Here and There / Hier und Da

This has been a very ordinary, and slightly boring, week: no trips, no interesting letters or emails, no warm weather, no news. For me, it is the last week of my holiday, as my class begins again on Monday. It is strange to think that the next time I will be in such a state (with no course work to think about), we will have only eight days left in Austria. While still four months away, the end suddenly seems very, very near.

We have written out lists of places that we would still like to visit during our Easter vacation and other assorted long weekends, which there seem to be a fair amount of between now and the end of June. If we are to see anything else at all, we need to get it planned soon. I also have mental checklists starting to form of the things we will need to do to get ready to leave and the things that we will need to do before we leave so that our lives are set once we get back to the USA. It's too soon to commit these lists to paper though.

One thing that has been checked off my mental list this week is registering Nikolas for school for next year. We went back and forth for a while wondering if, after this year, we should be looking at a different program for him. Ultimately, we decided on pre-kindergarten at his old school. His old school is a great place, with a warm and welcoming environment, super facilities, a focus on early literacy, and providing lots of fun learning experiences. It's everything an American preschool should be and yet, I guess in our back-and-forth thinking, we were hoping we could find something a little more European back home.

We have loved Nikolas' kindergarten this year because it is so non-traditional, in the American sense. There is no focus on literacy. None. Kids aren't learning letters or numbers or memorizing ABC songs at all. Instead they are interacting with each other, being musical and artistic, playing inside and outside, and having a great time simply being kids. It's interesting that in Austria, where there is no pressure to have kids reading and writing and doing math at an early age, that they are all caught up in those areas (or are even ahead) compared to their American peers by the age of ten or so. I don't think there's anything wrong with young kids reading or writing, and certainly we can see Nikolas making early steps towards becoming a reader and writer, but I wish kids could just be kids in America without developmental checklists following their every move.

While we love the whole environment of Nikolas' kindergarten, there are three very specific things that come to mind that I will miss when we leave. Certainly the financial side of kindergarten is a bargain when compared to what child care programs cost in the US. It is heavily subsidized by the government (and there's even talk in the political circles of making kindergarten free in the coming years), and comes out to about 100 Euros a month. Lunches cost extra, which is actually my second highlight. For 52 Euros a month (which works out to about 2.50 Euros a meal), Nikolas gets a home-cooked three-course meal each day. I love that he has been exposed to such a wide variety of foods and that he eats them happily! He will ask for soup and lasagna and salad, because he's discovered that he likes them. And while he doesn't always sit through a meal at home so well, he's developed really good table manners at school. Finally, I will miss the walk to and from school each morning. Sometimes Nikolas is riding a scooter, and when there's not snow and ice on the ground, he's riding his bike, but we are able to get to school without a car. It's close by, the streets are quiet, and it's a nice way to start the day (or the afternoon).

The other day we went to pick up Nikolas from school, the third day in a row that he proudly showed me the pair of borrowed teddy bear socks he was wearing (that we had washed, dried and returned to school each of the previous mornings) because his own socks were dripping. His rain boots had puddles in them, his rain pants were streaked with mud, his winter coat was soaked, as were his gloves which were dripping and caked with dirt. The kids had played outside, the playground and yard a swampy mess of melting snow and slush and puddles, shoveling and sweeping and digging in all sorts of amazingly fun games that had Nikolas beaming. It was such a great scene, muddy kids and coats and boots everywhere, water and mud streaked all over the floor, and no one complaining about it at all because making the most of the great snow melt-off, instead of sitting around inside watching it, is just what being a kid should be all about.