Week 22 Aha ! Ich verstehe the handarbeit

It’s a week of handarbeit in our house.

J brings home a lovely little card heart for me, for Valentine’s day. Oh, how sweet.

Then he brings home a folder that he’s made, which is really lovely and very individual – artwork on both covers, inside and out.

Then he brings home another folder that he’s made – the card work on which is really very beautifully done. I’m posting some photos here but I’m not sure the detail is really caught. Hey ho. The spirit was willing even if the photographer was weak.

And then – on Thursday, C brings home the result of his 20 lengths of crochet, and it finally all makes sense. The crochet is the fringe on a really gorgeous scarf. His teacher had already stitched a felt smiling face onto it, and he had to push the crochet lengths through holes that had already been punched, and then tie them. So he’s very proud of his work, and I’m very proud of him. He can’t wait to wear it.

Again, I apologise for being unable to turn these pictures round, so sorry about your cricked neck. I must be missing something very basic - if you know how to "flip" photos on blogger.com please do let me know.....

The other exciting news from this week is that J’s class do a rap workshop with some musicians from the city, with a view to creating a rap about the environment and how we should all look after it - or something like that. If it’s good enough they will record it and maybe post it on youtube…… so now he has stars in his eyes. But he thoroughly enjoys the experience and is looking forward to working more on the project after sportferien.

On the Friday afternoon I suddenly realise that we’re half way through the school year already and am amazed at how much has happened, how much the children have adapted, how quickly they are picking up the language, and how well they are coping. Yes, they have been utterly knackered at various points. Yes, we’ve had tears (all of us, perhaps apart from OH), yes sometimes it has felt completely alien and lonely and sometimes I have missed seeing other mum chums in the morning for a chat and a coffee. But I miss the school run like a hole in the head, I’m more than happy to see the boys off from the front door each morning and afternoon and am thrilled in every respect that I only use the car perhaps twice during the week. We’ve definitely turned a corner, and the fear factor has almost completely disappeared.

Hurrah !

Their friends are real !

Thursday sees J have a friend round to play – skateboarding, out in the street.

Saturday sees C have a friend round to play - inside this time as it’s tipping with rain.

A good sign: their friends aren’t imaginary, or made up to reassure me that they are doing OK at school, honest. They are real ! And they come round, all on their own, to play ! It’s just like it was for us in the 1970’s ! But without the inflation and the power cuts, thankfully.

Cookery lessons

No, not at school, at home, but I’m posting about it because I had agreed with the boys that I would teach them to cook. I am determined that by the time they leave home they will be able to cook, manage their money, operate a washing machine (and iron), keep their room / home in some sort of reasonable state, and organize themselves. There’s nothing less appealing than a bloke who still can’t boil an egg at the age of 25, and no excuse for it either in these enlightened times. Just in case you’re wondering, yes this is completely one-sided on my part, so please feel free to throw things at me. I have no intention of picking up a power drill or using the lawnmower. Readers who know me personally may – rightly perhaps – question my motives. Surely I just want to be waited on hand and foot and as soon as possible, princess style ? Damn, rumbled again. In fact I really do rather like the idea of pottering round the kitchen on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, glass of wine in hand, having some bonding time with the boys and giving them a useful life skill, especially for our household: how to use the corkscrew.

Seriously though, I’m fully of the opinion that the decline in the health and increase in obesity of the UK population is due to a complete inability to cook for many people, after cookery was taken out of the school curriculum. The whole of my year group had cookery and nutrition lessons for the duration of the third year at secondary school – but that was 1982, it’s no longer on the national curriculum in the UK, and hasn’t been for quite some time.

I have no idea if the boys will learn cookery at Swiss school – there are teaching kitchens on the lower ground floor of the school, but I don’t know who uses them – perhaps they are for evening classes. But it doesn’t matter – the boys wanted to get started right away and I didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm. I dug out all their childrens cookery books and sat looking at the pile, utterly baffled, trying to figure out how to put together a meaningful, structured course. I didn’t want to just teach them “this is how to cook pasta”, I want them to be able to understand the food science and nutrition behind it – appropriate for their age group of course – and be able to put together a balanced meal so that they can take care of themselves when they are old enough. Then I realised that some clever person somewhere might have already done all this, and so I typed I want to teach my children to cook into Google, and lo and behold: http://www.kids-cooking-activities.com/ came up.

I’ve bought the kids cooking lessons package and set it all up. It looks brilliant, and perfect for gradually introducing techniques, science, nutrition from age 3 right up to age 18. We started at the weekend and are racing through the age 3-6 lessons. We enjoyed some fun snacks in front of the opening matches of the Six Nations on Saturday, and on Sunday, C prepared most of the vegetables for dinner. Result !

Week 21: Never be late home from the doctor's.......

I am 5 minutes late home from an appointment on the Monday morning and find C home from school for lunch faster than usual, hammering on the front door and in floods of tears. I don’t know how long he had waited- probably only 3-4 minutes but I hadn’t told them that I was going to the Doctor at 11am, as I had assumed that I would be back well before 12.00. C is absolutely howling, and frantic. I am chastened and reminded that the independence they enjoy in walking themselves to and from school comes with a responsibility on my part to always either be there or warn them of a possibility of being late or give them a key - or all three. I feel dreadful, but he calms down eventually and goes back to school for the afternoon in good shape.

(The doctor’s appointment was a somewhat different experience to anything I had had in the UK recently– but here is not the place for recounting my surprisingly and alarmingly thorough checkup with the Frauenartz. I’ll leave that one for a bawdy girls night out sometime.)