First Day

On the first day of school,* moments pass by lightning quick. Emotions change just as fast.
a. A boy can't help but get excited when he's all dressed up and ready to go!
b. He's joining the big world - time to eat his breakfast just like Dada.
c. J gives C a brotherly ok on her school outfit. It's her first day too! (3rd grade already.)
d. But to calm his nerves, some guitar strumming seems just right.
e. There are moments where the big world seems a little too big.
f. A talk in the coat room with his babysitter (his true love) cheers him up.
g. After all there are trains to try out.
h. And wait, there's a car!
i. In no time at all, he's made a friend. Bonding over the tool table already.

* Nursery school

Caroline goes to Camp

 

Postcard from camp, I'm guessing there are three horses and she is getting to ride one! And happily, she hearts us. The back of the card says, nice and simply, "CAROLINE IS O.K., BUY"

Every year, Caroline's kindergarten spends a week at Škola v prírode, or school in nature. Half the school's teachers go and most of the předškolní, or 5 year old kids, too and for a week ahead of time, it is the only thing that the mothers picking up their children talk about.

This is C's last pre-school year, her year for kindergarten camp. Back in March, she brought her camp instructions home, and we started going through it line by line. I thought we'd have most everything already, but then again, I'd heard that the girls shouldn't pack dresses, and Caroline rarely wears anything else. So we poured over the list to make sure she'd be set to go.

There were all the standard things you'd expect, like a pláštěnka, or rain poncho, and holinky, gum boots, but it took me several calls to friends to figure out exactly what oteplene sustaky might mean. (Apparently, a track suit lined in flannel on the inside and nylon on the out. Now I know what they are, but I still don't know their name in English!)

Thanks to C's babysitters and several expeditions, we managed to find everything, even the elusive sustaky. The night before she left, I read C her clothing list and she ran back and forth collecting everything while I marked her name on each piece and we folded it away. All packed, down to the smallest bear and largest rubber boot, and I thought we were finished for the night. But no. "Mommie," C said, "can you teach me how to take a shower?"

So it was, on the eve of her first overnight camp, at nearly six years of age, that C decided it was time to step under water and voluntarily get her face wet. What else new will she learn this week? Come Friday, I'll let you know.

Color squares for kindergarteners

C asked to play color school again the other day, and we came up with a fun exercise. Pick a bunch of colors, draw color squares for each one, sort through and decide on a palette of three or four and then draw a picture using your colors.

I think she liked the squares almost as much as her drawing.

Card-carrying member of the Antiheliocentric League of Preschoolers

I pick Caroline up to give her a goodnight hug and swirl around the room and think what a grown up girl she is now, almost too heavy for me to carry. Her face comes near to mine in size and her long legs and arms threaten to overturn the raft my arms make carrying her. I know my sense of proportion has changed since the baby was born (he seems big to me too, no longer a newborn now that he’s ten weeks old and 24 inches long), but when I set C down and we talk about school, her teachers and how she tries to listen to them, I guess I know what it feels like to have a big kid in the family.

Then we see the moon peeping through the chimney stacks above the house next door and C says, "Look, it’s the moon! He’s my friend you know, he follows me around when I go outside, and the sun does too. They are my special friends." And I remember that she is still a little girl and if the world might not always seem to revolve around her, at least the sun and the moon still do.

At least I didn't trip over my tongue (this time)

Not the most graceful of souls in balanced times, the addition of a bolded b belly* has thrown off my center of gravity. I blame my shoes too - wobbly slides that threaten to slip off if I lift my feet too far off the ground. They're perfect for pregnancy (no laces, no heels) but if I get distracted, I just can’t help but add an extra trip step to my walking routine.

I shuffle stepped Caroline over to school today since Will had an early presentation to give and C wanted to show me her school artwork. After admiring a brown rabbit (an original drawing) and a bowtied duck (identical to all of its sibings - I suspect teacher churn out), I helped C change into her playclothes. She showed me off to several friends, we kissed and I turned to leave.

Suddenly, Pani Director was by my side, a sheaf of papers in her hand. Summer term documents, I must sign immediately.

"That's right," I confirmed, "Caroline will not be in school for July, she has camp then. On the other hand, I’d like to sign her up for August, we don’t know exactly the weeks we'll be in town, but we will shortly and of course we’ll pay for the whole month since that is the only option."

This lack of August organization kindled fire in Pani Director’s eyes, her voice raised to a sawlike pitch and she began to complain about the difficulties of working with foreigners - their inability to make decisions, how they thought they could pull children out of school at any time. I turned off my ears and pretended to not understand the rudeness. I reminded her we had six months till August, I was sure all would be resolved well before then. She counted the months on her fingers (satifyingly fat and rather stubby), and seemed surprised to find it true. I reminded her again that I was paying for the pleasure of my inconsistency, bid her good day and left, carefully managing not to trip over my shoes until I was well out the door.

* bolded b belly = how C remembers the difference between small b and p right now.

Word I-Spy

Word books for kids? Given the choice between taking or leaving 'em, I use to leave them every time. We have a few for their pictures, or because Caroline became desperately attached in a book store and the alternative was Barney, but once they joined her bookcase, I avoided reading them as much as I could - no plot, no quick page turning, nothing to sing or rhyme, horrors!

Then C and I discovered word I-spy. Word I-spy works like this: we pick a page from a word book and I’ll say, "I-spy a word that starts with a 'b' and ends with a 'k'." Caroline, most slowly and dramatically, will swirl over the page with her pointer finger until she finds the word. "Aha! b, double o, k. Here it is!" If the word is short enough, she’s started sounding it out too, "Buh oo k, book!! Okay mommie, my turn - can you find a word that starts with the letter..."

We’ve played this game every night for the last week or so, extending it into the early evening now that I’m sentenced to rest half the day and can’t run around as much as usual. Besides the thrill of hearing Caroline figure out words, word I-spy is also a great game, and it has the unlooked for advantage of keeping a new book novel for much longer (a page or three a night? fantastic!).

Tonight we finally finished Maisy’s Amazing Big Book of Words. The last page was all about Bedtime. I closed it with a satisfied thwack and started contemplating our other word books, "Hm, Richard Scarry or that slightly wacky English/Czech dictionary, then there is the photo book of words..."

But the choice for tomorrow had already been made. As Will picked up C to carry her off to bed, she yelled over his shoulder as they passed through the doorway, "Night night Mommie, we’ll wake Maisy up first thing tomorrow!"

Stepping into reading, one word at a time

Do you remember the first time you read a word, free floating, out in the world? I don’t know how old I was, probably four or five, but I remember the moment. Sitting in the backseat of our VW Bug, stopped at a red light, I saw "on" and then "no" on a billboard behind the light. I vaguely remember the words (a plain font, black on white), but what I wholly recall is my lecture to myself. "Remember now," I thought. "You'll never again not see words. These scribbles will always be there to figure out." I thought reading meant I was no longer a child.

Caroline’s day for discovering words outside books came on Sunday. It was the first spring day of the year, and we decided to spend the morning at the zoo. We drove and Caroline spent the ride pointing out all the blue "P" for parking signs that we passed. She collected at least a dozen by the time we arrived - mostly because we had to circle the zoo's neighborhood looking for a parking space in company with all the other Praguers who’d had the same thought when they woke and discovered the sun.

While we circled, and Will listed the practicalities of buses, I decided to distract Caroline from her P quest with a new challenge. If she could find the word "zoo" I’d give her a piece of her favorite Hubba Bubba*. Caroline rarely forgets conversations that involve chewing gum and sure enough, halfway through the kilometer hike from parking lot to wild animals, she found ZOO - and then again and then again. We traded a lot of high fives that day and I told her I'd make a picture for her to remember her first big step into reading in the wild. See above.

* Czechs, and Caroline, pronounce Hubba Bubba "hoobah boobah", to my delight. Just a note in case you're looking for some on your next trip to Prague.

Hearts on the line - Happy Valentine's!

Caroline woke me up this morning with a question:
     Mommie, how do I say "Happy Valentine's Day" to my teacher?

Never a coherent translator early in the day, I mumbled something about Valentinska, but then recommended that C just hand her teacher a heart and add a hug to go with it.

We have Valentine's hearts to go around, as C spent a long Saturday painting splashy, many hued watercolors for me to cut into valentines. The cards didn't scan well, so I collected our extra hearts and laid them out for all to see. Photoshop gave me a few extra layers and voila, kolokolo's valentine's card to its readers!

......

Valentine's Day isn't exactly a Czech holiday, but each February 14th finds Prague florists and restaurants busier than the year before. Today Will came home with the news that the flower shop had a line out the door, and when we called in an order of bibimbop to our favorite Japanese/Korean restaurant they apologized and told us the wait would be at least an hour. I was happy waiting for flowers until tomorrow, but couldn't resist the bibimbop - its addictive spicey sauce has tempted me all day!

Roll those rrrs

Drrrrnda, drrrrnda.
      Drda, drmda.
Again! Drrrrnda, drrrrnda.
      Drnnda
Super!

Caroline and Lucie are practicing rolled rs in the living room while I work. There are plenty of kids who don’t have r down yet, but Lucie is heading to Asia for four months Monday (the life of a babysitter model), and wants C to get in some practice before she leaves. Lucie learned her rrrs on drnda, or chatterbox, and so Caroline does too.

Thanks to Lucie and her family, our babysitter family, C speaks fluently in Czech, with a Prague accent to boot. She speaks to Lucie in Czech automatically, but English is the language she pulls out when she meets strangers, and especially new children. Rumor has it that she tried to convert her kindergarten to English a few months ago but that the kids stuck to their native tongue. When I asked her about this, she said that she thought everyone should speak like us. She said it regretfully, as if she thought they were missing out and she was just trying to help. (I sometimes wonder what her kindergarten teachers make of C. Once every two weeks or so, they’ll send her home with a note that says she was awfully good and didn’t boss anyone around that day. It makes us wonder about the rest of her days.)

Luckily her idol worship of Lucie, home for the last two months from Singapore, has helped make Czech cool again, and she has pulled out her Czech children’s books and asked us to start reading them. She gets Will to read them in English, but she says she doesn’t mind if I read like Lucinka. The nursery rhymes are easiest for me to pronounce well, so that’s what I mostly stick with. Rhymes, plus I’ll read Czech kids’ magazines, pages beautifully full of pictures and activities with only a few words in between.

Tonight we played a game from one of her magazines, Méd'a Pusík, and I read the instructions, deciphering them together with C. Okay, take the kostky, that's dice, and if you land on the walrus you have to go back three ice flows because he was grumpy. Um, does that make sense?

We look at the picture of the walrus and decide it probably does. Then Caroline practices saying mrož, or walrus, a few times. She doesn’t quite get the r but that’s okay, and we roll the dice and keep playing.

The blue kocarek

Caroline’s special symbol at school, the one that tells her where to hang up her jacket and unpack her playground clothes, and where her toothbrush cup should sit, is a blue baby carriage. Caroline memorized this straight away and came home chanting “modrý kočarek” under her breath on the first day of school. She’s carriage obsessed anyway, and even though it isn’t my favorite accessory, I vowed to find one for her.

Doll baby carriages in Prague, if you haven’t priced them lately, cost an astronomical sum. The cheapest I've found is $50, and Sparky’s offers several over $100. I’m now searching the Vietnamese markets, hoping to find a gem buried under all the almost Barbies and I’ve warned my business partner that on our next trip abroad I’ll be springing into toy stores in hot pursuit.

Why the sudden fervor, you might well ask. You see, when Caroline first realized she had to go back to school every single day, she developed this act full of sobs and clinging fingers, to be presented at the classroom door each morning. She did this for three days, adding drama daily. Friday morning came. She picked up her backpack, I velcroed her shoes shut. Then I asked her to try being brave, to see how that played out. If it worked as well as I thought, five days of the same show would surely warrant a present. She thought about this, nodded and whispered into my ear - "a blue kočarek?"

A deal was made. The crying stopped. Even though she can’t count days beyond tomorrow, she still remembers the doll carriage. I found this design at a Flickr site* illustrating matchbox lids from the 40s and 50s. By the weekend, Caroline may have a real set of wheels to push around; for now she's got a carriage printed and posted above the bench where we put her shoes on each day, on the way to school yet again. The matchbox says, "everyone saves with PKO." I quite agree.

* Check out the Flickr site for more matchboxes, they are fabulous and mostly from our neck of the woods. My hat's off to the designer, Jane McDevitt, who found these and posted them to the web. She has an excellent eye.

The Sartorial Challenges of Školka

School and Caroline have now survived each other for eight days. During that time, Caroline has switched from waking up at 9 (or later) to 7:15 without a blink. She hasn’t walloped anyone, she shares fine, she likes the food and her Czech is up to snuff. Because she suffers from foreign parents, however, she comes home with notes every day about something new we have neglected to send with her.

On the first day of school, she wore a dress. It was cute, but not fancy - perfect for playing in. That afternoon she met me at the door with a strange pair of sweats and a shirt I needed to wash. Apparently the dress wouldn’t do for the playground so she’d had to change and borrow some clothes. Oh, and would I please remember to send a toothbrush tomorrow?

The next day, we packed her up with a toothbrush and cup, and dressed her in a tee with jeans and a sweater. She came home, once more, with someone else’s clothing and a message explaining that she needed separate clothes for class and for the playground; the jeans didn’t exclude her from changing. Oh, and the sweater was nice, but could we add a jacket?

And thus it went, all week. On Friday I sent Caroline to school in jeans, an undershirt, long tee, sweater, and jacket. She carried a bag with sweats, old tee, and an old jacket. She wore velcro-closing shoes, not white, and for good measure, she had some kleenex zipped into a coat pocket. Waiting for her at school were a toothbrush, cup, and a pair of slippers. I snapped a picture of the complete Czech kindergartener as she went out the door, and patted myself on the back.

She came home with a message that perhaps the coat was a bit too hot, could we consider something a bit lighter? Oh, and please send a photo to school on Monday, she was the only kid in her class without one.

The new year started today

The first Monday in September feels like the beginning of a new year. People are back from vacation, children start school, businesses answer phone calls again and, right on cue, the weather has snapped from sunny to cold.

We were in Paris yesterday, on the way back from Brittany. At our patisserie, adopted because the owner knows Caroline by name, the locals were out in force, greeting one another with kisses and exclamations in honor of the end of the holiday season. August was over - Parisians were ready to take back their streets from the tourists and the silly season. The church across from our hotel had a regular circulation of families in their Sunday best, girls in navy cardigans, mothers in sensible skirts, fathers with smoothed hair and tennis tan lines. In the middle of rue Mouffetard, right where a playground meets the market, retired hippies sang and passed out song sheets. Couples with long grey hair and flowing skirts and shirts danced polkas to accordion music, the next younger generation, dressed still for church, watched sedately while their parents frolicked in the square and their children swung through the playground.

We’d walked by stores and restaurants closed for the month, promising to wake again on Tuesday, September the 4th, and I thought about their owners, wondering if they were part of all of this celebration and settling in; who might be who in the great crowds of people enjoying the day. We sang some of the songs, danced none of the dances and drank coffee on a playground bench while Caroline practiced her one French expression - “Regardez moi!”

On the boulevards the chestnut leaves have already started to fall, and when the weekly rollerblading parade swept down St. Germain in the late afternoon, the skaters swept the leaves in front of them. We watched the skaters pass, Caroline waved once more, and then we walked down the Saint-Michel metro stairs to an RER train and the airport. We were ready to be home too.

Prague is not as adamant as Paris is about its right to take the entire month of August off, and so September first is not as big a date here, but even Prague had a more than usual bustle about it today. Outside the schools on our block, parents waited for their children to finish their half day, students whistled as friends appeared, Caroline whirled in her new dress and posed for pictures before walking into her first day of school, summarily dismissing me with a “bye mommy” and a languid wave.

I hung out for an hour anyway, sitting in a chair for toddlers, the only barefooted person in the room*, trying desperately to decode the whispers of the other mothers and at the same time assure them that although, and uniquely, Caroline had arrived at school with a team (Will, Marie and myself) we really weren’t that unusual. I picked her up again at 12:30 and the director told us she’d been a hodne holcicka, a good girl.

Tired out from being good, Caroline started to cry as soon she saw me, and I carried her home, sobbing on my shoulder. She told me that she didn’t have a flower for me and it had broken her heart. The flower turned out to be a finger painting, all in red. Marie found one for Caroline to take home. Consoled by strawberries, hot cocoa, and a card of flowery swirls, Caroline fell asleep as soon as we pulled up the covers at nap time.

* Avoid sandals at Czech pre-school events - you'll have to take off your shoes to enter the classroom. If you must wear sandals, bring slippers. At least half the mothers brought their own.

Coloring book lessons

C and I had a colorful morning. We paper-machéd a jar to make a lantern (thanks to the directions of Be*mused) and then, while our jar sat to dry, we pulled out the magic markers. These are much fun and many colors and have I mentioned French, so their allure is strong and I was pretty quick about getting Caroline set to color a playground scene I’d drawn for her. Then I got absorbed into my own world of pens and paper. When I looked up again I realized she had colored in a one inch by half inch swing set - yellow, and quite thoroughly, but that was it. She was prepared to rework that swing and already the paper was nearly see through. I persuaded her to switch to a coloring book, to a picture of a train, and she took her yellow pen in hand, and then stopped.

She stopped because the picture had no yellow in it. Of course it didn’t, you might say, she hadn’t colored it yet, but what I mean is this - a lot of Czech coloring books have the picture on one page already illustrated, right next to the page waiting to be colored. Her illustrated train was blue, with pink wheels, and a black smoke stack. Yellow? No.

Czech kindergartens and her babysitters seem to put a lot of emphasis on coloring in the lines, and of not getting too loosie goosie with the colors. If Zdenek Miller colored his butterflies orange and brown, so should we all. Maybe this is good for hand-eye coordination and learning how to match colors, but I sometimes paint my skies apricot and my seas orange and I like to draw without thinking about it and for fun. So when I see her shoulders all wound up concentrating on getting something right, I don’t quite know what to say. She’s three after all and mostly acts rather than listens.

Caroline gave me the yellow (here you go mommie, your turn), picked up the pink and started to copy the pink train wheels into her picture, as careful as any three year old possibly could be. But try as she might, she accidentally filled in the white hubcaps on those wheels. Hm...she said, then shifted up to the already illustrated picture and used her marker to pink up its white hubcaps, and was done.

I decided to save my lecture on looseness for another day. The jar spent all day drying, while we went triking and roller blading and ate ice cream by the river. It is now a lantern alit outside my window, rather twinkly and blue.

The politics of nursery school

Yesterday was registration day at the local nursery school in our neighborhood. Our babysitter decided we needed to make a good first impression, so she dressed Caroline up in her favorite dress (navy blue top over a green plaid skirt), pink sweater, brilliantly white tights, and Sunday shoes. Then all three of us: babysitter, Will and myself, herded Caroline to the little skolka that is just across the street from our flat.

When we walked in we realized there was a crowd of people ahead of us. Czechs are expert at self-regulating lines though, so we just had to ask to find out who we would go after, how many families were in front of us (four), and how long the wait might be (an hour). We spent the hour entertaining Caroline, chatting with the other waiting parents, and trying to figure out just why it took twenty minutes to sign a three year old into a public nursery school program.

Our best guess is that the filtering system so obvious in middle to high school education in Europe gets its start with 3 year olds, and that these meetings are designed in part for the director to check out the parents and child and decide if she wants to see them again. It’s a guess only because we didn’t get a chance to hear the regular spiel.

Instead, as we sat down for our meeting, the director said, “Aha, you are the foreigners who visited during open house. I’m so sorry to tell you but because you are not EU citizens, your daughter probably cannot go to this school.“

It turns out that the government doesn’t pay schools a stipend for children who are either not Czech or non-EU. In the past, schools have gotten around this problem by charging foreigners a certain amount a month, but then a story appeared in the Czech press about a town where the elementary school was funded mostly by the Vietnamese families who sent their children there. Although what the school was doing was technically legal, the story created a stir around the country, and so some schools now have decided it is just easier to not accept foreigners until the laws are straightened out.

We spent most of the meeting listening to the director explain all of this, and then in the end, she asked us what we did and if the laws get worked out, if we could afford the stipend. She didn’t care a whit that I had my own company (only question, when will your next child be born?) but when she found out that Will works in the educational sector and what he does, her hands started trembling and she began to randomly apologize (for spelling his name wrong on the application form, for the bother of the whole thing). It amused me at the time, but when we got home and started talking about the meeting, we both thought - do we really want Caroline to go to a school that didn’t want her until they found out what her father does?

So now I am looking into private schools for Caroline. Some place in Prague 2, 4 or 10 that doesn’t charge outrageous prices for children to get to together and play. Some place where Czech kids go but a kid from another country could fit in happily too. Suggestions welcomed.