2 months in and calling it quits

I'm not a quiter. I hate the feeling and it usually leads to a healthy bout of self loathing. So I'm the person who doesn't even consider leaving a position. Until now. My host mom came to me last Tuesday, two days after finishing my thesis, and said she just wasn't happy and she didn't know what to do. After an hour and a half of crying, serious conversation I was left confused, newly stressed and a little disappointed. For me I was just starting to relax into being with this family full time, keeping them in mind all of the time, and really starting to live a German life style. For them it had been two months of me spending evenings and days off in my room working on something to do with America, and they don't know what to do with that. There were a lot of emotions expressed by Tina that night, emotions I wasn't registering, and it made me consider whether I wanted to be there or not. And so ultimately I decided, I don't want to. And so I'm leaving.

It's a scary thing, jumping off a cliff, having no safety net. Making decisions that take away all plans you had, including things like where you're going to live. And I'm doing this by choice. This is the closest I've ever been to homeless, and even then I can always fly home or hop on a train.

Now for any family or friends out there, I'm not coming home. Not right away at least. My beautiful Oregon will have to wait, at least until Oktoberfest is over. And then, it's nearly anyone's guess. What's magical is that every avenue is open to me, but then again, what's terrifying is that every avenue is open to me.

But we've got a few weeks of security left. One week when the family is on vacation (I'm no longer going with them clearly) and I'll get to spend days being a tourist around Munich. So let me show you where I've been, and when I know, let me tell you where I'm going.

Good night, and good luck. (literally said this on accident to Mike while he was trying to fix the cable box last night)

Ellbow

I'm not the only one dealing with a kid

I was pleased and cracking up to see this clip from Tina Fey on David Letterman talking about how her two year old is trying to kill her and is possibly disturbed. The clip reminded me so much of dealing with violence in my own 3 year old and how funny and a little off-putting that can be.

P.S. Julia Stafford, saw this on the internet before Joanna Goddard wrote about it. Not stealing blog material I swear!

Well.. I missed a week

But I had my reasons. Namely: thesising. And to be more precise: penultimate thesising. That's right as of 9:02 am, August 18th I have turned in what should be the last draft of my thesis save for a few copy edits. I did all of the revisions my committee asked for. I did almost all of the revisions I was hoping to make (there's always more to do). And I am fully ready to put undergrad life behind me and become a present humanoid living in Germany. The reward: turning my computer OFF for 3 days. No emails, no blogs, no tumblr, and no no no no just checking one more thing on my thesis. Come the 21st, this baby's being printed and I don't want to see it or think of it for a year after I get that last email saying "printing now!".

Do you think it's a possibility? Probably not. But... I can always dream.

Next week: dive into the 121 book challenge, finish Rosetta Stone before we go on vacation, join a gospel choir, two book clubs, and find a horse to trail ride for the next 9 months! I think I'll have enough on my plate without this 98 page document.

Doctor Who IS for Kids

One of the great things about being an Au Pair is that it really teaches you how you want to raise your own kids. That being said. One of the hardest things about being an Au Pair is that it teaches you all the ways you will never treat/behave with your kids and then forces you to act in that personally envisioned irrational way for several months.

I believe in raising kids as the tiny adults they are. Yes, they haven't seen as much as you have, and they often can't express how they feel or what they think. But if you've ever had a simply spoken yet utterly profound conversation with a kid, you realize how fresh a prospective they bring to everything and how they are really just very small adults trying to grow up in our crazy world. I prefer to respect this potential in kids by treating them as adults in everything we do. And a big part of that is not allowing them to be babied by me or the media. What does that mean? I HATE CHILDREN'S MUSIC. With a passion. I HATE it. I listen to "regular" music with kids exclusively--as long as it's clean I can't see any reason children shouldn't hear it. We are listening to Mozart per-natal after all.  I also hate children's television and books that don't have something else going for them. Dr. Seuss rules, so does Toy Story (movies not any other form of that franchise), and C.S. Lewis, Rowling, the Ant and Bee books, Raul Dahl. There are so many great forms of children's literature, for every age that keeps things simple without dumbing anything down or addressing children as if they are incompetent. I tolerate things like The Barrenstein Bears, Cars, and Curious George. But if a piece of media isn't going to respect my kids, why should I respect it.

I think as a result of these strong opinions I have a tendency to push parents' boundaries regarding the maturity of their children. I want to read the first two Harry Potter books with kids starting at 6. I'll read The Magician's Nephew, the (more) complex Dr. Seuss stories and Shel Silverstein by 3. And I'll watch real actor television, and quality productions with kids at ages their parents deem inappropriate. Like today and watching Doctor Who with my 3.5 and 6 year olds. The first few minutes it was a mistake. The computer was open, DW was up ("The Lodger" a funny and monster-free episode) and Jay wanted to just see a few minutes. When we finished the second half of the episode, all three of us together now, they were very excited. I thought that would be it for the day. But they asked for another episode as a reward for cleaning up the (incredibly messy) living room and I caved because it's Doctor Who and these kids want to watch Rory the Racing Car more than Duck Tales (side note: what's up with that?). I spent several minutes searching for another good episode, and finally settled on "The Eleventh Hour" because it has few monster sightings and lots of physical comedy--after starting and they got scared of the giant eye that is the warden I turned it off, and quickly realized that we should have watched "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" instead. The boys both still liked it, and would have continued to watch it with me, stop and go to explain who the aliens are, that not everything that looks like a monster is a monster, and that in the end the good guys always win. But Tina took Jay away at the moment we saw our first alien (big mistake to not let something scary resolve itself in my opinion) and Lee and I stopped soon after, when he had laughed and we had clearly moved past the fear he was having with any aliens.

I know that a lot of parents would disagree with me about watching something as mature as Doctor Who with young kids. Yes it's scary sometimes--there are even episodes I won't watch alone ("Hide" had me wishing it was an alien repeatedly). So don't watch every episode. As with all media, know what you're putting into your kid before you let them experience it. Yes the plot lines are extremely complex. But when is a challenging word puzzle something bad? If it's keeping your kids from enjoying it, then stop. But if they still enjoy it and neither of you understand, laugh about how it's impossible to understand. I wouldn't trade those childhood experiences of feeling respected and appreciated by my whole family for anything. Almost all of them happened because someone handed me a book, or rented a movie with me, or let me listen to music with social messages when I was just on the verge of being "old enough" to understand. This media challenged me, and made me think critically. Even when it was my first PG13 movie (Men in Black), which you wouldn't consider very advanced; at 7 years old it forced me to understand vulgarity (in both action and language) as a negative trait, and to enjoy temporary suspended disbelief in the face of nightmare-quality plot lines.

I have a feeling I have a talking to coming tonight. Through which, as an Au Pair I'll have to keep my cool and simply apologize. But my kids (those in the future that I will have or adopt) will watch Doctor Who, read interesting books, listen to real music and the radio, and grow up much faster for it. For now I just have to suck it up and raise someone else's kids the way they want them to be raised. It's more exhausting to do it their way than it is just to be high-energy with the kids all the time.

My suggested Doctor Who episodes to watch with kids (5+):
"The End of the World"
"Boom Town"
"The Idiot's Lantern"
"Love and Monsters"
"The Next Doctor"
"Partners in Crime"
"The Lodger"
"Closing Time"
"The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe"
"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"
"The Power of Three"

My Aggressive Three Year Old

This week has thoroughly beaten me. And I mean that literally. I have a scratch down my cheek and bite marks on my arm and a bruise on my hip that makes it hurt to walk and bike. I am exhausted and to be honest I'm a little scared of a very little man. Jay is 3 years old, and Jay is extremely aggressive towards me.

There are always going to be problems with kids. I don't think I've ever had a perfect day as a baby sitter, camp staffer or now as an Au Pair. But generally these issues have been limited to excessive crying or moping, and the occasional defiant behavior such as going out of my sight after being asked to stay close. Often these behaviors are just part of kids processing their emotions or their own exhaustion. And in those cases it is easy (though not always intuitive) to remove yourself, let every one cool off and then talk about the issues calmly and constructively, looking for solutions which you and the kid can both handle. They also are normally only a once or twice a day thing, even with a group of children. And never have they been systemic.

I've dealt with the normal amount of these issues with Jay (3) and Lee (6) while I've been here this first month. I draw the line for normal behavior when Jay calls me a "shitty Ellen," (it's Germany they use that word a lot, it's not good, but it's not as bad as it would be in English). But in addition I've also been dealing with consistent violent behavior in both of them. Like any parent (or Au Pair) I've been making excuses for the behavior to myself and others, but with a lot of pushing and support from my parents I'm addressing the issue not only with the children individually but also with the parents.

As a perfectionist and I think as any kind of child-care provider, it's difficult to admit that you are struggling to do your work. Parents also tend to have blinders on with their kids, they prefer to overlook the issues their kids are carrying around with them or any problem behaviors they are exhibiting. These blinders make a difficult conversation even more of a struggle as parents refuse to recognize that a behavior their child is exhibiting is not appropriate or normal, and even worse when the children are not behaving that way towards them or in front of them. I had a lot of fear going into this conversation that I would be getting an earful of "just do this" and "I always do that and it works fine". I had had a lot of issues up to this point of not been able to have either parent hear what I'm saying and understanding that I'm doing what they do, it's not working, I need to take additional steps. So this time I came in prepared with suggestions for how I will be addressing the aggressive and painful behavior from both boys, but particularly Jay.

My hope was that this conversation would be short. That the behavior is similar to a problem a teacher may have had or even an old baby sitter. What ended up happening was a very productive and yet frustrating and stressful conversation that lasted over 2 hours and bore few helpful suggestions. Obviously something is wrong. I was very happy that Tina and Mike were both so supportive of me, and made it clear that they don't see me as the problem in this situation. For the first time they really heard what I was trying to say, and after repeating what I had been doing and which situations were of real concern for me (not the physicality that happens when a joke goes too far or as a result of usual 3 year old behavior, but that which is vicious and meant to hurt me as an over reaction to a small or non-existent trigger). Unfortunately the only next steps we could agree on were changes to my everyday behavior (a lot of which were directed at some personal habits that are very embedded in my personality--i.e. my thinking face is too stern so try not to be deep in thought in front of the kids, or I leave and enter the room silently through out the day but they want me to narrate these actions more for the boys) and are addressing the symptoms of the tantrums not the cause of them.

I hope that these small changes to daily behavior can alleviate some of the pressures that are triggering Jay to act out so violently towards me, but I don't think they are really solving the issue--as yet unknown.

The most difficult part of this conversation with Tina and Mike was the footnote. If things don't change, if I can't care for the kids without putting myself in harms way, then we need to rethink my position in the family. It's a simple truth that not all people are a match. Some personalities just clash and there's nothing to be done about it. If that's the base issue causing this aggression then the solution is to remove myself from the equation.

I'm not ecstatic to be here. But I don't want to go home either. Starting over with a new family or finding a different job would be exhausting after starting to settle in here. But at the end of the day part of this job and part of being a parent is putting the kids first.

Music:

"Home" by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
"A Home" by the Dixie Chicks

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.