Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

ed note: not meant to be a pity post, but just filling you in if you wanted to know what we've been up to. I should be writing about our sight seeing, but sorry, you get this first! (pictures have nothing to do with the story here--just good color!) It is the first day back to school for Elisabeth after a week long February break.  The first half of it was spent recovering from illness, illness that started during the last few days of school for Elisabeth.  It was sort of a repeat from right before Christmas break, only worse.    My scariest moment through the whole ordeal, well, there were at least two.  The first was last Thursday night when I heard Elisabeth up at about 1:30 AM.  She wasn’t calling for me, but she has changed since her last sickness (December, right before Christmas break).  She doesn’t necessarily wake me up just because she is up and uncomfortable.  That is nice, but it also alarms me sometimes.  This particular time I...

Elisabeth wrote this poem yesterday, with a little bit of spelling help from her German friends.  You can probably get the gist of it and see some similarities between English and German.  I was just a bit tickled, if you can't tell! Ich Bin die Kleine Katze  Ich bin die Kleine Katze.      Ich bin nicht groß  Ich  bin nicht schwarz. Ich bin klein und Ich bin braun. Ich bin die Kleine Katze. Ich esse Fleisch und Wurst.  Ich trinke Milch und Wasser. Ich bin die Kleine Katze Ich leibe meine Familie. Die leute in meiner Familie sind:meine Schwester, mein Bruder,meine Mama und  mein Papa. Ich leibe meine Familie.

Some of you have heard me complain and cry about Henry’s Kindergarten experience.  It has certainly had its ups and downs.  But right now we are in an UP and I’m grateful.  For the last week or so, as soon as we come back from taking Elisabeth to the tram to meet her middle school buddies who accompany her to school, Henry asks me, “When can we leave?  Will I have time to play?”  Morgenkreis or Morning Circle is at 9:00 and that is the official beginning of Kindergarten, but he can arrive any time after 7:30.  It starts getting busier between 8:20 and 9:00.  So these days we are sure to leave the house by 8:30 and sometimes earlier so Henry has “time to play.”  It makes me chuckle because he has time to play all morning, but there is something special to him about getting there before the bells ring.  I asked him if he wanted me to bring him right after taking Elisabeth to the tram.  That would be a bit before 8:00, but I think he still ...

I’m marveling over our budding bilingual boy. It’s true that he is not bilingual yet, but I am fascinated by the changes going on in our household. This happens all the time, I know, but it is a different feeling to experience it first hand. I guess I feel like the parent of a newborn who exclaims, “She pursed her lips and cooed! It was so amazing!” I have known several bilingual children over the years--friends who grew up in Mexico and whose children have always been speaking Spanish and English, friends who moved from the Netherlands to the U.S. when their oldest was two are among those was around more. I remember when he didn’t know any English, but then gradually he knew more and more, but I didn’t get to watch it so close up. In these two examples the parents were already fluent in English, so it only seemed natural that their kids would become fluent in English. They told me they didn’t speak English at home, but I don’t think I really believed them. As late as 2 week...

On New Year’s Eve we were invited to the home of a family from Henry’s kindergarten. While I was a bit nervous about attending our first German social gathering, it turned out to be quite relaxed and comfortable. We had two kinds of soup for dinner, plenty of champagne, fire crackers at 6 PM for the kids, and then a couple hours of conversation while we waited for midnight. I had told this friend how we had bailed early on a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago, and that was the last one we had been to, but I promised to make a good effort to stay until midnight this year. We put the kids to bed upstairs, so they made it quite easy to stay late. We enjoyed comparing stories of how we met our spouses, differences in Kindergarten vs. preschool vs. keeping kids at home, politics and potty training. The time flew by and soon the t.v. was on, showing us the concert at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. At midnight our new friends called out, “Frohes Neues!” which means “Happy New!” short...

It was time for Christmas trees to be collected this week. I had heard that there was a day that they would be collected and assumed I would need to drag it out to the street, like we do in the U.S. A week or so after Christmas near church I saw piles of trees, but I thought, “Well, that’s in the city. The people that live in apartments need to bring theirs here.” I saw several piles around the city that day, and one on the way home from our tram to our house. That evening I asked my friend B what day we needed to take our trees out. She explained that from the 13th to the 20th or so, trees would be collected . . .from the pile I had seen walking home. So rather than dragging it to the street we would need to drag it oh, a half mile. Now, true, we could’ve put it in our car. But what do you picture when you see a month old Christmas tree in your car? A mess. So, after seeing the pile of trees grow and grow, and even seeing some trees being dragged down the street, the kids and I tried ...

Henry was coloring with the markers in the new pencil case he got for Christmas from our landlady. Something about the picture didn’t please him, and in a fit of anger and frustration he cried out, “I’m not going to color this any more! I’m going to throw it away.” He ran over to the trash can in the kitchen and cried out, in the same urgent tone, “Which trash can does it go in?” In the first picture, from left to right: paper and card board, "Gelber Sack" or "Yellow sack" for plastic and metal, "Restmüll"--everything else, except for the compost which I will spare you. I am always impressed that when our Restmüll is picked up once a week, it is rarely full, and see how cute it is? The container with the blue lid is for paper. The container on the right is for Restmüll.