Side Bar: Cat Photos

So there's a website called Written? Kitten! Where you type 100 words into their word processor and it gives you a picture of a cat. Every 100 words. As your motivation to continue writing. I, having no papers (thesis does not count here) to write started just babbling here and I ended up writing this:

"Sometimes I'm going to do something awesome, and it will never be so that you can tell me I'm great or see it for yourself. It will always be about me. And that sucks for you! Not only do I not need your praise. No, no. Far from it. I actually don't want your praise or for you to see me do the amazing things I can do. I want to do these things to prove to myself that the perfect person I have envisioned in my head is possible. There is no unselfish good deed. Joey was right about that. Dude cat photo this is supper distracting from the point I was trying to make. I wonder if we could make one of these with corgy photos or Berner photos, or select a google search kind of thing? That would be the best. Select a tumblr tag, ha! I can see the Freeman/Cumberbatch fan fiction pouring in now and how distracting that would be. The cat with the monkey is bad enough. Though is that a monkey, or is it a teletuby. Yeah... I don't know how to spell that thing. But that looks like a blue version of... oh changed photos to white cats sleeping together. Cute not funny. Also BTW deleting words does not make your photos run backwards. This is too much work for cat photos. Argy i i i i i i i ii  ii i i i i i i i i i i i ii i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i ii i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i cheat the system."

Cat photos for the win.

It's been 1 month since you looked at me, tipped your head to the side and said I'm angry.

Yesterday or today, depending on how you count, is the one month mark in this whole crazy experience-living-in-Germany-why-don't-you thing. And for all the goods and all the bads I'm feeling very lost, a little home sick, and certainly questioning the quality of my decision. Half the time I wake up wishing I could just be at home in Portland reading the 120 books I already have which are squished together under my bed side table, and half the mornings I get out of bed excited to go adventuring with the boys.

One month into this experiment I have to say that the jury's still out on the quality of my decision making:

• The kids are starting to like me, but they don't love me yet.
• I don't love them (yet) either. I'm not protective of them. I compare them mentally to my cousins of the same age, and they always come up short in comparison.
• The three year old is much more open to my presence, and when no parents are home we all get along flawlessly (biting and swearing aside).
• I cannot get the six year old to be interested in Harry Potter so now I'm reading it on my own, in German and feeling very accomplished.
• The diet, though European and in many ways excellent, does not agree with my pre-Germany (Gluten free) dietary expectations. Why do you have to eat three pieces of bread at every single meal?
• I'm exhausted all of the time. Maybe it's the heat or the job or a side effect of the diet, but I'm exhausted.
• The language comes easier now. If only I could get my host family to stop speaking English with me at night.
• I now speak British English. I fail to comprehend how I transitioned from one English language to the other, but there it is.
• I've met people, but made no "friends" yet. And I'm turning into a desperate beast, needing attention and love and having no resources to get that which don't involve an internet connection (i.e. skype, whatsapp, and email with my family--get your mind out of the gutter).
• I met a cute boy, but am having issues connecting with said boy through social media/cellular devices... boo.
• I'm joining a book club(s) which should solidify my identity as the oldest 22 year old of all time.
• The weather is truly beautiful and the general culture completely agrees with my constitution.
• Winter is coming, and I'm pumped for some sweater weather and snow.
• For better or worse, I'm now 10% of the way through my stay with this family. And if I choose, in 9 months I can go straight home.

It will certainly always be safer to choose the known world before the unknown. I could have moved to New York or stayed in Portland, worked in an office or as a nanny, had my gap year, but stayed in a land where people at least speak the same language. And maybe, just maybe I would be happier there. But I have to believe that you can't make a wrong decision (though you can make bad ones) because each decision leads you on a different path. I have to believe that taking this chance, no matter what I feel today, will be one of the better ones in my life and that in 10 years I will look back, proud to have jumped into the unknown.

Music:

"Home" from The Beauty and the Beast soundtrack
"Summer Love" by JT
"Where or When" cover by Harry Connick, Jr.

The Technology Problem

I've been here 16 days, which makes this the first day of my third week of work, and already I can see the issue that will create a gap between me and my host "mom": television. I love that my family doesn't watch a lot of tv. I had too much of it as a kid, adolescent and college student. You don't need tv every day. Especially when you're a kid and it's summer. But sometimes your kids slept 7 hours (as opposed to their regular 10.5) last night and then went to school and then played for several hours in the hot sun and now they are exhausted and need to wind down. When you have trained your children that this is when they can watch tv, and then leave them with me, they may end up watching tv in these moment like you trained them to do.

I've been with the boys 9 days, doing at least part of those days on my own, alone with them. Twice I have allowed them to watch tv. Once the kid I had with me was sick, and once today, it was to be a break after eating lunch before we went to pick his brother up from school. 2/9 for a new person in the household is not so bad in my opinion. Especially when you consider that their mom has set them in front of the tv three additional times when I had nothing to do with it. I'm not relying on tv, I'm using it at the right time as a tool. She said no tv on school days, I denied them tv 3 days in a row because it was a school day. She said no tv right before bed, I denied them tv twice because it was already 6:30 and they needed to be in bed by 7:30. I am not relying on tv. But Tina seems to think that I am.

And that's the issue right. You ask me what we did today:

7:10 - Breakfast
7:30 - Papa leaves for work
7:45 - Get dressed, prep things for the day
8:00 - Read a book aloud while the boys play legos and cars
8:30 - Grab stuff and leave for Kindergarten
9:10 - Get back from Kindergarten drop and have a 2.5 hour play date (playing with cars, scooters and sand box) with the neighbors (now 3 kids under 4) which I supervised alone
11:40 - Start making lunch while the kido does a dinosaur art project
12:05 - Eat lunch
12:25 - Choose a movie* and start watching while I clean the kitchen and the rest of the house
           12:50 - I sit down and start watching the movie with him
12:45 - Oma calls and says she wants to take both boys to the See for swimming
1:35 - Movie is over and Oma arrives to pick up the boys

(count it-the movie lasted for 1 hour and 10 minutes of the 7 hours we were together and the 12 hours I was supposed to have them today)

Ask the kids what we did today: we watched a movie with Dinosaurs.

I had a great day with the boys today. They were happy, a little tired after lunch but they don't nap, and very pleasant and well behaved. So yes, I'm sorry, we watched a movie. It's the same length as the two tv shows Tina suggests are better for them to watch. I'm not encouraging tv, or using it as a crutch or anything. I'm stimulating their imaginations and playing with them and not just sitting them in front of the tv. I hope she'll learn to see this in the next month or so. It seems right now like she's expressing her own discomfort at how much tv they normally watch by criticizing me for letting them watch tv at the same or lesser frequency. But that is the burden of the first Au Pair I suppose. To wait out the onset of aware and intentional parenting.

*By the way the movie we watched was Ice Age 3 and we watched it in English and he was laughing at verbal jokes, so... feeling okay about that choice.

A Start At Au Pairing

My life has quickly become hectic, very strange, and all in German. It's a miraculous thing, how stepping off a plane in a country where you have some basic grasp of the local language means that you converse in that language all of the time. But that's not the point of this post.

I've worked at day camps, school/over-night camps, baby sitting, and have you heard about my clan of 78 family members? But nothing so far in my life has quite been like this. As the youngest child I never had any full time "younger siblings" (with one exception). But in the last 10 days I have had to adjust quite suddenly to living with a 3.5 and a 6 year old. Not to mention living in a new city, country, house, room, culture and language. I thought I had prepared for this with my previous experience with kids. I was kidding myself.

Being an Au Pair is like being some strange combination baby sitter, big sister, parent. So far I've done everything from cause trouble at the dinner table to put a kid in a very harsh time out for repeatedly saying Scheisse. From the moment I stepped off of that plane the expectations were entirely different from any job I've had before. These people feed me, talk to me about their days, watch the evening news and crappy movies with me. But I'm also "on duty" 30 hours a week, alternating between discipline and entertainment with their kids, calling their kids Schatzy. It's all been very crazy.

And for a moment there (daily) I got really really homesick, and was on the verge of tears walking home from the morning Kindergarten drop. And then one week in, Sunday barbeque happened. And the crazy family, the grandma and grandpa who never sit down to eat just keep pushing food on you, the sarcastic exchanges that I was able to understand, and the table of people all trying to get someone's attention, it all made me feel so at home. I think they thought I had cracked when I started laughing. But I was just happy. It all felt... right.

Kidos picking berries and playing in the backyard

Music:
Legally Blonde the musical, the entire soundtrack. Just, omigod you guys.

Canada!

So Canada happened. One week in a sweet little apartment with my mom, exploring Prince Edward Island and trying my darnedest not to look exactly like Anne of Green Gables. The Island is beautiful and had some wonderful weather. The people took a chapter straight out of their Celtic heritage and were extremely friendly! Even though we never found a place to go exploring my wetlands (bad weather the last two days and extreme exhaustion made it impossible) we had a lot of fun.

We flew into PEI on Saturday, went straight to our apartment and slept. Then food of course. Charlottetown had several great restaurants, but they're all pretty fancy for what we wanted. We ended up in the Old Dublin Pub for dinner. To wrap up the plainest day of vacation ever we went grocery shopping, then home and slept more.

I think we look pretty good for having not slept and been on planes for 24 hours

The second day was a little more exciting. We drove north in the central part of the Island in search of Green Gables stuff. Be forewarned: almost everything on PEI that is touristy is closed on Sundays and Mondays. This includes things like the Green Gables house, though the land is open and museums. Since we couldn't find our way into the attractions we were looking for we spent most of the day hopping from location to location, taking short hikes and talking to the locals (natch).

Mom outside of Green Gables

The cellar and foundation of LM's childhood home in Cavendish

We had a late lunch at a little restaurant east of Cavendish, "Amanda's," which is open seasonally and had opened only the day before. A local had recommended it, and it was the first place we'd seen that wasn't a coffee shop or a nicer restaurant. While this is the kind of atmosphere we wanted (everyone in the place was local not just to PEI but also to that town) I think we paid the price with the quality of the food. One would think that on an island that produces so many potatoes your potato products would always be fresh, but apparently frozen french fries are very popular. I was still behind on sleep at this point so we went home, I slept and we watched the first "Anne of Green Gables" movie that night.

Most everything Anne-oriented is closed Sunday and Monday even during the tourist season (July 1-August 31), so on Monday we tried to go to the east side of the island in hopes of reaching the Myriad View Artisan Distillery which makes moonshine! (thanks tumblr for bringing random PEI attractions to my attention). Along the way we stopped at a historic village which was pretty cool.

The moonshine distillery was definitely the highlight of the east coast, small as it was. I think the idea of moonshine for Americans is just fun.

Mom and the distillery operator

Day 4 everything actually was open so we went back to Green Gables and all of the LM Montgomery museums. If you're attempting to do this I would read a good guide book and choose at most 3 places to go. Everything costs $4 per person and has the same information. We finally ran out of steam and stopped going into places. Learning a little more about the author and walking in the places she used to inspire her books, and probably my favorite heroine of all time was amazing, even though we over did it.

Anne's bedroom recreated in Montgomery's uncle's home a.k.a. "Green Gables"

Lovers Lane. But actually, it's the real Lover's Lane

Day 5, well day 5 was pretty awesome. We had a lazy morning, ate in a very Portland-esque cafe, and around 2 headed over to the local theater to see Anne and Gilbert: the musical. I was a skeptical of going to see a musical of my two favorite characters as anyone, but it was completely worth it. Every actor performed well, the script kept to the books well enough that I wasn't complaining, and the songs are still stuck in my head. Literally, it's been 2.5 weeks and I listened to the soundtrack last night. The more popular play Anne of Green Gables doesn't run until after Canada day, so we completely missed it, but it's place was well held by A&G. Plus, the guy playing Gil isn't half bad looking (I mean seriously, how sweet are they together?).

The last day was just packing airports and flights. Ultimately, it was a great way to spend a last week with my mom before moving 1/3rd of the way around the world.