Ex Patria

Tuesday kid photo blogging

It's our anniversary.  The husband is far away in Tbilisi, Georgia.   So here are (for him, mostly) a few pictures of the two younger children tumbling on the couch.  Leah is already wearing her night outfit -- fleece diaper cover and T-shirt.  She doesn't need pants as she sleeps in a sleeping bag and for the pre-bed play with the brothers, she wears Baby Legs.  How I love those chubby baby legs peeking out!

Note that the dressing is gone from her hand.  After a mild infection on Sunday, the yellow patches have scabbed over and I decided that she could be without another bandage for the night.  She was a bit incredulous and kept staring at her hand.  Clearly, the sight of the bright-red new skin and brownish scabs did not reassure her.  So she kept the hand balled up in a tight fist the whole time.

Anyway.  Leah Marie and Jacob.  Enjoy.

Because sometimes, I like to gross my readers out

We changed Leah's dressing today.  It was getting really grubby and I wanted to make sure that nothing got infected and we didn't constrict the blood flow.  I did leave her unscathed thumb out to check for blue fingers but you can never be too safe, I figured.

She cried a bit but mostly, it went off without a hitch.  The Giant Blister (TM) is still indeed giant and still intact -- which is the purpose of the dressing, after all.  For those unafraid ones, I have a picture of her hand under the fold.  It's gross, I think, so I'm not putting it up front.  You are warned.

I had the bright idea to put a mitten over her dressing -- keeps it from getting all gross and horrible and offers another layer of protection. We expect that blister to burst soon but we figure, the longer it lasts, the better.

She's a real trooper, she really is.  Apart from the bit of crying during the changing, she was totally fine. She's playing in the living room now, making happy noises.  Good little girl.

An equation

   1 Wood burning stove

+ 1 Free-range baby

+ 2 Distracted parents
___________________

= 1 burnt hand

Poor baby.

(No, I did not stop and take a photo while she was crying.  She was fine and playing at the kitchen table and then fussed because she dropped her water bottle.  I might be a bad mother but I'm not criminal.)

The chestnut game

Yesterday, Alan came home and was upset.  It took me a while to distill some meaning from the flood of hurt anger that was pouring out of him but this is what apparently happened:

His class has weekly themes.  This week's theme is "friendship".  So far, so good.  Yesterday they played a so-called chestnut game: each child had one chestnut.  He (or she) could do two things: give a chestnut to a friend and take a chestnut from a kid he didn't like.

Alan ended up with no chestnuts.  In his anger, he took chestnuts from all those kids who keep bullying him - five in all.

What the hey?  What kind of an irresponsible and stupid game is that?  "How to enforce cliques in my classroom?" Alan was upset all day.  He kept lashing out at his brothers and us in unpredictable intervals, he cried and sobbed intermittently.  We did our best to build him up but boy, it was tough work.

Maybe I got this all wrong.  Maybe something was lost in translation, maybe he remembered it wrong. There might have been talking about what happened and why this and that was not acceptable.  But somehow, I think not.  The aftermath in our house was unhappy and sad. 

I thought the bullying was tapering off but I was wrong.  Alan is still singled out, and the longer this goes on, the more everyone falls into predictable patterns.  Noah and Simon tease Alan, Alan complains to the teacher.  Noah and Simon don't take that too well and tease and bully Alan some more. 

Alan gets bullied for his name (silly name! Like a girl's name!), for his language (he mixes some English in sometimes), for his imagination (apparently, no one here knows about Green Lantern), for his knowledge (robots don't actually exist, stupid), for his fascination with science (there are no probes on Mars), for his ADHD.  I know he's not always easy to get along with but he is a fierce and loyal friend and he has a very kind heart.  Those who can call him friend are very lucky indeed.

I am out of my wits. I try to teach Alan to ignore the bullies but that's hard to do.   One of the bullies is the class captain, the other is the star student.  They are both adored by the other kids, and the leaders of the pack.  It's hard to ignore the popular kids.  I hate to see Alan be singled out but what can I do?  I talked to the teacher and while she seems nice and I like her as a person a lot, I think she's in deep water here.  I don't require her to like him (I honestly don't know whether she does or not which speaks for her professionalism), I just want her to make him feel accepted.

Alan has no tool kit how to deal with this.  He doesn't resort to clownery which some kids might.  He has started to fight back (also physically) and gets caught (he's not sneaky) and punished. Which reinforces the vicious cycle.

My instincts tell me to take flight or to take Alan out of school.  But, no job on the horizon, and no where to go to -- and homeschooling is not permitted in Germany.  In any case I believe he needs to learn how to deal with this -- some kids attract bullies, and unfortunately, he does.  He got bullied on the bus in Armenia.  The problem is not going to go away when we leave, so we better learn it here and now.

But how?

[I had the idea to make a Halloween party for his class.  I shy from the work but it's a US thing that is gaining popularity in Germany and maybe it will show some kids that not all that is foreign is bad?  I had suggested to Alan to invite each bully by himself for a play date to reconcile but he doesn't want to do that.]

Is it a bird? Is it a pirate ship? What is it?

Four years ago exactly, the night before Jacob was born, Doug spent hours assembling the Playmobil pirate ship that Jacob was supposedly bringing for Alan and David as a present.  It was a huge hit, just like Jacob himself.  We still have it and it has survived three moves and countless battles in the bathtub. I have to say that of the many pieces, most are lost. Somewhere. Here or there, in this house or another, little tiny pirate pieces lie forlorn.  But! The ship still sails, so that's all right.

Tonight, we ignored the pirate ship.  Jacob has a passion for trains and so and I spent the afternoon and evening before his birthday tomorrow assembling a cake.  Yes, it's a cake train.

 

 

 

He better likes it!

This train would not have been possible without the gracious help of my Mom.  She donated almost all of the cake ingredients -- I had simply forgotten that today is Unity Day in Germany and all shops are closed. My morning shopping expedition to gather all supplies was thwarted.  Luckily, my Mom always has sugar and butter and milk in her house, so all was well.

The frosting, btw, I have from the Smitten Kitchen. Deb has never disappointed me with any of her recipes and her advice on the Swiss buttercream (keep beating!) was dead on.  The frosting came out beautifully, it tastes yummy and spreads easily.  So all unprofessional spreading is due to my lack of skills and not the frosting's fault. I will henceforth only use this frosting for birthday cakes, it's that awesome.

I wished I could also show you a picture of my wonderful little boy newly born.  But alas, months after his birth I doused my laptop in coffee and lost all of the pictures of his first weeks.  How tragic is that?  Here's one of him three weeks later, in front of our house in Bucharest. 

 

Little cuties.  They are all so big now!

Well.  I should go and rescue the train from the fruit flies now.  Pictures of the birthday boy will follow tomorrow.

Happy Unity Day!

First birthday

Happy Birthday, sweet girl.  Apart from the moment when you grabbed my coffee cup in an unsupervised moment and took a swig from it, and poured the rest on the table cloth and down your shirt and pants, you've been a stellar one-year-old so far.

I want to wrap you in tissue paper and keep you like you are.  Time seems to go much too fast and you're growing up so quickly.  Every day is a delight with you but sometimes I just wished we could slow down a bit.  Just a bit, sometimes.

Friday morning surgery

It's hot, hot, hot in Germany right now.  With the weather as whimsical as it was lately, this means nothing.  Tomorrow, we might need to pull the sweaters out again.  But today is blue skies, bright sunshine and kids running around with watermelon slices, jumping into the kiddie pool in the yard.  Oh, and also playing robot wars with Legos.  That is actually weather independent.

So, I sat on the couch this morning, checking my email. The shutters were all down on the eastern side of the house (for those of you who know our house, that's the side facing the garden).  It was lovely cool and dark in the room.  Leah stood at the couch, happily chomping on a piece of apple.  She loves apple slices - to eat and to smear with. 

All of a sudden, she dropped her piece of apple, and as I looked at her, her face got white and then red, her eyes got really wide and then she screamed.  And screamed and screamed.  First, I thought she'd bitten her tongue but I couldn't calm her down.  Then I spotted the ripped up body of a bee on her shirt.  And when I looked closer, I could see the sting still stuck in her tongue, complete with the poison sack.

Have you ever tried to hold an almost-one-year-old still, with her mouth open, while your husband tries to retrieve a sting from her tongue with a pair of tweezers?  No?  Lucky you.  I remember the first time one of my kids (David, incidentally) had to be given an intravenous shunt.  You can't be squeamish and you can't lose your nerve, even though you really want to. I mean - a bee just stung your little girl in the tongue!  'nuff said.

She was in pain afterwards and we gave her some Motrin for that.  She was distressed, mostly because the pacifier was not calming her down - she tried sucking on it and then spit it out again, appalled that her one beloved comforter made things worse instead of better.  We fed her some cool yoghurt for breakfast and monitored her for two hours.  She's fine.  But it sure wasn't pleasant.

Much better

Leah finally woke up fever-free.  She's still a bit cranky but sometimes also happy - the latter we've not seen much in the past three days.  She's awfully skinny - she lost about 3 lbs, the poor mite.  But her appetite is returning and we keep feeding her with choice morsels.  A good time to introduce chocolate, I wonder?

Anyway.  Better, and that's good. Take that, stupid flu!

Summer break

Friday was the last day of school.  David's kindergarten had closed its doors the day before for all but the soon-to-be first graders.  It's a little tradition that those kids who leave the nursery/Kindergarten for school (which in Germany begins with the first grade) have a big sleepover at the school with all their teachers, complete with scavenger hunt through the town, pizza dinner and a big fire and ghost stories.  The next morning, the parents join in a potluck breakfast and bring their tired and worn-out kids home, complete with all their paraphernalia - house shoes, towels, photos, a big ring binder full of their work, another one with all their art work, a final present, more pictures...  we had to go back and forth twice and still forgot some items which one of the teachers dropped off at our house.

Alan had a great report card (which does mention his tendency to drift off into dreamworlds) and everybody was looking forward to three weeks of tumbling around and then our three-week trip to the US.

That Friday night, Alan had a violent vomity attack.  He had to be showered, the bed had to be completely stripped, the mattress cleaned and flipped -- all in all we were working for about half an hour before we got him medicated and back to bed.

Saturday morning, Jacob woke up with watery diarrhea and general malaise.  Leah woke up with a fever, raging up to 104 F before we got it down with Infant's Motrin.  David was the only cheerful and healthy one.

During the day, things started to calm down somewhat.  Leah's fever subsided, no more diarrhea was reported, Alan ate normally and was fine.  We went on a walk with all of them and everybody had a great time.

Saturday night, both Leah and Jacob woke up crying, with high fevers.  Both got medicated but while Jacob drifted off to sleep quickly, Leah fussed and cried and buried her flushed little face on my chest, her fists grabbing me tightly, refusing to be held by anybody (read: her Dad) than me.  She didn't really fall back asleep until 5 am, and then woke up crying, again with high fever, at 7 am.  Both she and Jacob were listless and feverish throughout the day.  Both are cycling through fevers but we can't really tell what they have -- while Leah has a bit of a runny nose and coughs a bit, Jacob has nothing but the fever.  If Leah has not improved by tomorrow, I'll bring her in to see her pediatrician.

I try to console myself that it's better happening now, as we are at home and at ease, than during school time or during our trip.  But sick and achy little kids do touch your heart so.

Leah, doing really well on the walk yesterday.
(And luckily, both she and Jacob are easy to keep hydrated!)

Mommy on a happy Earth

I tend to get overly excited when one of my kids draws a picture for me - none of them are artistically inclined and although Alan had a brief period when he liked coloring, that passed quickly and none of the others ever got there.  So I was really touched when Jacob presented this picture to me yesterday:

That's what Jacob told me this is:  Mommy standing on a happy Earth. The little manikin next to me is Jacob, of course.  The scribble underneath, I don't know.  The letters, he said, spell my name. If you are wondering if the scan is reversed - nope.  Jacob is left-handed and tends to "write" backwards.  He's only 3-almost-4, so we have time to work on that.  I love that he is writing letters at all!  I also love that everybody is happy.  I guess we're doing something right.

PS: I know, I've been remiss.  I have tons of emails to answer and never get around to them.  I will, as soon as the craziness that is the end-of-school-year combined with my brother's visit and sick husband and nephew's baptism and cousin's wedding preps are dealt with.  And all the cherries and the currants and the other fruit that want to be turned into jam/compote/jelly.  I promise.