family

Just a quick flu update

February 8, 2009 by Susanne 5 Comments

We’re all still living, that’s the good news. I have been teaching with a fever on Friday (new discipline, and I did splendidly, and managed not to cough on students, that’s a plus). You have to know that I never get as much as a temperature. If my temperature rises I’m really, really unwell. But I did it, thanks to ibuprofen.

My husband has been fighting the flu with a vengeance, and successfully, until last night. Now he’s the one spending the day in bed, which I did yesterday. While I feel much, much better today, I still would like to spend a bit of time in bed today for recovery purposes. Which I will, just after I have cleaned up the kitchen, done the monthly taxes, and have written this post.

My son is the one who feels worst right now. After a week of flu, fever, coughing, not being able to sleep because of coughing, and then finally feeling just a tiny bit better on Thursday; he has been feeling worse again. Starting Friday afternoon, of course, when all doctors are closed.

After a bit of debate my husband and I diagnosed him with a secondary bacterial infection and gave him a bit of penicillin that we have had around. So far it’s not working. It will be big fun when, on Monday, I take him to the doctor again and tell that I thought it was a good idea at the time. (Don’t worry, we’re not foolish, it’s a completely new and unopened bottle of children’s penicillin, still fresh, and there’s enough to give it to him for five days. Chances are that the doctor would have given some to him anyway, only I think it should be working faster.)

Also, my father comes to stay overnight tonight. I’m still contemplating how to make him comfortable while avoiding actual contact. I don’t want him to get sick too. My mother-in-law offered to have him sleep in her guest room. Maybe that’s the best solution.

And? Thank God my mother-in-law is still feeling well because she has to babysit again next week.

I didn’t want to sound all whiny, this is just to tell you why I have been almost incommunicado for the past days. I hope to be well again tomorrow or the day after, and will send both my son and husband to the doctor tomorrow morning.

I survived the holidays!

December 30, 2008 by Susanne 6 Comments

Though I have to say that the holidays as such weren’t the real problem. Not even when my brilliant plan of de-stressing our Christmas celebration (on Christmas Eve as is traditional in German) by making the traditional Christmas dinner a Christmas lunch before putting up and decorating the tree afterwards, and opening the presents in the afternoon instead of in the evening when everybody is cranky and tired, went wrong because the wood stove acted up, and our Christmas lunch was three hours late. (I have to say that at least these days we know how to handle a crisis like this: when you realize that nothing is going right, let everybody have a sandwich.)

The holidays also weren’t the problem when on Christmas day we decided to have goose leg with red cabbage and my husband said that we needed to have potato dumplings with that. I keep forgetting because in the Northern part of Germany where I grew up people don’t eat dumplings much. Usually when we make dumplings we buy them almost finished, you just have to boil them, but this time I had to try and make potato dumplings from scratch. They didn’t taste that awful but the next time I try this I will put more flour in so that they actually stay dumpling shaped when cooked.

I don’t exactly know why but this year’s Advent was the most stressful I ever had. First there was my husband’s pneumonia which left him weak for weeks. Since he didn’t have a fever, and since my son and I had been coughing for weeks too we thought he just had a bad cough, and he didn’t went to see the doctor until just before Christmas. Of course he didn’t stop teaching (that’s the joy of being self-employed, you never stop working if you can stay upright, and still possess all your limbs). While my husband was mostly out of commission my son had the ongoing waxing and waning coughing-sneezing-tummy aching-fever having-malady. That added a bit of excitement to the last two weeks before Christmas because we never knew if he would be fit to go to the kindergarten Christmas thing, where the children did a play, or his own birthday party.

I didn’t feel that well myself, I had been coughing for six weeks at that point, and just when I felt almost human again (and hoped to maybe be able to sing again some time in the future) I got the next cold. On top of that I had to be Santa’s little helper and organized all the presents we gave anybody for Christmas, and all the presents anybody gave my son for his birthday and Christmas. I also wrapped them all, baked three batches of cupcakes, and organized my son’s birthday party which left me totally drained after having spent the entire afternoon thinking that now I knew why everybody always tells me that my son is so well-behaved and quiet – it’s the truth. And that doesn’t mean that my son really is that quiet, it’s only that all the other children are less well-behaved and much, much louder.

The party seems to have been a success with everybody, except for me and my son who told me that he doesn’t want to have a party next year. He was suffering from the noise and chaos almost as much as me.

I can tell that I was stressed out beyond what I’m used to at this time of year by the fact that my period was ten days late, something that never ever happened before. (No, never, not even when I got pregnant.) Of course that just added another layer of stress to these days, the whole panicking if I could be pregnant in spite of birth control, the buying of pregnancy tests, and the wondering if the tests could be wrongly negative, or what I should do if I were pregnant. So that in he midst of thinking about what games to play with my son’s friends I wondered if I knew anybody who wanted to get rid of their baby stuff, and whether my marriage would survive a second child.

As I said before, I’m not really sure what stressed me out so much but I think that it might have been the sheer amount of tiny organizational detail. I promise that I haven’t been a perfectionist about Christmas. This year I didn’t even put up the Advent decorations. I didn’t bake Christmas cookies.

The only things I might do better next year is:

Next year when I order my son’s presents in mid-October I’ll wrap them right away.
Instead of baking the cupcakes four to five days in advance and freezing them I will bake them at the beginning of November.
I will buy the special birthday candles sometime in January and put them away for next year.
I won’t volunteer to play guitar at the Christmas party. (That was my way of avoiding to have to act in the play the parents did for the children. Instead of meeting with the other parents three or four times I only had to play the songs through once before the event.)
I will make an appointment for my husband to get a flu shot in September.
I hereby give up the notion of baking Christmas cookies. Not even the ones I bought all the ingredients for in December 2007.
I will make hair dresser and beautician appointments in November.
I will make a list of games to play, and what to do at my son’s birthday party in November too.

Since Christmas I have been sitting and recuperating. At first I was at a point where I was too tired to knit but since the weekend I have been improving, started a new intricate shawl project, and might even do some housework. (Well, I already cleaned a bathroom for the first time in ages but I have great hopes for the future.)
I still don’t have to teach until next week so I hope to get some time for contemplation. I hope your holidays were peaceful and happy.

(I just re-read my list of things to do next year, and you know what that list means? It means I will have both a stressful November and December. Or maybe not. I’ll give it a try anyways.)

The Family Reunion

October 7, 2008 by Susanne 4 Comments

As I have written before, I went to a family reunion last weekend. I left here Thursday in the morning and came back on Sunday just in time to have dinner with my own family.

My father was the one to organize this, and I didn’t realize how much organization there was needed until I saw that there were 27 of us, who came from all corners of Germany, and that our days were nicely structured. I was a bit scared beforehand because I didn’t know anybody there, apart from my parents and me, that is.

On Thursday I was mightily proud of myself because I had everything packed the day before, and I left with time to spare, and I was calm and composed. It seems that in going in panic mode the week before I had gotten over it. The whole train ride was very pleasant, even changing trains went smoothly and uneventful. The only thing I didn’t like was that the table in the train was so small that when the woman sitting across from me put her laptop down there wasn’t any place left for me. I ended up squeezing my lace pattern under her computer cables, where it was hanging precariously. (And on my way back the same thing happened. First a guy with a laptop (who also kept his big luggage under the table so that I didn’t have any room for my feet), and then a woman with a big writing pad and a newspaper. Next time no table for me.)

The hotel we stayed in was about the ugliest hotel I’ve ever seen. (I won’t link to it here for obvious reasons.) The rooms though were big, and so sparsely decorated that they had a serene feeling.

After unpacking I went down to have dinner with the first bunch of relatives. Four of my father’s cousins with their respective spouses. I was surprised at how nice and kind everyone was. Through the whole weekend I felt blessed that these people on the whole are very friendly and warm, intelligent, and with a sense of humor. (I always had taken sense of humor for granted until I met a bunch of my mother-in-laws relatives. Somehow they just don’t get this whole laughing thing.)

The next day the reunion started in earnest and the remaining people arrived. We had lunch together, and then went for a guided tour of Wernigerode. The guide was not as funny as he thought he was, he played guessing games and gave away bonbons for correct answers but at least we got to see something of this really beautiful town. At one point in the tour the guide’s wife approached him saying, “Is this the second tour? When will you be home?” And he answered he’d be home at half past four but you could see that she didn’t believe him. At which point I gave up on ever being warm again.

On Friday evening we had dinner at the hotel, again, talked to each other, and saw part of a video about a historical play one of my father’s cousins has written about the town where my great-grandparents come from. It’s a bit weird to be related to so many people with a totally different dialect. A lot of these people are from Erzgebirge, that’s Saxony, another group came from Hamburg (you know about Hamburg, don’t you, no need to link this one), and the rest from various places around Germany, Hesse, Lower Saxony (totally different from Saxony, and in a completely different part of Germany), and then there was me, living in Bavaria. In viewing the film it was evident that quite a few people didn’t understand a word of it because the actors talked dialect, and two thirds of the audience didn’t understand a word. Interestingly I didn’t have much difficulties. Living in Bavaria for ages and having friends from all over the country obviously has trained me in understanding different dialects. Well, German ones at least.

There was another thing that had me wonderfully prepared, my father sent me an e-mail beforehand, explaining who was expected to come and whom they were related to. I took that out quite frequently to help all those conversations that went like, “And that is Fritz, I think, and he’s the son of the youngest daughter of my great-grandmother. And this is my grandmother, and the guy over there is my father,…” and so on.

There was only one other person in my age group, also a singing teacher, and also called Susanne who came with her son. Creepy, isn’t it? And our mothers have the same first names too. It would be even creepier if both the name Susanne and our mother’s name weren’t so common in our respective age groups.

It also seems that all of my paternal grandmother’s relatives like to sing. There was an episode on Saturday with spontaneous bursting into song. With harmony. Nice. Who would have thought.

It was really fun to look at all these faces and see their similarities, and differences. To see people in the hotel lobby whom you had never seen before in your life, look at them and think, “Oh yeah, she’s one of us, just look at her nose.”

On Saturday we took a steam train up to the Brocken, the highest mountain in that area. Sadly, it was a very foggy day but we were lucky, and just before we had to go down again the fog lifted and we could see a bit of the beautiful landscape.

On Saturday evening the hotel had a dancing party, and someone (might have been my father, also the hotel manager) thought it would be a good idea to attend. Well, the food there was the best I had in that hotel. (The food I ate in those four days had me longingly think about vegetables, and even salad by the second day. They did have salad, in a way, but it mostly consisted of cooked green beans and shredded carrots with sugary dressing.) But then there was a big woman telling jokes, interspersed with one of these unspeakable dance duos, you know the kind, a keyboard and a guitar, and one of them sings, and they play all the songs that I try to avoid as much as possible. And then the music is so loud that you can’t talk to anybody.

And so I excused myself just after dinner, went up to my room, knitted and read the latest Terry Pratchett. A very nice evening but I regret that there were some of my relatives that I haven’t spoken to.

Sunday morning I went back, this time the trains were a bit more crowded but not unpleasantly so.

I found that I really enjoy traveling alone. It was very relaxing to just do what I wanted when I wanted to without having to consult with anybody. It was nice to have my own quiet room. It’s also much easier when I only have to pack my own things without trying to cram my son’s stuff into the same backpack as well. It was lovely for a change but I also missed my family (you know, my son and husband) and was very happy to be back home.

As I’m writing this I’m still a bit tired and overwhelmed by my weekend, and I feel that this account is brittle and dry and doesn’t do it justice. Anyway it was decided then and there to meet again, in about two years at the place where my parents live. And I’m looking forward to it.