Today

Both boys wake earlier than they do on a weekday. The Small Boy sneaks to the bathroom, I can feel him trying to be quiet, but Boychen knows he is up and calls to his brother. He always wants his brother to be the one to open the door to his room, help him get out of bed. Small Boy goes to get him and they stay in the Boychen’s room, with the door closed, playing – horses, I think, from the sound effects; later, cars. This, then, the sweetness.

* * *

I am making pancakes when they start squabbling with each other in the living room; I let it go, giving them the space and time to figure out how to deescalate things themselves, but it goes in the other direction. Boychen hits the Small Boy, and I give him a two-minute penalty for unnecessary roughness, and Boychen tells me he doesn’t like me. I don’t like you, Mama! I’m sorry to hear that, I say, I still like you. But it stings.

* * *

Five minutes later they are happily putting together a puzzle of the United States. They finish it themselves, then come eat pancakes. Small Boy eats four. My mother used to joke that my brother, the hockey player, had a hollow leg. Yes, it would seem so. Boychen, the child who survives somehow on air and goldfish crackers, eats a respectable two. They drink their milk, ask if they are allowed to watch TV. The yelling, the hit, the penalty: forgotten

* * *

What will they remember from these teeter-totter childhood days? The horses and the puzzle, or the squabble?

Flipside

Not, mind you, that it’s all sweetness and light around here. The same boy who can so impress me on the ice can drive me to distraction around the house. Don’t think, for example, that he doesn’t ignore his brother and pretend to be asleep when the Boychen comes to wake him up for school, ignoring him and ignoring him even as the Boychen’s distress grows, ignoring him as Boychen cries and grows ever more hysterical until it takes us twenty minutes to calm Boychen down enough to be able to eat breakfast. For example. That casual disregard for Boychen’s feelings – I don’t know how to talk about it (nor do I like to, here) and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s jealousy and sibling rivalry and some days I’m at my wits’ end. It is Boychen-specific and inconsistent. They can be adorable brothers together, and especially when we are out in the world, in museums or on playgrounds, Small Boy can be quite protective of his little brother. At home he can play perfectly well with his little brother or he can suddenly be… unkind.

And yes, I’ve read Siblings Without Rivalry although I suppose it’s time to read it again. In all my spare time. Actually I can read it next week, in the evenings, when I have nothing to do because R will be away on a business trip to the States.

And can somebody please tell me how it came to be the middle of September? And am I the only one wondering what has happened to the year?

A boy, bigger

Back-to-school time in the US has prompted a flurry of posts about parental anxiety over the transition to school, about wanting to stop time, about how it’s all going so fast. And it is. So very fast. The Small Boy is so tall that sometimes people don’t believe me when I say he’s six – he was almost kept out of a shopping center’s playland yesterday until I offered up his precise birthday. But the thing is, it’s good. It’s amazing, actually, watching the Small Boy grow and grow apart from me. That is the goal, yes? That they can walk out the door themselves, walk to school themselves, put on their own hockey equipment, take off their own skates? That they grow older, and taller, and into themselves?

Every week at hockey training Small Boy practices some new step towards independence. It’s interesting to me, because it is clearly practice – lately, after I’ve parked in the parking garage and he’s hauled the hockey bag out of the trunk, he says to me: “I’m going to go ahead to the stadium now. You wait here so I can get ahead of you,” and off he goes, up the elevator and off to the rink. I wait a few minutes, and take the stairs. Inside the stadium, he gets himself and the bag down the stairs without help – he’s figured it out since the day Nice Woman had to help him, and it involves crashing the bag down the stairs, but that’s the way the Piccolos (the next age group up) do it, so that’s what he does too. Every week he takes over some small task that I had been doing. I used to fill his water bottle and carry it to the players’ bench, but he does that now. He just started doing it one day. After practice he gets his skates off himself (getting them on and properly laced up is still quite the challenge). He runs off to the showers without me – I’ve been told in no uncertain terms not to hang around making sure he gets all the soap out of his hair. After practice, in the parking garage, he hoists the equipment bag into the trunk of the car himself. (Getting the bag up the flight of stairs and out the stadium door, that’s the last barrier. He tried once, but it’s too much.)

Small Boy asked me recently if he could take the train to practice, and although he then immediately said no, he was joking, I don’t think he was entirely. I think he wants that. I think he is already looking forward and seeing the day when he is one of the older boys who does this whole practice thing without his mom’s help. And when I tear up a bit at that thought, and I do, it is not from a sense sadness or loss but sheer wonder and pride at this child who is becoming, so astonishingly, his very own self.

Gooooooaaaaaal!

Small Boy scored his first goal in a proper hockey tournament today; he tipped in a nice rebound after the opposing goalie deflected a shot (though Small Boy’s team still lost the game and ended up third out of four teams in the tournament). The tournament was fun, and gave me an opportunity to continue this strange new friend-making adventure I seem to be embarking upon, but my favorite part (aside from the Small Boy’s goal, of course) was this:

The parents were only allowed to help kids tie their skates. Everything else, the players had to do themselves. This is already strongly encouraged at training, but something about it being Game Day made the kids take it more seriously. I hung out in a corner of the locker room until it was time to lace up Small Boy’s skates, then went out into the hallway. Shortly before the trainers closed the door to the locker room, I went to take a peek to see what jersey number Small Boy was wearing (they don’t have numbers at practice but rather train in practice jerseys) and the kids were just putting on their jerseys. It can be tricky for a little kid to pull a jersey on over their shoulder pads, and then the jerseys often cling to the velcro straps on the elbow pads (and sometimes pull them open again), and I usually help Small Boy with this. How was he going to do this, I wondered, and then saw that kids had buddied up and were helping each other with their jerseys. Small Boy was straightening the jersey of Pro Defenseman’s Kid, so I turned and went back into the hall. They clearly had it covered.

They know what they’re doing, these coaches. They’re developing the whole player, not just the bits on the ice. Evidence that it’s working: after we got clobbered 18-2 in the first game, the team surrounded the goalie and everybody patted him on the head, the shoulder, encouraging taps to the shin pads with their sticks, and they all lined up together to shake hands with the winning team. Then they huddled around the coach and got ready for the next game.

First grade, first day

Small Boy started first grade today, excited and nervous and unsure about leaving behind the free-for-all play of Kindergarten for the more serious business of learning. It will be a transition, certainly; he told me tonight that it had gone well but that “there’s a lot more sitting still than in Kindy.” He had Sport (what we’d call gym class) today, but he only has it three days a week and I think that’s going to be rough for the new first graders – they’re used to blowing off a lot of steam in Kindergarten. But the day went well. It certainly helps that he’s moved on to first grade with almost all the 6 year olds from his kindergarten class.

The whole school welcomed the new “SchülerInnen” – school kids – on their first day. Before, they were Kindergarteners. Now, they’re school kids. The incoming first grade class gathered at the bottom of the walk leading up to the school together with the parents and the two first grade teachers. Then the second-graders, dressed as ladybugs (the ladybug is a good luck symbol in Switzerland) and rattling noise-makers, came to get them. Each second grader took one or two first graders by  the hand and led them up the walk to the school where the rest of the students waited, lining both sides of the walk and the hallway and the stairs leading up to the first grade classrooms. They sung, the whole school, a song of welcome for the new class and some of the kids even clapped a little as the first graders came through.

And though I know all schools have politics and cliques and bullies and all manner of first grade heartbreak, I felt like I was sending him off to a safe and welcoming place, to a school where the underlying ethos is one of community. I feel like he’ll be okay there, my big-small boy who talks a good game but whose heart breaks pretty easily actually. It was a good start into school.

New poem

My poem “Mother and Son at Hockey Practice” is up at Literary Mama, my favorite place for the literature of motherhood. Enjoy, and check out all the great writing while you’re there.

Diving and driving

I finally enrolled Small Boy in swim classes last week. We’ve always gone “swimming” – when he was a toddler he splashed around in the baby pool and when the Boychen was old enough to go into the baby pool the Small Boy was happy enough to stay in the little kids’ pool with his brother. Small Boy tolerates water, but I wouldn’t say he takes to it (the Boychen, now, he takes to it – I think swimming will be his thing the way hockey is the Small Boy’s thing), but he’s six and a half now and has already been to his first swimming pool party (the infamous party he left early in order to make hockey training on time) and couldn’t keep up with the other kids, who were jumping off the diving board and going into the pool without water wings. Strictly speaking, Small Boy doesn’t know how to swim – because I never put him in lessons.

Until last Monday, when I enrolled him in a vacation swim course for total beginners (and am very very grateful that there was another boy his age in the group so that he wasn’t the only almost first-grader in a class full of four year olds). He had classes every day for a week and at the end of the week he earned his first level badge, which basically means he jumps off the side of the pool into the water and puts his head under water – he’s still far from swimming. But he did it, and slowly came to enjoy it, and today he was retrieving objects from the bottom of the pool. Okay, it’s only one meter down but this is a pretty big step for a boy who tries to keep his head dry in the shower.

Unfortunately I signed him up for the summer vacation lessons so late that the next level classes are full for the rest of vacation; I’ll have to find something that meets once a week after school. Part of the reason I haven’t gotten him into lessons before now is that I try not to over-schedule him; he’s got hockey twice a week and I think that’s already rather a lot for a six year old boy. There is school, and there are playdates, and there is kid-time: I think there is a great deal to be learned from the throwing of rocks, the burying of mice, and the observing of frog eggs, to say nothing of the pure enjoyment factor, and I don’t want him to spend his days getting shuttled from one lesson to another. (Nor, to be honest, do I want to do that much shuttling.) But there are things besides hockey that he needs to learn, like swimming (he doesn’t need to be great at it but he needs to be competent enough that I can send him to a swim party without worrying) and things that he wants to learn, like tennis (I’m not sure where that came from, but he’s suddenly very interested in tennis), and these things are going to have to fit into the schedule somewhere. All while letting him take an hour to walk home from school, picking up every rock, feather, and flower that captures his imagination.

And the Boychen will have his own interests – he already enjoys the water more than Small Boy and is more comfortable in it, and I want to keep going with that while the enthusiasm is there. He wants to ride a proper bicycle. He likes music and would probably enjoy a music class. He also likes riding in the tractor with Grossvati, and walking in the woods with his Grossmutti, and puttering in the garden – he is a wonderful putterer – and doing anything with the Small Boy and I genuinely believe in not over-scheduling them because yesterday we walked in the woods and we spied a bird’s nest and when I held my camera-phone at just the right angle and took a picture we discovered that there was an egg in there and now there is the daily visiting of the nest to listen for the sound of a hatchling.

And I would hate to not have time for that in our day.

Why cycling is a metaphor for parenting

You teach them a few fundamentals and let go. They head off down the road without you.

Homework

We have the Small Boy’s first grade class schedule – called the Studenplan – and classroom assignment. There are two first grade classes here in the village, and SB will be with the teacher he wanted (he wanted this teacher based on the second-hand information that a friend’s brother likes this teacher) and is staying together with his entire Kindergarten class minus one child who for some odd reason is the only one from his Kindergarten class going to the other teacher, which strikes me as awfully unfair for this particular child. (The life, it’s all about the unfairness right now.)

The first grade curriculum looks like this: he’ll have German (reading, writing, literature – this is the same as a US first  grader having an English class); math; “Natur-Mensch-Mitwelt,” which I’m assuming is basically social studies with some physical sciences thrown in; P.E., which they just call Sport here; art (including textile work), and music. There’s still a lot of down time – he only goes to school five mornings and two afternoons a week – though I confess I have no idea what the Swiss homework situation looks like in the first grade. I’m willing to find that out as we go along and if there isn’t a lot of homework all the better since he’ll have hockey practice twice a week and an extra “class” outside of school, from me.

I’m looking through first grade curriculums this summer – at the moment I’m reading What Your First Grader Needs to Know - to figure out what U.S. history Small Boy would get in the first grade, if he were going to the first grade in the U.S. and I’m going to put together a little extra class for him outside of school. I hope to be able to expose him to the highlights primarily through stories, especially in the early grades, so that it doesn’t feel like I’m sitting at the kitchen table tutoring him. Neither of us take to that particularly well, but he learns remarkably well  - and I pass along information fairly well – in the context of a walk, outing, or adventure. But him sitting there listening to me tell him Something Important? Not so much. I can imagine if I took him on vacation to Boston, for example, he would have a blast and eat up all the stories and learn ten times more about the Revolution than if I tried consciously to sit down and teach him about it. So I’m hoping for some good children’s books to lay the ground work.

Sooooo, American readers of young children, here’s where you come in. What should a first grader learn about US history? What are some good age appropriate books or movies? What did your first grader learn? (I’m thinking specifically US history here. I’m perfectly happy to have Small Boy learn world history in the depth and order the Swiss kids do. It’s just the U.S. stuff that he obviously won’t get here that I’m interested in.)

Aaand, expat parents of children of all ages, I’m looking for your advice too. Did you teach your kids about your home country? How? How much? How often? Which subjects were the most important to you? (For example, given time constraints, did you teach the literature of your native country on top of what they were getting in the local school?) Did you present it clearly as learning about where you came from, or did you just try to sneak it in in the form of stories and vacations? When did you start, and how long were you able to keep it up? Did your kids rebel against this extra workload? I’m looking for information galore here, so please feel free to pass a link to this post along to your expat friends.

Thanks.

And spare a thought for the Small Boy, who is about to be confronted with another of life’s little unfairnesses: he has to learn the history of two countries.

There’s no such thing as too much cake

The Small Boy got over life’s injustice fairly well. It helped that when we got home from that last practice his grandmother was here (R was out of town and my mother-in-law gave the Boychen dinner and put him to bed) and the Small Boy was able to cry to the most sympathetic person on the planet and have somebody agree with him that it wasn’t fair. He went off to school fairly happily the next day and by Friday had forgotten all about it (well, who knows if he’s forgotten it – I doubt it, actually – but it doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of his mind anymore). On Saturday I surprised him with a cake decorated with his name in frosting and some things meant to represent highlights from his year: two hockey players, a soccer shirt, the ABCs, a white horse representing his school play that caused all this drama in the first place (the play had been called The White Horse). I told him it was for his year and for all the things he had done this year, and done so well, and that I was really proud of him. He got all quiet, the way he does when he’s especially pleased by something, then declared he wanted the piece with the soccer jersey on it – it was made of marzipan, after all.

I think he was happy.

Then he said he thinks there should be a cake at the end of every school year. I think that’s a fine idea, each school year closed out with a special cake, and if that means that soon there will be two cakes, for soon there will be two school boys, then two cakes there shall be. Really, what boy wouldn’t want a cake made just for him and not even on his birthday?

And truth be told, there is no such thing as too much cake.