I have a confession. This might not come as a surprise to some of you, but it’s actually been tough being a mother to three children under the age of five. Especially in the last few months as my youngest has become more sensitive to noise and light, and as I’ve had to try to maintain perfect nap conditions for him while containing two energetic preschoolers in our one-story house, I’ve felt more like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus. In other words, I have felt like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Posts tagged Jane
German cuisine: a comforting constant
One of the small things that charmed me about our San Diego neighborhood when I first visited it, was the presence of a small, independent used cookbook store. I’d manage to only wander in once during my first year here. Sadly, it’s closing this Christmas. The owner explained to me that she can make more money working less hours by selling rarer cookbooks from home on the internet in four hours than working full-time running her shop. That’s what’s happening in America right now.
Sad as it is to lose another bookstore, let alone an independent one specializing in one of my favorite pastimes, I’ve managed to make up for lost time by visiting frequently and taking advantage of the sell-out prices. I picked up four vegetarian cookbooks for the price of $13. My German husband was not as enthusiastic as I was about these particular meatless bargain purchases. The next time I stopped by to browse, I couldn’t resist a 70s relic of a fondue and chafing dish cookbook. And last week, while I was waiting for my children to finish their music class around the corner, I wandered back in and succumbed to making some more unessential yet irresistible purchases: two German cookbooks. There was a third one but even I had to admit at that point that a third would have been excessive. Especially as I realized, the main point of this post, that the culinary styles of all three books were all the same. The same despite the fact that one was published in the 60s, another in the 70s and the last in the 80s. On two of the covers: meat, sauce, veggies. Exotically, at least I think to an American crowd, one of the veggies is fennel.
“Almanya” in San Diego
San Diego kicked off its first German Film Festival last month. It seemed to be a long time coming considering that there are an estimated 100,000 Germans living in the San Diego metro area and Orange County.
The festival opened with the screening of “Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland,” a movie written by two Turkish German sisters, Yasemin and Nesrin Şamdereli, about a Turkish immigrant family’s literal and figurative trip back to Turkey. The family immigrated during the big Gastarbeiter movement in the 60s when the patriarch left his hometown in a village near Anatolia to earn big money working in a factory which he sent back to his family. Initially unplanned, the whole family, made up of three children and later four, eventually moved to their new home in Berlin. READ MORE »
Strengthening my German Core
One of my earliest challenges of post-partum life in America was searching for an equivalent of “Rückbildungsgymnastik” here in America or post-partum pelvic floor training. (There’s no easy translation.) The likes of Stroller Strides and specialized pre- and post-natal personal trainers who could help burn all of that baby fat were easy enough to find, and while I wouldn’t mind losing the 3-month bulge which might raise an eyebrow of “is she or isn’t she” to a stranger, the only similarity that these exercises share to Rückbildungsgymnastik is the post-partum descriptor. READ MORE »
Finding Childcare in Germany
I mentioned in my previous post that spending the first year of baby’s life with him or her at home is common and expected in Germany, at least in the west. On the other hand, it isn’t so easy to go back to work within the first year or before age three because of the limited childcare options. While finding a Kindergarten (KIGA) in your neighborhood should be possible, finding one with a Kindertagesstätte (KITA), translated to day care center, or Kinderkrippe is harder. Even if you were able to get a spot for your three-year old at the KIGA walking distance down the street, if it doesn’t have a KITA, you might have to drive your one-year old across town to a Kindertagesstätte or two, that is if you got a spot and that is, if your town, city or village is big enough to have a KITA. READ MORE »
The First Twelve Months
I’ve been enjoying getting to know my new baby during these first three months of his life. I organized a Mommy & Me Yoga/Baby Massage class at our local yoga studio here in San Diego to give myself that regular undistracted one-on-one time with baby Lenny. During the massage portion, I enjoy warm memories of taking a baby massage class with my first born while we were still living in southern Germany.
One of the side benefits to taking a baby class is getting to know some of the other mothers. After each class we find ourselves at the local cafe exchanging stories about our same aged babies and getting to know each other better. This aspect of motherhood is pretty critical to my own well-being as a mother. On one of these recent occasions, I was enjoying the conversation of one of these fellow mothers and was suddenly struck with a pang of guilt as I thought of a mutual friend of ours who would be going back to work soon, three-months postpartum. It was a new feeling, a new world feeling. READ MORE »
Enjoy the Silence
It used to annoy me that I couldn’t do any shopping on Sundays and that our Saturdays were so hectic racing from one shop to the next when I first moved to Germany. Like anything in life, I got used to it. In fact, I started to like the fact that there was some time without the claws of commercialism … although that was never a major concern in southwest rural Germany.
The same goes for “Hausordnung.” Coming from the land of the free, it takes Americans some getting used to not only be able to run out to the grocery store or Walmart at 2 AM and run a load of laundry at a similarly unconventional hour. But, then I found that my mind and soul got used to having silence midday and roughly between 8 and 8.
When I came back to America, READ MORE »
A German Sense of Order Restored
As I’ve recently blogged, I’ve been pregnant for the last nine months in America. It was a miserable pregnancy. While I was fortunate to not have any complications such as gestational diabetes or preeclampsia, I was debilitated by the discomforts of being so large and being stretched and pulled and swollen and from a significant decrease of energy. With two little ones who require a lot of attention, it was necessary for me to bring in some extra help in the way of assorted non-German babysitters and grandparents.
While I’ve been extremely grateful for the help and couldn’t have survived the pregnancy without it, it resulted in some new influences infiltrating our attempts at maintaining a sense of German order. READ MORE »
Made in America
My family and I went through yet another life changing experience four weeks ago with the birth of our third child here in San Diego, CA. Child #1 and Child #2 were born in southern Germany, both positive experiences, so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I embarked on this experience in a different country the third time around. I began chronicling this experience in a previous post. Here is the rest of the story.
READ MORE »
Living the German Way Part III
I was disappointed to read that my fellow blogger, Sarah Fürstenberger, was leaving our ranks as German Way Co-blogger for the time being. She and I had become friends through recording by blogging the same chapter in life as American wives of German husbands living in Germany. Coincidentally, she and I also left Germany at the same time this past summer.
Although I was sad to no longer be able to keep up with her American/German family’s new Irish life through her blog posts, I could also understand her sentiment that her heart wasn’t in blogging about the German Way anymore. Often, when my week rolled around to blog, I felt at a loss as to what to blog about. It’s been about eight months since we left Germany, and our lives have significantly changed: our daughters, though still bilingual, speak mostly English now, we start to shiver at 60 degrees F (16 degrees C), our consumption of paper products jumped exponentially when we became members of Costco, and we barely buy or eat cold cuts (Aufschnitt).
I realized though that despite the dilution of our German-ness, there were beliefs and pursuits of the German Way of Life that I was still committed to. First and foremost on that list has been finding a pediatrician that suited my parenting philosophy. How do I characterize that parenting philosophy? Well, to oversimplify for the sake of this blog post, it is pretty mainstream German for under six year olds, in other words, more kumbaya and fostering play-based learning. READ MORE »
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