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.

Graduation Party

Yesterday was my last night in America, so we had a party (well a bon voyage and a graduation party). It was good, low key and fun. Pictures below.

Music:

Home by Edward Sharp & The Magnetic Zeros
Love on Top by Beyonce
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding
Lover, Lover by Jerrod Niemann

1.5 days... oh God.

So I graduated, and then slept, and then partied it up, and then moved, and then went to doctors and dentists for stuffs and finally I'm home, busy as all get out with packing, playlist making, preping parents for my departure, and finishing the clothes shopping that I've had to do for the last few weeks (I have no more pants!).

But you have my attention for a moment and in return I give you my favorite photos from graduation.

6 Days/21 hours until Graduation Part 1

I'm so nearly done it's amazing. Tomorrow is graduation which I think means I get a camera! Which means original photos that don't come from photo booth can commence! 6 days until Canada and the apartment's nearly packed and it's all nearly over. It all really boggles the mind doesn't it.

Good luck with whatever you're handling in the next 21 hours! I'll see you late tomorrow with photos!

One Week Baby!

I skyped with my family this morning. The whole family. Mom, dad, 5 year old, 3.5 year old. And let me tell you, there is nothing like a 5 year old doing a happy dance at the mere idea that you will arrive in 15 days (Canada comes first) to get you excited about a trip. I feel like part of this family already and I've never met them in person or hugged them or shared a story with them. But they are my new family!

I'm still stressed, and busy (anyone want to take care of my cat for a year?), and terrified of leaving. But the prospect of arriving now is so much sweeter. I'm going to live in Germany. With my family. For a year.

Boom-pow-surprise.

8 days to go

Tomorrow morning I have a skype date with my family and I'll finally get to meet my boys! I think with these plans I'm starting to move out of the college phase and into the real life thing. If I finish packing my apartment tonight, then I will be 9 items away from being able to move, 8 days until I fly, and 3 days until graduation!

These 10 days are certainly the strangest in the whole process. I have stuff to do: work, errands, the like. But school's over so all I really want to do is watch "Sex and the City" reruns. And yet, it's all going to be over so soon. Thank goodness for short transition periods.

Happy US Open First Day!

9 Days Left

I took a break today (shocking I know!) and watched the movie "Freedom Writers" with Hilary Swank. It's a teaching movie I've been avoiding for several years now because I worried that it would portray a one-side-of-hopeful perspective. And in a lot of ways it did. But it didn't just have wins, it had losses. And those moments of failure are what made it real. They're also what made me stop the movie several times just to process what I'm getting myself into.

When you work in the lowest income urban public schools you expect the violence and drugs, homelessness and gangs, rape culture, home violence, home abuse and neglection. But I think it's easy to forget how all of that generates fear in every. single. person. in that classroom. It's a culture of war and fear that starts at birth for many and is not contained to schools and is not contained to one race or class or geography. It's wide spread and in many ways ubiquitous in our public school system.

Some of the best teachers, in reality not just in their film portrayals, are those who make their goal as a teacher to break this culture for their students. Not just in the classroom, but as a pattern and a life choice that their students make to no longer participate actively or passively in the war they are living. And to fight against it with peace. As a teacher the freedom to run your classroom that is required to facilitate this type of growth is rarely given. You have to bend some rules, make up new lesson plans and ideas, try things that are not in anyway part of the sanctioned curriculum. I think "Freedom Writers" made a strong portrayal for the resistance you can meet here as a teacher. Swank's character had to fight constantly for control of her classroom with other teachers, school administrators, district administrators and the school board. This resistance is real in many ways for the reasons the film laid out: taking on this goal and accomplishing it means taking risks and actions that are not replicable with any student body, and therefore don't fit the idea of a national education system.

The resistance is rooted in this concept of the greatest good for the greatest number over the greatest amount of time (which, yes is a sustainability concept from Gifford Pinchot, but I'm an Environmental Science major, what do you want from me?). Utilitarianism. Wherein you write off some students so that the majority of students can succeed. You write off some students? You give up on them as individuals? As human beings? As organisms? If even once in my life I had been on the receiving end of that apathy I would have broken completely in two. And that's what a centralized education system tells us to do. Write the curriculum that will teach the greatest number and ignore the 5% that don't understand because they're purely kinesthetic learners and you used verbal and written language to explain the concept.

How can we be this nation, and support a concept like that for our children? How can we be any nation, any identity, any collection of people and passively support a system that doesn't give teachers the freedom to run their own classrooms? But then how can we know that teachers are using their autonomy "correctly"? And what is "correctly"? Do you define it? Do I? Do we? That really was the aspect of the film that I felt was best executed. The Department Head was a well intentioned woman with a modern and well accepted pedagogy standing in the way of something that I feel is morally correct. If I was apathetic to the thing she opposed would it be okay? If I was against the thing she opposed (agreed with her) would it be heroic? And who among us gets to decide the morality of a pedagogy or goal a teacher might hold?

And this is why I'm terrified and positively anxious to be a teacher. I love these questions and the policy debate surrounding them. I love being in the classroom with these students trying to undertake these goals. I know there will be so many obstacles in my way, more than I can ever imagine. But it's exciting to see that kind of path and purpose laid out before you. So scared or not, I think I'm ready.

Too bad (not even) that I have a year in Germany between now and when I start my grad school!

The 10 Day Countdown

Welcome! My entire life is being turned upside down in the next 10 days. And that's some kind of terrifying. This morning I took my last final of undergrad. With that final step everything accept for graduation and final thesis edits are done for my undergraduate career. (Thank goodness!)

After this I have to finish packing my apartment, graduate, celebrate, and move. To Germany. For a year. But then again you probably new all of this.

Once I leave I'll be trying to post weekly updates on any travel/experiences/happenings that seem relevant. But for now, I'm laying in "bed," a futon mattress that can be transported in a hatchback so it stayed in the apartment after moving part 1, dealing with stress by watching bad TV. And not going to lie, having a little bit of a panic attack. But there are books and kids and passport stamps and posts much more interesting than this in our future: so we breathe through the panic.

Movies and television played during the process of writing that down:

"The Parent Trap" (1998)
"Sex and the City" (2002-2003 season)
"Switched at Birth" (most recent episode)
"Gilmore Girls" (end of season 4)

Hey I finished college, I deserve television.

2 weeks

The 2 week countdown has more than begun. It is fully upon us. The fact that it's bringing on severe senioritis and I have a paper due at midnight and some thesis editing to do this weekend is probably not good. But it's here none the less. And amazingly, it gets closer every day.

I got really excited yesterday when I looked up my soon-to-be home town on tumblr. Beautiful pictures below!