Friday 22nd August - vomit.......

Friday begins with C vomiting his entire breakfast immediately after consuming it, and at exactly the time when they should be leaving the house. So I panic (gah, what do I do, don’t know what to do, can’t ring up school as can’t speak Deutsch, smell of vomit so can’t leave house and run down to school to explain etc etc). So I clean up C (lovely) and pack him off back to bed, pack J off to school, giving him instructions to go straight to C’s classroom and explain to his teacher that C is sick before going to his own class. J has no idea where C’s classroom is – ideal - but he is a relatively sensible lad so I trust him and off he goes.

C spends about 30 minutes in bed then gets up and mopes about. He seems fine and I realise that I had unwittingly made him drink milk that had gone off, so no surprises that he had chucked up the whole lot.

J is home for lunch, and tells me that he couldn’t get to C’s classroom to pass on the message, but he had telephoned from his classroom to C’s. What sophistication !! Telephones in the classrooms !! Whatever next !

C manages a decent lunch so, obviously, gets sent back to school in the afternoon, though he does look very wobbly on his bike with his backpack, and I wonder if the whole bike / backpack thing is wise.

At 3.30pm the front door is flung open with a dramatic flourish and J yelling “quick Mum, C’s had an accident on his bike”. Heart in my mouth, I race down to school to find C outside, with his bike. He has collided with a secondary school pupil coming up the road in the opposite direction to him as he was trying to get his balance, and they both ended up in a heap on the ground, with C’s bike now refusing to budge, despite looking perfectly operational. There is a crowd of about 6 people, from both schools, waiting for me to get there. I’m not sure whether they are waiting for C to apologise or to collect insurance details from me, but they seem genuinely concerned that C is OK before disappearing. He’s fine. We get the bike home after some considerable palaver, and J goes off for a sleepover at his old friend’s house – some necessary light relief for the poor boy after the first week.

Alas, this turns out to be not such a great idea when J’s too knackered to do his homework on Saturday and then struggles to do it on Sunday. I really want him to keep up with his international school friends (for numerous reasons benefiting him but also benefiting me: their mums are my drinking pals and I love ‘em to bits) but he seems to be getting a lot more homework than them and he’s more tired - because he’s being taught in German. So I’ll have to think about how we can manage to help him see his chums without the inevitable exhausted tears on the Sunday night when the homework still isn’t finished and he’s all but cross eyed.

The upside of the first week is that C has already been invited to a party. The downside is that I have to ring up the invitee’s mother, in German, to reply. However, the other family have taken the time and trouble to translate the entire invitation into English (good grief, how warm a welcome is that ?) so I chicken out and ask “sprechen Sie Englisch ?” on the phone, to the inevitable response “ yes, a little”. A conversation in fluent English then follows - much to my very English embarrassment at my lack of language confidence.

Oh, and the second upside to the first week is that OH manages to fix C’s bike. Hurrah. But I’ve decided that it’s too risky and they will scoot for the time being.

The second downside is that C still hasn’t worked out where the toilets are in school……… as all his classmates already know. I keep telling him to ask, but he won’t. Grrrrr.