Being five in Germany

Two things my daughter came home from kindergarten with:

I mentioned I wanted to learn to knit socks like the mother of the 20-year-old who was in the clinic with my daughter. Daughter says, "Like Barbara's Kleinmutter, you mean?"

A Kleinmutter, it seems, is (in my daughter's little mind) what you are when you are a mother of a mostly-grown child. Klein =  small, see. And a Grossmutter is what you are when your child has a child. Gross = big. She says I'm just a plain Mutter, though.

Which size are you?

And here is a rhyme she came home chanting:

Ein kleine Mickey Maus
geht ins Rathaus.
Rathaus brennte,
Mickey Maus rennte,
Ampel rot,
Mickey Maus tod.

(One little Mickey Mouse
goes into city hall.
City hall burns,
Mickey Mouse runs.
Stop light red,
Mickey Mouse dead.)

Nice, huh? She learned it from her friends, also age five. It's nice to teach kids not to cross the street when the light is red, but...a bit gruesome. Kind of like the pictorial example of just why you need to wear your bike helmet. My oldest is in fourth grade, and they have a whole course on bike safety, with a booklet akin to the drivers manual, and a written and practical test administered by the police. They had the story of two girls who did an experiment with a watermelon and a helmet. One put the watermelon in a helmet and dropped it from a standing position to the ground. It was fine. The other dropped the watermelon with no protection from a standing position. Splat. Red splat everywhere. Yes, there were pictures. German media for kids is mostly very padded and safe these days, but occasionally Grimm and Struwwelpeter still make it through when it comes to safety issues.

book for boys!

If you have a boy who reads, get this book!! The Dangerous Book for Boys. It's originally British, has an American edition (with slight changes), as well as a German edition (also with slight changes of content). It is a nonfiction book that's part scout manual, part advice, part history, part answers to science and inventions, space, magnets, how to play football or soccer (depending on edition), and even includes a short section on understanding girls. Girls would like this book, too, but it's so perfect for boys because it's just what so many boys actually like to read, as opposed to "boring" stories. (My extremely avid reader absolutely REFUSED to read or listen to Bread and Jam for Frances in first grade. He'd rather have me read science books to him.)

Very, VERY cool book!

nonverbal skills

Not much writing today, although I did get to wander the bookstore, like I said. It was really the first well day when everyone was happily off at school and I wasn't required to be on call for one thing or another, and could shop for non-food items. Thanks to the "Kleinmutter" of the girl in my daughter's hospital room, who was knitting socks to pass the time, I'm feeling the urge to try them myself. However. Knitting is a nonverbal skill for me, so learning a new trick is...tricky. I learned to knit in Chile because the "mamita," or retired lady I rented from/lived with was horrified that my mother had never taught me 1) to knit, 2) to wax the floor with real wax and a waxing machine, and 3) to make stuff like charquican. Right. Well, she got #1 taken care of, anyway, and now I own a "bufanda chilena," or Chilean scarf.

The thing about Chileans and knitting is that they learn by watching someone else. There are names for stitches (tejer, meaning to knit, and reves, meaning reversed), but they don't write down patterns. They just look at something they like and just...knit. Hand-knit sweaters that would go for $400-800 in the States? They just wing it. Lovely stuff. So anyway, I learned the basic stitches, plus some cool ones (I can knit two different pieces at one time; useful for sweater cuffs) and also slippers. When I got back to the States and wanted to learn more, I couldn't make any sense out of those codey things in books. k2p2 huh? I figured out over a loooong time how to read some of it, but a lot is just kind of winging it. Anyway, socks are something I've never done, but they looked so easy. ROTFL. I got some yarn and these double-pointed needles today and some fantastic instructions--in German. Let's just say I've picked out the first two rows about six times now. I really wish I'd asked the mamita how to make socks. It would have been so much easier just to see it. I'm such a verbal person that it drives me crazy not to be able to use words to figure this out.