School begins. Bye, bye, baby!

5 years doesn't take long does it?

In fact, forgive me (especially any of you who might be child-free) for a moment while I do that thing like old people who go on about how once you get old the years just fly by. I feel old today. Hamish has gone off to school, and that's both my babies all grown-up---ish and at school, and it seems so fast and like it was only yesterday I was mopping the sick from my hair, shoulders, back, sofa, cushions, floor that my lovely refluxey babies produced endlessly as a sign of their love for me, and now look:

Stevie laughed at his little black socks and his little 'suit-like' trousers, just like daddy - though Daddy would turn up his nose at an outfit with such a high polyester percentage!

For Orla it was a thoroughly exciting day, as she got to show off her wee brother and feel more grown up now she's in year 1, and also she had her Schultute ceremony. I had assumed that it would be first thing in the morning as parents were expected to present the Schultute, but as I gave up on plowing through my emails from my week away, I missed the email which told me that it was going to be at lunch time. Which was a bit of a bugger as I can't get to the school at that time and Stevie couldn't take time off work. So there's my first parental fail of the academic year!

The photo therefore comes courtesy of one of the other mums.

Sometimes €10 for a bit of decorated cardboard is a bargain

Life teaches you many things along the way, and the lesson I have learned over the past couple of weeks is:

No child should be allowed to know of the existence of sequins until they are at least 8 years old.

And in case that's not enough:



Gold lame fabric will suffice in an emergency for wiping a child's bum, but it will look so odd you'll laugh.

So, sequins.

I am so over them. Admittedly, it's my own fault. When Orla chose a plain pink Schultute I rejoiced at the money I was saving. And I also figured it would keep her busy on a little craft project for a few hours. *sigh* how wrong can I be?

I asked her how she'd like to decorate it and she said she wanted love hearts and sequins. I let her choose some fabric to cut hearts from (gold lame- I'd been thinking of a pretty pink gingham, but she looked at me in disgust, and well, turns out bling is cheaper) and of course, guess who ended up cutting out the hearts. Then she wanted sequins glued round the edges of the hearts. I poured them out, gave her the glue, showed her how to apply it, and set her off. 5 sequins in and she was fed up. "Can you just help me a bit?"

Well, sure I can! To give her her due, she stuck around for a minute watching me do it, and then went off to do something less mind-numbing. And so I sat for hours, glueing individual sequins on, all the while thinking it was utterly ridiculous and I should just leave her to decorate the damn schultute herself, and how I was a total mug and should have realised that sequins were a bad idea, and that there were probably children her age sewing blooming sequins on t-shirts in India in intricate designs.

Once completed, my lone typing finger ached with a fresh rawness from applying a few thousand sequins. Orla gave her nod of approval but declared that it needed something 'more'. Wracking my brain, I suggested that perhaps a bit of potato printing might be just the ticket. And so I carved a nice heart shape, let her loose with my acrylics, and bam! She just splodged it on so carelessly it actually looked like a potato, and not a pretty heart.

Well, hey, I'm not spending hours sequinning just for someone to come along and ruin all my good efforts! So guess who ended up doing the potato printing?

But you know, it just still wasn't right. Or so I was told. Couldn't I just add some more sequins to it all over? Well, sure I could! I don't need lunch like the rest of you! And couldn't we do something with the extra gold fabric? Absolutely! Let me just lose a couple of hours of my sleep staying up hand sewing it to the top edge!

You think we're done? Oh no. We're heading back to Scotland tomorrow and plan on buying some large fake colored jewels to stick on it... All this effort for 10 minutes of ceremony.... *sigh*

If you fancy reading some more about Schultuten, try this: Schultute: a very rough guide

The German Schoolbags

Never before have I seen such beautiful school bags...ahem.

Now if you remember, once apon a time I had a little ponder over German school bags & their general lack of appeal, weight, size, blah, blah. I couldn't understand why something so ugly could cost so much. Then you helpful readers enlightened me to the world of the Schulranzen and of lists that German schools supply with regulation stationary that *must* be bought and used. Turns out that for quite a lot of money, many people are happy not to have to shop around for coloured pencils and pass holders if they come included in the ugly schoolbag.

Well, guess what? I've very nearly gone and bought the darn things. Nearly, but not quite. It all came about as a result of both kids feet getting bigger. Seriously. Last year I bought Orla a cute little backpack from M&S that basically covered her needs (P.E. kit, packed lunch, occasional additional items) and she took her swimming kit in a different swim bag. It was pretty perfect. And then her feet kept growing, and growing. And all of a sudden towards the end of last term the girl with the biggest feet in the class (of which she is very proud) can barely fit her trainers in her bag along with her packed lunch. Hamish needless to say is only a size or two behind her.

My plan was to wait until we went to the UK before doing a giant school shopping trip which would include school bags for both Orla & Hamish (who will be starting Reception in September), but when looking online most of the kids rucksacks I've seen have been the same size as the one Orla had last year. And then, one day, I was walking through Karstadt and saw the perfect sized rucksack.

Today, I bit the bullet and bought two Scout VI rucksacks. Scout is one of the main players in the whole Schulranzen game. These though are perfect for smaller children who don't have to carry a million thigs with them everyday. Hamish chose a dinosaur design, and is thoroughly pleased with the mesh pockets at the side where he can keep a juice cup, and Orla eventually settled on a butterfly design (it was between that and a unicorn design). So there you go, give me a couple of years, and I'll be transferring them into a German school and walloping great big ugly Schulranzen on their backs, saying, "Aren't they lovely?" as my inner German finally emerges.

The going rate for these smaller rucksacks is 33 Euros each, but you can find them online from prices as low as 19 Euros. I found an online retailer with good prices called Ranzen-Berlin which just so happens to be nearish us, as in we walked for what felt like ages from Rathaus Steglitz U-Bahn station in a thunderstorm to get there but they had absolutely loads of choice and tons of regulation stationary (evident by the people wandering round with lists) and had a massive selection of Schultuten too including ones which matched the school bags!

Links:
Scout website
Scout VI rucksack patterns
Ranzen-Berlin (a really good shop if you're in Berlin, but also good online prices)

Schultüte: a very rough guide

Prepare for an assault on your eyes. For it's Schultüte time. These mystified me when we first arrived in Germany, I couldn't work out what they might be for, and didn't know then even what they were called. I assumed they were for putting children's presents in, but they seemed such an awkward unusable shape for most things that I couldn't see how that concept would have taken off. The last year with Orla starting school I was told that she should have one to bring with her on her first day, though it turned out that in actual fact she doesn't need one until this year. So, while I blind you with garish colour, here's the low-down on them.

Make your own with supplies from Idee (though you can end up spending more doing it this way)

So reliable old Wikipedia says "When children in Germany and Austria set off for their first day in school upon entering first grade, their parents and/or grandparents present them with a big cardboard cone, prettily decorated and filled with toys, chocolate, candies, school supplies, and various other goodies. It is given to children to make this anxiously awaited first day of school a little bit sweeter."


And there you have it. If you are a novice at Schultüte-filling, then you might be wary of buying school supplies to go in it, as most German school have regulations regarding the equipment your child should have for school, and will supply you with a list of items plus the brands that they should be. However, you'll also find that most places that sell Schultüten rather handily have lots of the regulation school supplies right next to them. Bonus! It's quite good fun putting together a Schultüte, and I think it's a lovely tradition that I would love to take back to the UK. I thoroughly enjoyed buying little toys, and paint brushes, and novelty erasers, and coloured pencils when I did it last year. It's like a mid-year Christmas stocking. Though you may want to take some medicinal salts with you on this shopping trip when you clock the price of coloured pencils and those kids paint sets, and realise you're going to have to deny yourself that nice top from Esprit you saw from the escalator on the way up.

The selection at Karstadt, from tiny to huge, mostly all with recognisable characters and brands on them.

 Size: Does it matter? Who knows. I think it probably does. Last year the school's instruction was not to buy the utterly massive ones. So I didn't. And when we turned up on day one and saw the kids going in with their Schultüten, we could see that that advice was 99% ignored. A Swiss friend of ours here says that it should be the "size of the child". Hmmm... if you know more about this please advise in the comments below, but I can't help but think that given the range of sizes available, it's probably not so much of a big deal.

Stuck for ideas? You can even buy books of ideas for girls ones and boys ones, and you can't go wrong with a mountain of crepe paper. Well, no, you probably can. Especially where glitter glue is concerned.

 Cost: I've seen some big ones in Kaufland (the supermarket) for Euros 3.99, and they look ok. I also thought Karstadt were pretty reasonable. The medium sized Spiderman one that Hamish wants (in the second photo from top) was Euros 3.99. The large ones with generic unicorns and pirates and things on are as you'd expect cheaper than the Hot Wheels, or Barbie, or Disney Princess ones which cost around 10 Euros. You'll find the Princess Lillifee & Cap'n Sharkey ones are priced just a little bit higher just to piss you off.

Of course, given that we've learned over the course of the year that what school is really all about is testing your ability as a mother to undertake endless creative projects against the clock, you might as well get some practise in and make your own. No, it won't save you any money, but it will teach your child the lesson 'If you want something doing well, you might as well do it yourself'. If they don't like your ideas they can do it themselves. It'll be hours of creative fun, and you'll finally be able to get rid of that rug you hate, because it's going to get ruined with glitter glue.

Anyway, I'm off-topic. The big basic cardboard cones in Idee cost around 4 Euros. But unless you have a stack of other materials at home, or are planning just to close your eyes and take a Sharpie to it, you'll find all that highly tempting glittery paper and the nicely packaged bits and bobs they have are going to take your spend to  way over the 10 Euro mark. Though one friend is printing Spiderman images off the internet and sticking these on which I think is a great idea. Desperate mums laugh in the face of copyright law.

Why not just go to the KaDeWe, where you'll find all the big names in Schulranzen (those awful-looking German school bags) are ready to sell you something equally ugly. (Though I thought the pink deer one by Samsonite's Sammies range was ok. 20 Euros though - is it worth it?). When you could buy a kit with all the bits to make you stay up cursing late into the night, for exactly the same price? Hmm... I think you know what I'd choose :)

If you look at the sea of DIY Schultüte supplies in Idee and feel lost with so much choice, they have kits that you can buy which contain everything you need to make a certain design. Handy, but they are super-expensive. For the same price you could take yourself (well excluding travel costs) to the KaDeWe and buy one of the branded ones that match the Schulranzen. They have ones by Samsonite, Scout, and I can't remember the other makes. These ones come in at 20 Euros. I was expecting to find some super expensive ones for sale here, but the KaDeWe has sadly let me down on this score. If you want to spend big bucks on an item which will be used for one day and then become a princess hat, then you need to take yourself to one of the little individual kids boutique shops.

Last week I was having a browse when I saw a quite lovely looking fabric-wrapped Schultüte on a shelf. It had that kind of 'Bavarian-style' thing going on with a combination of felt, gingham, and reindeer, and it was embroidered with the child's name. It was 40 Euros, which seemed a bit much even if you were going to pack it away in the loft as a childhood heirloom, given that under the fabric it's still just a cardboard cone. BUT, you're forgetting one thing: You could get ahead of the fancy dress costume making game and stay up all night replicating it with your sewing machine. It would probably only cost you about 3 euros for the fabric, and what price do you put on sleep anyway?

I mean think of how great you'll feel having stayed up half the night, on that first day of school when their little eyes alight on it, and they look into your half-shut ones and say, "But I wanted Fireman Sam...". Try and save your tears for when you see them off at the school gate.

We don't need no education...yet

Warning: This post is quite long and honestly, is possibly only of interest to ex-pats in Berlin who have children below school age.

This week is Berlin's school application week for all the little children due to start school in September 2012. And to be honest I never thought that I would need to be bothering with school options in Berlin - given that I was gently told which school Orla would go to, but in the past few weeks a number of things have happened that suddenly jolted me out of my blissful ignorance, and set me on a trail of investigation on this very subject.

First off, we have been talking about whether on not we will be in Berlin next September. Stevie has floated the idea of having his contract extended to his boss given that budgets will be decided in the near future, but we have heard that you don't tend to hear if you have had your contract extended until very nearly the last minute. As in, a months notice or less. The hope is that you'll crumble early and take a local contract. But we are very much still undecided about our future here. And school is becoming the number one deciding factor in that decision.

If we don't get an extension, and decide to stay then Orla needs a new school. I had thought of that and casually thought 'oh well, I guess I will just take her along to the Nelson Mandela school and get her in there'. Patently, I am very naiive. I haven't been through the school application process in the UK before but I had heard it can be pretty nerve-wracking, but somehow I just thought it would be less problematic here in Germany. Especially as the school of my choosing is a bilingual school - how many people would honestly be needing that? I think the current figure is kazillions.

I met up with a friend for an early morning beer in the top floor bar or the KaDeWe. The beer it became apparent was essential as she told me of her sleepless nights worrying about whether or not she'd be able to get her child into a school in Berlin. By the end of our conversation I was a bundle of nerves (especially as the application window was to start before we got back from our October break) and all of a sudden the poster in the lift at Kita heralded information I knew I just had to be able to read and understand before it got me to the 4th floor. In fact, I considered stealing it to translate at my leisure, but it would have poked out of my bag, so they would have had me pegged as the Schulanfanger Poster Dieb before the half term holiday even started.

Luckily for me I found it on the internet as I was Googling like mad to find out what I needed to do. It's a good place to start if you need information on what you need to do. But here's my guide to applying for bilingual schools in Berlin.

1. School Open Days start in October and these are useful to get a feel for the school and it's culture if nothing else. You can also learn more about the application process from the staff. Most of the Open Days are scheduled before the registration process starts, but funnily enough, occasionally they are slap bang in the middle of the registration period. Why? Nobody knows.There are theories but who can say...
2. You should (not) expect a registration  form through your door about now. I say 'not', as quite a few people have told me that their registration forms arrived too late and they just went to the school regardless during the registration week to register their child.  
3. You need to find out what your catchment school is. I hadn't a clue. And after a long search I eventually found a page where I could enter my street and postcode and it told me. And now I can't find that page again...but I will if it kills me!
4. If, like me, you failed to go to any Open Days, you could in theory have a look to see what people on ToyTown Berlin are saying. But, it's a bit frightening. Honestly, I probably wouldn't look if I were you. I looked and then I didn't sleep very well. Admittedly, you probably wouldn't sleep very well after reading the thread on where you could find American beer in this city, but that's Toytown for you. There's a market right there for a Toytown Berlin Anger Management course.
5. The best thing I have found is to speak to people: kids in the park, parents at parties, friends of friends - it's actually quite a small expat world out there, and there's bound to be someone who has kids at the school you want your kid to go to. You hear good stuff and bad stuff of course: someone stopped us outside a cafe in the summer and warned us that we should never send our kids to JFK as unless we were with the US Embassy our kids would be treated as second class citizens. On the other hand there's a German woman I know whose son has started there and he loves it. Can't say anything against the place. Everything about it is fantastic. And the same goes for all the schools. You have to just make a decision and go with it.
6. Registration: So then what you need to do is go to your local Grundschule where you would register your child if you wanted them to just go to the local school. But, if like us, you feel that your child needs to be in a bilingual school then you need to ask for  the following: "Antrag zur Aufnahme eines Kindes in eine andere Grundschule" which is a form you need to fill out giving your reasons why you want your child to go to another school. You will still retain a place at your local school until you tell them in writing that you are not taking it up. (Though someone has told me that some of the local schools are also over-subscribed - it's a joy, isn't it?). Oh and you need to take your passport and the child's passport and your registration document (the one where you had to register into your local area) and any other relevant papers.
7. Then once you have your 'release' form completed, you then need to go to the school of you choice and register your child there. If it's a bilingual school then you need to register them (and possibly have the child tested) as either a native English speaker or as a native German speaker. And here's the rub. These schools are very popular. Hideously popular. There's no point putting more than one school in the boxes where you can list 3 options. The bi-lingual schools won't even consider your application if they are in 2nd or 3rd place. It's first choice or no choice.
8. Most of the schools have an equal split between places that are given to Germans and places that are given to native English speakers. With a maximum of 28 in a class that means there are 14 places up for grabs. And with an awful lot of Germans competing for those 14 German places and far fewer English speaking expats competing for the other places what's happening now is that German parents are training their kids up to pass the test to be classed as a native English speaker, and thus increasing their chances of a place. So, it's not just a case of turning up and thinking you'll get a place automatically. 
9. And then you wait to find out if you have been granted a place. Presumably if you don't get a place you can go on a waiting list and in the mean time your child would go to the local German Grundschule and receive 'language support'. Home-schooling is not an option even if you fancied it as it's illegal here.

Admission by birthdate: In my haste to find out all about the process I didn't read the poster correctly. Here's one thing to note. The admission criteria based on the child's birthday is different in Berlin to England. I simply assumed Orla would be going to German school next year but it runs from 1st January 2006  to 31st December 2006 births and not end of August 2006 to beginning of September 2007 as we would have in the UK. On the poster it does say that children can be enrolled with birthdays up until 31st March 2007 (which is the bit I read and the bit that would seemingly say that Orla should start school) but this is only if "your child has no need for language support.". 

And because of that, yesterday instead of running around with my German-English Dictionary and all our passports in hand, I managed to relax and was able to let out a sigh of relief that I don't have to go through this... just yet. 

We still have an issue with what we do if we want to stay and a local contract for Stevie is the only way to do that. It would mean that Orla would drop out of school and have to return to kita (nursery) for another year. And that doesn't really sit well with me given that she had a bad experience getting bullied in her German kita, so I wouldn't be happy sending her back to one to struggle with her German again which puts her in a difficult position of not being able to defend herself, and so if I then have to go into battle for a bilingual kita place and don't succeed in getting one then what do I do? Go home? Maybe. It seems odd too to take her from school where she has been learning to read and write and do maths to then put her back in a 100% play environment. I don't know that that's a bad thing, but it just seems odd to stop their learning once they've started.