Yes - you can see I have mis-spelled my title.
Sometimes by accident. But today, it came out naturally and I left it alone as it really goes with today's little blurb.
At this moment, I should be finishing up my German lesson with Michaela. I called to cancel it at 8am this morning. Don't feel well, blah, blah. I am actually fighting off something and could probably have made it but...
I told Bart last night "I am really having trouble assimilating back into stuff after this summer and I don't feel like going to German class." "Stuff" meaning things like: practising/speaking in German, parking at the school so I can gab with other moms who've been gone all summer, speaking German, making appointments, getting out of the house.
He says " Yeah, the german is getting hard." A statement, not a question. It is hard.
At first, it's not so bad once you overcome the pronunciation issues (a German in Italy told me I spoke German with a Swiss accent - HuH?). I'm beyond that (I think) and trying to learn all the personal pronouns which are different depending on whether the object/subject is nominativ, akusativ or dativ - Have I lost you yet? A Swiss person would naturally spell 'shock', 'schock', if doing so phonetically. My neighbor sent me a email and her spelling for "whole day" was "howl day." That's how she hears it. And after taking a foreign language where there are little variations in how things are spelled/pronounced, the English language is so full of exceptions it's no wonder it takes so long to grasp spelling and language arts - even for a native.
Apparently, I'm in a funky mood with kids going back to school, trying to figure out which household project I should tackle next (make lists in my head while pulling weeds then promptly forget said lists when I get in the house - and thus why it's hard to leave the house) and knowing the schedule is filling up quickly again - school activities, music lessons, etc...
So at 2+ years, I'm still experiencing some culture shock. It hasn't gone away. Just re-surfaces from time to time.
But we had a fun weekend - with a beautiful sunny day sandwiched in between the cloudy, rainy ones. Attended the Waedenswil Chilbi on Sat. night to get our yearly dose of cotton candy and carnival meats, had Sunday School promotions + picnic at church and the girls got to help lead in a song with a classmate (no nepotism involved - really! :)) and rounded out our Sunday afternoon with a family workout of badminton. I wouldn't say we were playing any games/matches of badminton as the girls haven't really played before and we spent a lot of time on serving the birdie. And watching out for Kendra's backhand - which is actually quite good - better than mine.
Hope everyone's well. Maybe I'll try to start working off some of the pasta I seemed to have brought back from Italy!
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3 comments:
I hear ya. I remember feeling like that in year #3 in Singapore. I'll pray for you today.
I am now trying to figure out what to do with myself with no kids at home. **sigh**
I found out you will see some good friends of ours from MO in Hungary. I hope that works out for you!
Thanks for your kind words and encouragement about the empty nest.
I'm glad you'll get to see JD no matter what. The friends I was speaking of are missionaries in Budapest. We were visiting with them in MO, they mentioned that the D's were coming to Hungary and I remembered you had said something about that. I'll be praying for that to work out.
Hi Susan!
We are very in to badminton right now, too! We started playing while in Minnesota...actually we bought a badminton set at the hardware store so we'd have something to do on the tennis courts. Anyway, it's been a hit. But like you, we're all just trying to serve it over the net.
Any news on the childcare situation for Oct? Pray it will all pull together, but no matter, we'll still get to see you and I can pull our my rusty college German for a few minutes! : ) Miss you!
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