplements like the peanut-based product, Plumpy’Nut. Our comprehensive monitoring system saves more than 90 percent of children being treated in our feeding centers.

And this is where we come in, American Express has donated $1.5Million dollars to be given to an Aid Organisation. So if IMC wins the vote of the American Express card holders, they’ll receive this money. So if you’ve got an American Express credit card then you can decide where you’d like your financial institution to invest their money.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

Kara was suggesting to create my own .xml file and update this as I go (scary!!).

Michael mentioned podOmatic as an easy tool to create a podcast, which seemed easy enough but would have been a separate blog all together for me to look after.

The trusty google search for podcast tutorials brought me to a number of sites that were all pretty much saying the same thing: how easy it is and that I’ll just have to create my own .rss file … but this is the very thing I was trying to run from in the first place.

And then after all this I had to discover that wordpress has got a good article on podcating and that someone brilliant has written a wordpress plugin (PodPress) that allows me to podcast right here where I am with absolutely no effort on my part. Yippee!!

So I’m going to try it out right now and upload one of my Librivox projects.

I went to see her to confirm a pregnancy … our third, I might need to add. I know that this isn’t a very child friendly society, that lots of people think one or two children is plenty (should you bother to have any at all) and I am aware that some people even think you don’t know how not to fall pregnant if you still have more children after your second. Strange that it has never occurred to these people that some people would choose to have more children, because they like “large” families (not that I would call 3 or 4 children an incredibly large family).

My doctor isn’t really that type of person, or at least I wouldn’t have thought her this type of person, so maybe her reaction was more to the spacing of our children. I suppose they’re rather close in age for today’s liking, but we like it this way. Our first daughter was nearly 20 months, when our second daughter was born and our second daughter will be 20 months when this next little person comes into the world. Nothing wrong with that to me!

So more for my own benefit than anybody else’s I wanted to record our reasons for having more children and having them “so close”. Don’t feel you have to keep reading, it might get a bit boring now.

• I grew up with one sibling only (I’ve got an older brother) and I thought that as a child this was pretty boring. If my brother didn’t want to play with me there was no-one else to play with.
• My brother and I fought a lot and while this might be normal for siblings I think that it can be intensified by the fact that there’s no other distraction. We were always sitting on top of each other like this old nagging couple, with the difference that we hadn’t even chosen each other in the first place. I guess I’ve got this little theory that in larger families you can find another playmate and come back to the other one when the black clouds have cleared instead of worsening the tension by being in each others face.
• Most people who grew up with more siblings really loved it. Kids love being with other kids and to them it’s like a permanent sleep-over. I have never heard any of them say “I wish I’d have less siblings”.
• Similarly, when speaking to parents I’ve never heard any of them say “I wish I’d have less children” whereas I have often heard that people wished they’d had more. Many people stop after two cause it just seems like a practical thing to do, it might have been the normal thing at the time and it certainly seems just too hard at the time (to come back for more while there’s two little people in the house already).
• I know that I’m quite clucky, I love kids. Yet I could see myself easily stopping after two because I do find looking after two little ones incredibly hard work. And I don’t think I’d have more once those two are a bit older. As much as I love this stage, I think once moved on from here I wouldn’t like to come back to it. And then in 10 years time I’d be the one saying “I wish I’d have more children”. I do not want to have to regret.
• Therefore, while we’re already right in the whole baby and toddler stage, we though it’d be best to stay there for a little longer and then all move on together. Sure, we’re preparing ourselves for a few mad years but after that we’ll have the long-term enjoyment of a nice-size family … Well that’s the theory anyway

Actually I can only encourage you to go to Librivox and download the book for free (and totally legally). The lady who read the book, Kara Shallenberg, did such a good job that I even felt inspired possibly to start a weekly podcast, where I read a book … I’m reading a book for Librivox at the moment and I’m really enjoying reading out loud as well as the technical fiddling afterwards. What do you think?

Well anyway, I’m going off topic. We then wanted to watch the movie just to finish the whole thing off nicely and were really looking forward to it, since we’ve enjoyed the book so much. But we should have known better not to trust Hollywood to do justice to a book. I have to admit that it’d be a pretty tough task to condense a whole book into 102min and maybe they’ve done as well as is to be expected, but I was extremely disappointed. The film is missing the suspense of the book. Honestly, at its best it’s a poor summary of the book with even important bits changed and (I should have known it) a love story added into it. That was probably most off-putting. Why turn an innocent children’s book into some romance?

So any of you who don’t know the book yet: go read it. It is absolutely beautiful BUT do not watch the movie, it is a let-down.

I still like the idea of an Advent calendar. It helps to look forward to Christmas and gives all of December a festive and special atmosphere.

This week I went to the post office to pick up a huge parcel and found the most amazing Advent calendar ever inside (thank you Amelie and Christian*). Now we’re having fun trying to fill it with little things like baking ingredients (ginger for our gingerbread nativity), concert tickets, dried fruit, a bit of chocolate, little craft things etc. We’re having fun and M is circling the thing dying to be able to open the first door.

*der Richtigkeit halber soll natürlich Herr und Frau Treyde an dieser Stelle besonders gedankt sein!! Vielen Dank an sie für ihre Großzügikeit.