I am just off the phone with my mum and am left feeling a bit gloomy. I happened to mention the problems I have come across looking into Orla's school application (should we be in Germany at the time we need to apply) and it launched her into a big thing about change not being good for kids and how she doesn't think that Stevie can understand how people can be brought up in a place and just settle there - or words to that effect. Anyway, it seems obvious that she is trying to say that she doesn't want us to go. But in real terms it won't make a whole lot of difference to our families as we will see them just as much from Berlin as we would from here. And, it would take about the same amount of time to get to them from Berlin as it does here!
The problem is it just seems far away. Well there's that and the fact that there is no way my parents would get on a plane to come over. But the way she conveyed this was more like we would be doing terrible damage to our children by taking them to a foreign country and potentially sending them to school there, away from all their friends and things they know. If we had announced that we were moving back to Scotland (away from all their friends and things they know) it of course wouldn't be a problem at all. Ok, so possibly they wouldn't have the language barrier to contend with ... but I don't think that's such a big problem when they are still just 2 and 1.
Meanwhile, I am getting quite into the idea of Berlin. I have stopped reading my 'living in Berlin' book - primarily because Hamish has hidden it somewhere, and am now on to my Berlin guide book, where I discovered that there is a Frank Gehry building near the Brandenburg Gate. I have also been reading about all the galleries and shops and that has got me even more excited!
Hamish has been helping with the list of things to throw away by becoming really destructive in the past 24 hours. I have been sellotaping books and fixing toys like never before. I think it is the tiredness as well. We have had 4 nights of truly rotten sleep with him waking up every 2.5 hours and then wanting up at 5.30 am every day. It's killing us. This morning though Stevie flipped and gave him Calpol and stuck him back in his cot and lo and behold he slept until 8! I think the problem is that he is just getting too much day time sleep. Some days he would happily sleep for nearly 2 hours in the morning and the same again in the afternoon and for his age that's possibly quite excessive. So today given the 8am get up time I cut out his morning nap so we'll see if that has an impact tonight at all. Though I still let him have an hour and a half this afternoon cause I just wanted a break.
AHa! no flies on me.. I now know why you are cruising the blogs. Unfortunately I am a long way from Berlin. As for schooling, I guess you will put your daughter into an International school? German school system is good.. and they MUST take the children if they live in the area. Our 8 year old goes to the little local catholic school and I am really pleased with it.
ReplyDeleteWell, I started out looking at other blogs of people living in Germany- Berlin primarily, so I could get an idea of other peoples experience of moving to another country. Then my friend in Berlin told me to take a look at Toytown Berlin (which is both hilarious and depressing at the same time) and that kind of put me off the ex-pat community in Berlin, ha ha, so then I moved on to craft blogs and that has led me on to all sorts of different blogs. At the moment I am enjoying a few that have led me on to their flickr sites where they have photos of their rather amazing tattoos. Now I really don't like tattoos, but these are really great. So there you go, you learn something new every day. I think I found your blog quite recently, but you're not one of the tattoo'ed craft ladies....
ReplyDeleteSchool-wise, I would prefer to put them into a German school rather than an international one as I'd like them to integrate into German life (and hopefully teach me German, ha, ha.). Meanwhile from my conversations with our local education department, they would prefer us to put her into an international school which would follow the English curriculum, but there's no guarantee that a) we would want to come back, and b) we might always go back to Scotland and that would be different again - she would even go to school a year earlier in England than she would in Scotland, so really does it matter that much? I don't believe that the English school system can't cope with German children moving to England and joining schools here.