progress and frustration

I knew this day would come some day and the day came. Two days ago, when I brought Jonte to bed he said that he would like to go back to Kiel again. He wants to play and live there again. Asking him why, he answered, he doesn't understand all the kids and can't speak English. I could feel how sad and frustrated he was, which of course, made me feel sad - especially knowing how social Jonte is and how he loves to interact with others and be part of a group of kids and realizing that the language barrier is in his way right now and what stress that causes him. Theda instead is convinced that she can already speak English :-). The truth is that they pick up a lot of words. I am impressed by how they also pick up words and sentences and use them by intuition. About two weeks ago, we left the house to go to preschool, we sat in the car and I started driving and Theda and Jonte were shouting "Bye, bye house. See you later". One block further up, Jonte asked: Mom, what does "See you later" actually mean? So he used it in a correct way, but didn't really know what he was saying. When they play together, mostly in the mornings, they speak in their fantasy-English-language and it sounds like English more and more. They often play preschool and they sing the preschool songs. I also started to read more English books (since we got simple children books from the library last Saturday) and I hardly have to translate - often the pictures are explanation enough. Though they don't speak English yet to other people (as far as I know, except "My name is ... and I am 3 yrs."), I think they are on a good track.

I am convinced about that, especially because another day came which I expected to come some day, but honestly I didn't expect it to come so quickly: Jonte started to correct my pronounciation of English names. The other day he corrected me, when I talked about our neighbor Terry and today I could not pronounce the name Sam right. In his eyes I just couldn't do it.

Other than that days are exciting. Yesterday (Tuesday) I went to Home depot together with Narne while Theda and Jonte were at preschool. I wanted to get more wood to build another raised bed which we can use as a compost during winter and we will turn it into a vegetable bed next spring. And I wanted to get some construction material to cover our raised bed during winter. Since I had a hard time transporting all this material through the market with Narne, I found some guys working at home depot - I told them what I would like to buy, they collected it for me in the market and brought it to the loading zone, while I paid and pulled into the loading zone. They loaded the material, fixed the steel construction fence-like thing on the roof of my car and I could go. How easy!!!

Also yesterday night, we had the first parent meeting at the preschool. These parent meetings take place once a month and are part of the parent education program at the North Seattle Community College. The coops are run by the Community Colleges and so we as parents are students at the College and get credits for taking part in the preschool/ parent education program. Besides talking about organizational stuff at these meetings, each meeting has a special child-raising, early childhood developmental topic. There is a special parent educator with an educational and/or psychological background who observes the preschool class and who leads these sessions. Yesterdays topic was "Development of our children" - how have they developed during the past three months?, what are celebrations and what are challenges in living with the children. I found it really nice to step back from daily routine and think about these things and to once more realize how wonderful these kids are. Some of you having kids or working with kids might be interested in this link:

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/homefamily/children/development/ages_stages.htm


Now it is late at night. Friends and family in Germany and Norway and South Africa and wherever you are, you are about to start a new day, as we go to bed. Tomorrow will be another exciting day: Theda, Jonte and I will go to a children's play at the Children's Theater downtown. We go with a large group of kids and parents from the preschool and we will see the play: "If you give a mouse a cookie". So I am curios and very much looking forward to this.

Narne will stay with Sunke at work and hopefully take his noon nap there, so that Sunke is not too much distracted from work. Narne has overcome his grumpy days and is quite relaxed. He is excited to push himself up, standing on hands and feet - and we are all excited as well. He practises a lot and we will see when he actually will move forward. Other than that we finally made him eat his evening cereal. Over the past month we have tried to offer him various things: cereal with applesauce, cereal with orange juice, "swedish milk" - he was not convinced at all about this and mostly made funny faces when we once again tried to get the spoon or the bottle into his mouth. Today I tried the plain rice cereal without anything and he ate it! So hopefully he is stuffed and I get longer nights!

Sorry for not loading up any pictures - I really need to go to bed now!