Oma is for grandma

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)

If you read my second-last post you might remember that I was thinking about starting a podcast. I’ve done a bit of research and at first it looked incredibly daunting.

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.

 

 Der kleine Häwelmann [8:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is the reaction I got from my GP (family doctor) when I went to see her a little while ago.

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

Michael and I have just finished listening to “The Secret Garden”. We absolutely loved it. The story was so enchanting, it made me laugh out loud as well as cry. And the reading was extremely well done.

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.

One thing that I used to always enjoy during the weeks of Advent was my Advent calendar (or count-down calender as some people call it). I can remember, as a child excitedly rushing into the kitchen first thing in the morning to open the next door on my calendar and see what was behind (and we only ever had pictures, no chocolate, and still it was such an exciting thing that made Advent very special to me).

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.