Growing Pains

Our life is so different here that I can almost hear the creaking and groaning of the new reality trying to take shape.  It's really not so easily summed up by the fact we are living around the world from all that's familiar.  It's more in the pace of our days, how they stretch into a quietly lived week, how I fight against myself to try to accept and thrive in it.

Most dramatic is the kids' school schedules.  We all manage to get ourselves up and out for the walk to school by 8:20.  No sweat.  Normal.  But then it's all over and kids are home at 12:30!  WHOA.  Si goes back to school on Monday afternoons from 2:00 - 4:00.  I think I should be signing Millie up for after school activities, but honestly, I am currently too overwhelmed to figure this out just yet.  And baby Hannah's even in the mix.  She started at the kindergarten this week, and once we've made it through the weeks-long adaptation process (which involves me staying with her at school for increasing lengths of time until she's ready to stay on her own), she'll probably spend three mornings a week there too.

So all of this leaves me with approximately one hour a day to get out of the house with any less than three kids to run errands.  Gone are the days of traipsing the mall with a stroller and cup of starbucks.  If I manage to get out of here, it's a panic filled dash through the market to get some groceries (or maybe boots, coats, school supplies, shovels, or whatever crazy other thing is being sold smack in the middle of these Euro grocery stores).  Today it was the completion of the shockingly complicated process of printing out some pictures for a required photo album for Hannah's school (imagine asking where to find a photo-printing kiosk in another language.  Then actually figuring out how to use it.)

My days and weeks are becoming what they should have been all along, I suppose.  Home-focused.  We stay here all week.  The kids play, I unpack and make lists and hang pictures.  In the good times, I bake or cook.  In the best times, I plan and work with the kids on reading, math, and history lessons (lots of supplemental schooling needs to happen here so they can keep up for our eventual return to the States).  I have great dreams of reading more, figuring out how to exercise outside in the snow, cooking meals with the kids, hosting my German neighbors for coffee.  Wow. A real German haus-frau, I am.  I figure I'm really not far off from knitting and canning things.  I am unrecognizable.

In any case, if you know me well, you know how different this is and how difficult a transition it has been.  Task oriented, on the move, out to see the world.  There's no good way to check things off a list when you go days without leaving the house.  But I hope this is what the kids need: more of their mom, more comfort at home, a slower pace.  Time will tell.  Perhaps this will be the real gift of our years here in this foreign land.