creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for February 2008

What I learned from Flylady

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When in my big rant I wrote that

I tried to get back on track by re-subscribing to flylady again, and then I couldn’t stand all the e-mail. I didn’t do anything different and so, I have to confess, the e-mails didn’t do the housework.

Joanna answered in a comment

Flylady was invented for people who have 3 billion hours in a day. The routines look great on paper but they do not work in this house!!!!

And this had me thinking about a reply for weeks now so I decided to make it into a blog post. I hope Joanna doesn’t mind.

First, as I have written too, one of the problems seems to be that the routines and e-mails really don’t do any work. Sadly, housework still has to be done by oneself, or – in my case – by my husband. Which isn’t fair and so I have been working on improving my homemaking skills. That is not Flylady’s fault.

Second, Flylady was not invented for people who have 3 billion hours a day, it was invented precisely for people who don’t have much time, who are easily distracted and therefore a bit challenged on the organizational or cleaning side of life.

For those of you who don’t know who or what Flylady is, Flylady is the nickname of an American woman who started a yahoo-group to help people with organizing and housecleaning. The system is a bit unusual but I can testify that it works beautifully when you do it. Which might go for every system out there, I don’t know, but I can say that I started using Flylady’s methods five years ago and even though I have been off and on in applying them there are a few things that have stuck, and the house never looks as awful as it did before.

Right now I’m working on getting back to where I was before. It seems like that’s what I’m doing in all areas of my life at the moment. But there are things that I started because of Flylady and that just stuck.

Dressing down to shoes first thing in the morning.
While I don’t take a shower or put on make-up in the morning, each morning I get up and then dress into jeans, a sweater, my indoor sneaker, and I put on earrings and a necklace. So, if everything goes haywire that day I’m already dressed adequately for almost all the things I’m doing on a day-to-day basis.
Before I started doing this I changed clothes about six times a day. Sweats in the morning, then dress for doing errands, back into sweats, working out, dress in clean sweats after taking a shower, dress for teaching, back into sweats, then pajamas. Then I found that stretchy jeans and a sweater or tee are almost as comfy as sweats, and I can wear them all day long. Yes, I even work out in jeans sometimes. Then I take a shower and change into clean clothes. I still wear pajamas at night, just in case you may have wondered.

Wearing lace-up shoes in the house
When I first read this I thought this woman must be crazy. Why should I trade my Birkenstocks for anything else. Well, here is why: I’m less prone to stumbling and falling down stairs, I feel like I’m in work-mode, and my feet don’t hurt.

Picking up after myself
My husband will be the first to tell you that I’m not very good at this but I’m really much better than I used to be. Often I even put the dirty dishes away right after a meal. And I’m always glad when I do because it’s just so nice when you come back and hour later and your kitchen is actually clean and tidy.

Dealing with laundry in a timely fashion
Again, I have been better at this at one time but usually laundry gets washed when there is enough for one or two loads, it gets hung up as soon as it’s washed and it gets folded when it’s dry and put away immediately. I fold the clothes on the thing where the laundry dries, put it in a hamper, carry the hamper to the bedroom and just put everything away. Magic. No piles. And since we don’t iron anything…

Put everything into my calendar and check it at least twice a day
Really helpful. Everything is in there, and I check it in the evening, in the morning, and often in between. When I have something like “Bring two eggs, a pair of pantyhose, and a net to kindergarten.” it really helps to know about it the evening before. Because mornings are stressful enough as it is, I don’t have to add the stress of looking for discarded pantyhose and eggs on top of that.

“Housework done incorrectly still blesses the family.”
Yep. Picking up a few dust bunnies by hand is better than doing nothing at all. Taking a bit of window cleaner and wipe at the bathroom window is much better than waiting for those two empty days where I finally will have enough time to clean all the windows in the house.

Making the bed every day.
Yes, you read that correctly. Every morning after breakfast I go and make the beds, and tidy the bedroom. You might think this doesn’t make much of a difference but it does. Every time I go into our bedroom I feel relaxed and a bit more peaceful. Because it’s tidy and the beds are made.

Wiping the sink.
While I still struggle with the ongoing cleaning of the bathrooms every sink in the house gets wiped out after use. Almost every time. Also I wipe down the shower stall after taking a shower. That takes all of twenty second and it looks as if I were really cleaning them every day. Which I don’t.

Small steps done consistently make a difference.
I know, my mother told me that one long ago but she isn’t very good at this either. And I have a really hard time being consistent with anything. Since Flylady taught me that I don’t have to be perfect I have been practicing and becoming better at it. And if I’m not consistent for a while? Then I just start over again. And again. And again. And again.

And here is one last slogan from her (and I should post that one on my mirror):

Progress, not perfection.

So, while not everyone has to use Flylady’s system, and there seem to be a few people who don’t need a system at all (I’m living with one, for example) how do you go on about that? And are you happy with your surroundings that way? Or aren’t you?

I just love to hear how you deal with it.

Art Award

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It feels pretty weird to get an art award at a time when I feel like I’m not doing any art at all, but then, who am I to judge. Joanna gave this to me, thank you very much. And isn’t it pretty?

art award

I had a hard time finding the origin of the award since the url got scrambled somewhere but here it is, arte e pico (And that’s a link to the actual post where she (I think it’s a she) explains the award and the rules for it. Unfortunately I don’t speak Spanish (I know, it’s shocking. I understand a bit of it after having learned Latin, French, a bit of Italian, and Portuguese, but only a bit. (It’s really interesting how much you can study languages without every becoming fluent.))

I’m very happy about this award since it’s especially about art and creativity, two things that are very close to my heart. On the other hand I don’t feel very creative or artsy at the moment. I don’t really count my obsessive knitting since it’s all about following a pattern. That’s crafting, not creativity. And while I could go a step further and design my own sweaters or socks or whatever (and I have done so in the past, before the internet and ravelry, back in the days when there was a shortage of nice patterns, and we still had to make up our own) but then it doesn’t feed my heart the same way music does. Unfortunately.

But maybe I better get on with this award thing, and save the “creativity and music and my problems with it”-discussion for another day. Preferable one where I can show you a new song or something like that. (Did I mention that my voice is gone again? No? Well, that’s a serious problem in making music. If you are a singer, that is.)

So, here are the rules (And as a former academic I haven’t altered the quote. Since I am not an academic anymore I also have refrained from writing (sic!) after every typo.):

Reglas en ingles:
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you copnsider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contrubuites to the blogger community, no matter of language.

2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

3) Each award-winning, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the ward itself.

4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y pico”blog , so everyone will know the origin of this award.

5) To show these rules.

Award winners are:…

Well, I consider every blog on my blogroll to be extremely interesting. Otherwise I wouldn’t be reading it, trust me. Most of these bloggers are also very active in the blogging community. That’s why there still are the just posts. (Just because I always forget to remind you, could you just send any links to blog posts about social justice things to me as you see them? And, please, do it before March 7th? Thank you.)) So, this is about creativity, design, interesting material, and contribution to the blogger community.

All of the blogs that I’m reading are creative, interesting, and almost all of them contribute to the community. That leaves the design aspect. While there are many bloggers that I dearly love there are some who are more about art and design and creativity than others. So I’d like to give this award to:

  1. Lia. You should really check out her blog. She has these stunning collages and writes beautiful stories. Also I find her perspective intriguing since she is a Canadian living in Germany.
  2. Hel. She takes the most beautiful and dreamlike pictures. Her posts are mystical and poetic. They lift my heart and soul up even when she is writing about things not very uplifting. I think she should make more of her photography, by the way.
  3. crazymumma. You know, she isn’t crazy at all. She is a real artist. I really hope that she will be getting back into making visual art and pottery and sculpture and the like. Also her photos are marvelous.
  4. De. Again. You might think that I just pass every award on to her that comes my way but really, she is a writer at heart. Her words often take my breath away. I will never forget the first posts of her that I read. When I went back to check her archive and found that I already had read everything there was. She often plunges right into the deep end of the pool, riding the waves of emotion with her writing. And you probably all know her comments which are always special.
  5. My husband. I know that this seems incestuous but he makes the most beautiful music, he combines it with stunning pictures, and if anybody deserves an art award, it’s him. He’s not that much into the blogger community though. So I want to give him this award and relieve him of the burden to have to pass it on.

And that goes for all of you award “winners”. Take it as a compliment and if it feels too much like a burden, well, then let it go.

The language thing

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I have been meaning to write about this whole English/German-thing for ages. I had a post all planned out, it had the working title “Does my blog have a German accent?” and I even thought about recording me reading it. So that you could really judge how bad my German accent is. But then, of course, for the purpose of this blog it doesn’t matter how good or bad my pronunciation is.

Another thing pointing me in this direction was a friend of mine who phoned me and said, “I don’t like reading your blog as much anymore because you’re no longer posting in German. Because with the German posts I could hear your voice.” Implying that with the English she can’t. My husband, on the other side, says that my voice comes through regardless of the language I’m writing in. And I tend to agree.

What prompted me to actually sit down and write this post was Hel’s post about English as a global language. That post brought me back to my own dilemma, to why I post in English. And if that is a good or a bad thing.

It feels weird every time I think about it. Here I sit, a German, in Germany, surrounded by Germans, writing a blog post in English. Why? There are hundreds of perfectly good German blogs out there. My German definitely is better than my English. At least I never have to look up words or phrases.

So, why do I write in English? When I first started this blog I wrote my first post in German. Then I left it at that and didn’t write another post for a couple of months. Then I started reading a few more blogs. I found them through blogger’s “next blog”-button. Not the best method but everybody has to start somewhere. And I got annoyed that a) there were so many really dull blogs out there, and b) I couldn’t read a lot of them because they were written in languages I don’t understand. Then I thought a bit and came to the conclusion that, well, there might be quite a few people not understanding German either. And in what I consider to be my first official blog post I announced a language switch to English. Then I thought of the few people whom I knew of who were reading the blog, and how they were all German and most of them considered reading something in English a mild form of torture (I also know quite a few people who consider any reading a form of torture but those don’t read the blog of course. (And yes, I know quite a few weirdos, obviously.)), and I got torn and tried posting everything in both languages on separate blogs.

I don’t do that anymore and so the people I know in real life, you know mostly Germans, who want to keep up with my life have to read the blog in English. This might be more of a problem if I wrote in, let’s say Portuguese or Mandarin, but most people in Germany have a fairly good grasp of basic English.

I really thought that most people knew English as good as I but I had to learn that that’s not the case. I thought that I had learned English in school, and that was that, until I found out that my husband, who learned as much English in school as I (that’s nine years with English as a main subject in the past two years before university), didn’t have the same vocabulary. We found out that a) the English we learn in school is supposedly British English (I’m a bit doubtful if that resembles anything actually spoken in Great Britain), not American. and b) that reading and talking English for about twenty years after school had also made me learn a thing or two. Also I thought about what I consume and found that I live on an almost exclusive diet of American and English books, movies, TV series, music, and lately blogs.

That’s nothing extraordinary by the way, most of what we watch, read, and listen to comes from the US, only the books and movies get translated. But I’m not alone in my preference for the “original” thing (something Germans have always valued). Nowadays when I want to buy an American book I go over to Amazon.de and – click – it is shipped to my home immediately. About 15 years ago I would have entered the local bookshop, got the saleswoman to look through her catalogue and I would have left the shop with the promise that they would call me after the book arrived about six weeks later.

While I love it that I have all of this foreign culture at my fingertips it also means that German culture is deteriorating a bit. And German language with it. You can see the signs everywhere. At the train station the signs saying “Schalter 1” have been replaced with “counter 1”. The bakery is called a “back shop” (“Back” refers to “backen” which means “bake”. Yes, I know this is funny.) One of my all time favorites was a poster announcing a New Year’s Eve party saying “Sekt for free!” (“Sekt” is champagne.) And I already ranted about “Cashmere Schal”. It’s disgusting.

So, I like to have my languages a bit more separate. While I will still say “T-Shirt” and “Jeans” instead of “Leibchen” and “Nietenhosen” (Those German words were used only during the fifties, and most Germans don’t know them anymore.) , I will at least try to know which language I’m currently speaking and chose my words accordingly.

Sometimes that’s not easy. When writing this post in my head I thought about how I can use words in German “mit schlafwandlerischer Sicherheit”, and there is really no adequate way to say that in English. Well, I could try “with somnambulistic security”. Now you know what I mean, don’t you. It means that you can do something in your sleep, without thinking about it, and without taking a wrong step.

The fact that convinced me to continue posting in English (apart from the fact that the English blog had about three times the readers of the German one and about five times the comments) was the English-writing mommyblogger community. So far I haven’t found a German blogger community I feel at home with. While German bloggers go all about how they like to write stories and post them, most of them have that kind of blog where you post a paragraph or two, maybe only a sentence at a time. While those blogs don’t take so much time to read I find that I prefer blogs with a bit more substance to the post. (Which you can easily tell by the way this particular post keeps scrolling and scrolling along your monitor. Sorry about that, but then look at the upside: there were only about five posts in January…)

When I started writing in English I was a bit nervous of course. Would my posts be full of Germanisms? Would people laugh at how bad my English was? But then I thought about what I’m reading in both languages and how not all of that was well written either. I know enough to avoid the most common pitfalls, like very German syntax, or using the word “normal” all the time, or writing “handy” when I mean “cell phone”. I tried to avoid the mistakes my English teacher had always marked red, until I realized that that’s the exact same thing I’m doing in German all the time! It doesn’t have to do with me being non-fluent in another language, it’s my personal style! And since this is a blog and not homework I am free to write as I like, and you as the readers are free to go wherever you want. Of course I hope very much that you stay, so I try to make things as interesting as possible, and also stay under 5,000 words per post.

I still feel a bit uneasy about the whole thing. While a French accent is considered to be cute and sexy, a German accent only reminds us of war and soldiers. The one with the German accent is always the bad guy. And I know that I have to have an accent, since all the Americans and Brits I ever met who speak German do have an accent. Sometimes only slightly and sometimes so heavy that it grates on my ears after half an hour or so. But then I don’t want to pass as something that I’m not, I only like to mingle with people I like.

So, in one way it’s a problem and in another it isn’t. What do you think? German accent? Or not? (You see, you should always end a blog post with a question so that people feel compelled to comment. But then you should also make your headline a bit more streamlined like “How to blog in a foreign language” because “How to …” and “x reasons why…” is always good.)

P.S.: My son is much better by the way.

January Just Posts

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justpostjan2008

 

It’s time for the just posts again. As every month there is a wealth of blog posts to read about social justice. As every month Mad, Jen, Hel, and me are collecting them with your help and write a bit about something connected to it.

I don’t know if you have seen it but last month there was “Blog for Choice Day“. I didn’t know until Mad wrote about it. (You can find the link to her post and another one by Thor in the list below.)I had all but forgotten about the whole pro-choice issue until Mad told us about her volunteer work. Then I remembered that this is something I believe every woman should be able to decide for herself. Whether to become pregnant or nor, whether to have a child or an abortion.

The legal situation in Germany regarding abortion is a bit strange but it boils down to the fact that you can get an abortion by a trained doctor if you’re less than 12 weeks pregnant and you have jumped through a few bureaucratic hoops. (Of course it’s much more complicated in real life, we’re talking about German bureaucratic hoops here.) Oh, and it’s covered by health insurance. So that might be the reason why that particular issue hasn’t bothered me in recent years.

Unlike what conservatives are saying though it’s not a stroll in the park to have an abortion. Not that it should be, I think that is a very grave decision to make, but fear of punishment is not what is getting abortion rates down. For all that is known so far the best to get women to have the babies is to give them the feeling that they will be cared for. That they have options. And, well, having access to contraception may also be a factor. From what I know it’s the US that has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the Western world. (For further reading on this topic I recommend Suzanne Reisman’s post about “Victorian Times…” also in the list below.)

On another note, how are your baby shower gifts coming along? I kept my promise to knit at least a pair of preemie socks every month, in fact I made three so far. I’ll add to that so that there will be all pairs, don’t worry.

Alpha Dogma with Happy Period
Andrea with Apocalypse for one
Blue Mountain Mama with I first saw her at a kid’s program
Bohemian Creations with The machine
Bohemian Girl with Paraben Free
Carrie with My little philanthropist
Casey at Expectant Waiting with Actually, YOU need to seek help for my PPD
Chani with Midnight in our souls and Retirement of a cultural dissident
Chez Kirby with Taking Chances
The Cleaner Plate Club with My first boss, and what she had in common with a cloned cow…or a mad one
Dave with Words. Tone. Death
DAYSGOBY with Trial and error
Defiant Muse with bratz dolls and string bikinis for toddlers
Elderwoman with why hasn’t everybody turned green yet Pt. 1 and Pt. 2
Emily at Wheels on the Bus with Blog for Choice Day
Ewe are here with Just a quick note and Why our next election can’t come soon enough for me
Gina with not my god and big bad wolf
Gwen at Woman on the Verge with We real cool and And I Would Walk 5 Thousand Miles
it’s not easy being queen with his dream is still my dream
Jen with oh george, how i loathe thee and don’t you know i’m talking about a revolution
Jen Lemen with Everything we needed
Jen M with Philanthropy Thursday: Haiti
Jess with one step at a time and beloved
Julie Pippert with my big pink elephant for hump day, When it comes to sexual harassment, it’s the little things that bleed you to death and To the Sexual Harassment Google Searchers…
Kevin with Operation Climate Vote Relaunch
Lucy with We do not need rulers, we need rules of law
Mad with Blog for Choice Day
Mouse with Don’t Tell Me How to Talk About Sex and The Talk
No Caption Needed with Love in the ruins
No Impact Man with A balanced approach to climate change
Not Hannah with Enough. No more.
Peter with The politics of greed
R World with Secret decoder ring for Bush’s state of the union address
Seventh Sister with The last hours of ancient sunlight
Sin at Write About Here with tenuous
Slouching Mom with Wherein I’m dismayed to find that old and young are not always antonyms and What happens to a dream deferred
Snigdhasen with Daughters of the soil
Susanne with stifling the urge to learn
Suzanne Reisman on blogher with Why We Vote with Our Uteruses, Standing Up for Working Women & Child Care Providers, Because “Nobody Really Likes Hair in their Private Regions…”, and Victorian Times or Comprehensive Sex Ed: Which Method Do You Choose to Prevent Teen Pregnancy?
Thor with Blog for Choice Day
Uppercase Woman with Take the baby to prison day
Wayfarer Scientista with last native eyak speaker dies and energy & google earth

More shower gifts
Christine at Running on Empty with December Just Posts: A Baby!
Mary at Them’s My Sentiments with About the Gorilla in the Living Room
Suz at Within the Woods with Late to the Party

Readers
JoC
Sin
Jess
Mary
Mary Murtz
Steph

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stifling the urge to learn

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I’ve been thinking a lot about schools and learning the past days. It all began with the question of whether our son should be starting elementary school early (that would be this fall) or regularly a year later. I had been thinking about this already last year. In all the thinking and talking to kindergarten teachers (“Better wait.”) and the pediatrician (“But of course he has to start school this fall!”) I got totally emotional and nervous. And I wondered why. Because, truth to be told, I don’t think that it really will make much of a difference for our son and both ways would be sound. And, as much as we can tell so far, he probably will do well in elementary school. Either way.

I only realized why I got all worked up about this when I went to look at a nearby Montessori school. I entered the classroom, I saw the teachers, I heard their presentation and thought, “That’s how school is supposed to be!” And I realized how much I had suffered as a child in school because I had to learn so slowly. I didn’t get top grades but basically I just sat there, made an attentive-looking face and thought of something else.

I’d like my son to have the chance to learn as fast or slow as he needs to.

The other thing that has me all worked up is the Bavarian school system. When I studied music education I learned a lot about the various school systems in the different parts of Germany. When my husband and I got married, and when I briefly worked as a music teacher in a Bavarian school, I told my husband that we had to move somewhere else in case we had children so that they didn’t have to go to school here.

All in all it’s a jumbled mess of reformed reforms, of decision made hastily and then altered because it all didn’t work. That’s possibly true of most institutions but the Bavarian school system is especially prone to promote only a few elite students and leave the rest behind.

There are only very few students who still love knowledge and learning after leaving school even if they have been successful there. I can see it right now at kindergarten level when dozens of people tell my son that he should be glad to still be in kindergarten because he won’t be having any time for playing anymore once he’ll start elementary school. (Which is crap by the way, school’s from 8 to 1 and they don’t have much homework the first two or three years.) I see it in a kindergarten teacher telling another parent – while I and our two children were standing nearby – that it’s a shame, the things first graders have to do these days in schools, some of the lessons were too hard even for the kindergarten teacher!

And then, in third grade, it gets worse because then the children are pressured to get good grades otherwise their chances of getting access to a college or university education later in life will be minimal. (Really.) And if they get top grades and get admitted to the Gymnasium the fun only begins. With the recent reform of the system joy of learning and knowledge has a very hard time in school today. “Learning” is again used as a synonym for “cramming as much facts in your head as it can hold until the next test and then forgetting all about it”. Learning is considered to be hard, to be something one only does when forced to, something that isn’t fun for sure. And it’s not as if the students were taught how to learn, it seems as if they just get fact after fact dumped on them, without any strategies of how to deal with that.

I, on the other hand, still believe that learning is fun, that it’s something that occurs naturally, and especially that children are eager to learn as much as they possibly can. Just like Maria Montessori did.

In order to have our son visit a Montessori school we’d have to pay about 350 € every month for school, have him driven to school to the next town, and we’d have to be lucky to get him in since there are much more people interested than they can take. Regular elementary school is free, it’s nearer to our house than kindergarten, and it has to take him by law.

Those of you outside Germany might ask why I don’t homeschool him, seeing that I am that passionate about learning and a teacher on top of that. Well, homeschooling is illegal in Germany. This goes back to the 19th century when children were forced to go to school for the first time ever, even those whose parents depended on their labor, like farmers. I always believed that this is a good thing that it makes society a bit more equal.

But now that it is about my son I’d like him to be a bit less equal, or better yet, that all the children can have access to schools where learning is fun and where both teachers and students are looking forward to go to every day.

I know that there are still a lot of children in the world who would love to go to school and can’t. Children who have to work for money like they were adults, children who’d love to learn anything, and can’t. But still I’d like to live somewhere where learning is driven less by fear and more by enthusiasm.