Down on the farm

Otis and I went to Gut Wulksfelde Biohof the other day with our friends Nadine and Claus, and their daughter, Paula. It’s a vege farm, but they have a few animals for children to pat – goats, rabbits, donkeys and chooks. Otis loved it.In fact he was so inspired that he took his first three steps there. It was great – not so much to look at that it was overwhelming for the children, but enough that after lunch and a sleep (during which we went for a walk in the forest) that they could go for another round. We didn’t leave until 4.30ish – it was a full day out, but relaxing at the same time. Lovely.

In other news, I got the job sewing for Anna Golightly. Picked up my first batch of fabric today, and am looking forward to setting up a sewing space of my own. I’ve gathered up various bits and pieces of old clothing to start making stuff for Otis again too, so that should be fun.

Autumn seems to be setting in, so I’m thinking about winter clothes – I desperately need a pair of waterproof boots. Oh, speaking of the cooler weather, any recommendations for good, not too expensive children’s merino? I want to get Otis some long sleeve tops and leggings, and would love to get Nature Baby stuff, but let’s face it, it’s pretty pricey.

We’ve found our next flat – it will last for 6 months, and then we’re thinking we might go on holiday in a big van for a couple of months before getting something more long term. We don’t move in until October, but if feels good to have it sorted out already. The people we’re subletting off are heading to NZ for 6 months, which is a nice little coincidence. They also had a homebirth for their second baby, are furniture makers, and are pretty hippy in general. Nice people!

Boats, boots, and bumps

Thomas worked late on Tuesday so that we could go on a boat trip on the Alster in the afternoon. What a guy. What a nice way to spend the afternoon.

Otis’ main lesson for yesterday: When you climb where you shouldn’t be climbing, you may just fall off and bump your head. And if you do, you may just get an iceblock (carrot, mango and coconut milk, mmmmm).

I’ll have more of those thanks – Thomas and Otis cinching the deal.

Today’s lesson: Shoes can make an outfit… He brought them to me especially. I didn’t have the heart to insist putting the rest of his clothes on first.

Living in the Schanze

We’ve been all over the place the last few weeks – we shifted out of flat #1, and now live in the Schanzen quarter – lively, lefty and pretty hip. We’re house-sitting for friends for two months while they’re in Canada, and their apartment is fantastic. Open plan kitchen/living, which is not so common for apartment living, three bedrooms (one as an office for Thomas), and probably about 120 m2 all up. We’re on the ground floor, and share a garden with sandpit, slide and treehouse with the other 7 apartments. It’s part of a living project, which means that all the other people in the house are pretty cool too.

After shifting out of our old flat, going on holiday to the Ostsee for a few days, then on a cycle trip along the Weser River, staying with Thomas’s mother and sister at various points in between, and then living here for the first week with Martin, Nina, Jeroen and Jarik, it has been nice to spend the last week by ourselves. I think Otis appreciates it too – he was getting quite stressy, and a bit aggressive with lots of tantrums during the first week here. He’s definitely chilled out a lot over the past few days though, so that’s a big relief. He’s is also now officially down to one nap a day, HOORAY!, so that makes things a bit easier too.

We’ve had a nice relaxing weekend – yesterday was the Schanzenfest – a giant, noisy, and technically illegal street party with hundreds or fleamarket, food, and bar stalls all out on the street. It’s illegal because, while during the day it’s lovely and friendly and everyone is having a good time, by nighttime it can get really rowdy with protests and rioting. This quarter is historically quite political and anti-police, and things tend to escalate pretty quickly. Yesterday’s fest was deemed a success though, with only one bank being broken into, and a couple of fires started near the Rote Flora. We’re pretty central, and we didn’t really hear anything going on apart from one of the neighbors in the house having a nice birthday bbq in the backyard.

Today we had our old landlords over for coffee in the morning, which was lovely – Otis really likes them, and it’s nice to see him so affectionate with Anja. After lunch/ nap we cycled down to the Elbe and enjoyed the warm afternoon. The weather has been pretty rainy for the past week (feels like weeks), so it was nice to be out and about.

Things are feeling like they’re coming together now. For a couple of weeks I was feeling quite down and a bit lonely and sorry for myself, but I guess moving round and being unsettled, along with kind of crappy weather does have an effect on my mood.

There are so many other things that have happened since I last posted, but here’s a quick list of the major ones before I go to bed:

Otis turned 1 and also turned kinda chubby
I wasn’t in NZ for the combined antenatal group birthday party, boohoo
We cycled and camped for 4 days
Thomas bought an iPhone
We have a new (temporary) home
Otis fits a pair of big-boy shoes, and totally loves them
Otis is still not walking, but doing some excited balancing, and the odd one or two steps
I officially have a new friend
I also have a new niece, beautiful little Victoria June
German bureaucracy caught up with us (don’t ask)
It snowed in Wellington when we weren’t there

That’s all I can think of right now. Hope everyone is well – comment or email me, we miss NZ!

Weaning

Excuse the LOOONG break. It’s been super busy round here with school, and we’re all exhausted. Heaps has happened though, and Otis turns 1 on Sunday. Holy crap, how time has flown. I can’t believe it’s been a year since:

1. I’ve woken up naturally
2. I haven’t been tired
3. I was reading obsessively about homebirth (time well spent), not taking time to think about what would come next.

The weirdest thing is that I caught myself the other day surprised that I have a son – I was kind of thinking, “when I’m a mother I will…”

So a year ago I thought that when he was one, I’d wean Otis. I thought I’d have had enough, he’d have had enough, and it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. I had a big whinge to Thomas a couple of weeks ago though, because I was feeling entirely unready for it, and didn’t know when I’d ever feel ready, although at the same time I didn’t want to do real, proper extended breastfeeding. I thought, if I don’t wait until he self-weans, how will I know the time is right? Since I’ve been at school he’s not getting as much milk anyway, so is “asking” for it more, so it seemed that he’s really not ready for giving up either. And I do enjoy it. There is something incredibly joyful about snuggling together, seeing how he relaxes, and how I do too. It nearly made me cry the other day when I thought that I’d stop soon, and that he wouldn’t have any memory of it.

Then on Sunday I decided, “No more milk before breakfast”, which actually means, “I’m over waking up at 5 and breastfeeding on and off to try to keep Otis asleep until 7”, because I’m sure that the whole, Waking Up At Five O’Clock deal is intimately connected with bfing first thing in the morning. And Lo and Behold, the last couple of days he’s slept almost until 6 (haha, I know, it sounds pathetic, but it’s really quite a breakthrough round here). The most suprising thing has been that the entire week, he’s only had milk once after breakfast, because he just wasn’t asking for it the other days. Today, in fact, we were down to two feeds – an afternoon one because I was having a nap at the same time as Otis and wanted to lie in bed a bit longer, and once bedtime one; which he was too wired, post-bath, to be terribly interested in.

So it looks like we’re weaning, without even having decided to. And funnily enough, suddenly I’m ready for it.

Animal lover

Summer in the city

 

Yesterday it was summer. Real, proper, sitting outside with a big, cold glass of alsterwasser (sounds better than shandy eh?), summer. Otis’ new bike seat has arrived, so Thomas started working early, and we cycled to meet some friends in the afternoon, and enjoyed said shandy at a little cafe near a playground.

It was such a lovely afternoon, 5.30 came around before we knew it, and we did a serious toss-up of whether to proceed to a bier garden for chips and more beer. Otis was getting pretty grizzly by this stage though, so we decided to do the responsible parent thing and head home. It’s tricky – some children seem really capable of flexiblity when it comes to bed time, but Otis just doesn’t seem to cope well with tiredness at all, so bed time is pretty much consistently 7pm.

Anyway, heading home turned out to be a good decision, because we fried up some sausages and potatoes, and made a Greek salad, and enjoyed the beautifully still evening here in the garden. It was actually warmer outside than in, and we sat there until the light had mostly disappeared, only moving once to run across the street for ice cream.

After such a blissful evening, Otis decided to have a shocker of a night and was awake for around 2 hours from 2am. Life eh?

good good day

Today we had two goals: to get fruit and veges from the Altona market, and to go to the Good Goods exhibition; Germany’s sustainable consumer goods show.

Goal #1 was not so successful – in Wellington the market is a heaps cheaper way of getting fresh produce, but the market we went to this morning seemed a lot more expensive. We realised that was because it’s mostly an organic market… our miserly selves won out over our eco selves, and we just got a couple of bits of fruit for lunch (Otis loves pears, and can eat one whole by himself, although it can get pretty messy, so I’m helping him out in the above pic) rather than doing the whole weekly shop. Thomas did go to the supermarket this evening though, and came back buzzing – reading the whole receipt out, item by item to prove how much cheaper food is in general over here. I was fascinated. Truly.

On the way to Good Goods we ran into a protest march against nuclear energy. It’s pretty amazing what’s happening over here in response to the Fukushima disaster – eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany have been temporarily shut down, and there thousands of people out protesting to make Germany totally nuclear free. I’m not sure how many people were in the march today, but I think around 20,000 200,000 were out the other week. The thing that hit me most, seeing all these people on the street, was that protest is a really integral part of German culture. It’s not viewed as a weird, fringe, lefty thing as it is in NZ: there were people from all walks of life out, making their voices heard, and believing that they could change things.

The exhibition was interestingish – most of the stuff wasn’t really what I’m into – too high-end, but the things I did like all tended towards design, recycling/ repurposing, and lovely wooden stuff. I loved the clever bench seat below – simple and witty. When we’re finally back in NZ I’d be keen to make something along these lines.

The pic of me wearing the jacket isn’t very clear, but it’s made out of old army tents. I totally loved it – the designer (whose card i can’t find, dammit!) had incorporated existing details like big eyelets and rivets into the design. The hood buttoned off, and I like how it felt a bit like being in a tent when it was up. It would be a fun to wear on a rainy day. Next time I have 200 Euro lying around…

Und jetzt bin ich eine Deutsche Frau

I feel like I’m a real German mum – we went on our first bike ride with Oti today and he loved it! He spent the whole time waving his hands in the air, pointing at nothing in particular, and chatting away to himself. This bike and seat we borrowed from our neighbor, but we’ve ordered this one, which also attaches to the front of the bike, and should arrive next week. We cycled to the Hafen City, where the cruise ship The Queen Mary was arriving. They’re kind of nuts about this boat here for some reason, and they put up a ferris wheel and stuff down at the harbor to welcome it, so we thought we’d better go and see what the fuss was about. As expected, it’s just a massive boat, but it was nice to get down to the water for the first time since we arrived.

As soon as Otis saw this boy, he squirmed to get out of my arms and crawled over to say hi. Don’t know what it was, but Oti thought he was awesome.

Fruchtallee, Eimsbuttel

I’m pleased to announce that I’d completely underestimated the honesty of the average human being, and yesterday afternoon we went on an expedition to the airport to collect our camera. Hooray for Emirates! From now on things will look a bit more interesting, but for now, here’ a pic of Otis reading Hairy Maclary with Granny and Opa. He loves reading books… well, he mostly loves turning pages (<tired = faster page turning), so we bought this NZ classic for the plane trip.

We moved into our new wee flat on Sunday, and I love it here. It’s small – only 50 m², but it’s so nice to have our own space. We’re on the ground (or, half below ground) level, and share a small back yard with our landlords and their two children, who live above us. They have an old Alsatian called Che, a big softie who is very patient with being constantly terrorized by Otis.

Fruchtallee is a wide, busy street, but we back onto Bellealliancestrasse – pretty, leafy and partly cobbled. It’s nice to be able to get out of the house for a decent amount of the day, partly so Thomas doesn’t have to try to ignore Otis grizzling while he works, but also because in general he’s a much happier baby when out and doing something. Right behind our building is a playground which we’re making the most of. In the morning it’s used as a kind of kindergarten (you can leave your child there for €1 per hour!), but from 12.30 anyone can use it. On Monday I met a woman there called Michaela who was knitting a blanket for her sister’s baby. We started talking, and she invited me to a baby music group run by her friend that afternoon. Otis and I went along and sat with 3 other mothers (plus one Oma) and their children, and sang action songs. Admittedly I didn’t do terribly much singing, as it was in German, but it was such a nice welcome to the neighborhood. It was Otis’ first organised group activity, and he seemed kind of overwhelmed by it, sitting quietly with eyes wide, wondering what all these crazy people were doing. I think we’ll keep going though, because I don’t sing much with him, at home, and it’s something nice to look forward to.

I hear the boy calling from the bedroom, so will sign off!