small news

Dang! (Sorry for the mildness of the profanity, y'all, but my Mom reads this.) Firefox ate my blog entry! I shall try to reconstruct it, but of course it will lack the extemporaneous flair, the bright-eyed insouciance, of the halcyon times of five minutes ago before firefox crashed on me. Twice.

So I was saying I'd nearly decided to give up ifzijax and return to blogging by hand, as the cave-men did, because the comments, my reason for doing this in the first place, weren't really getting used a lot. But Tony Pierce left a comment on my blog! Ooo, fangirl flutter. He recommended Metafilter, which recommendation I will pass on to anyone who wants to keep up with what the blogosphere thinks of Katrina (nowish) and stuff in general (later, when Katrina's off the front pages). I'm so pleased. I read a lot of writing by brilliant, funny people, and when they're also nice enough to take the time to drop by, well that's just fabulous. Cass Brown sent me an email once (he of cancergiggles - buy his book, okay?), also a really nice guy. Rather restores my faith in humanity, to find that smart, funny people can also be kind, helpful people - I'm not sure why I think there should be a conflict. Some bizarre sense of balance?

Anyway. General stuff-going-on on the Folger homestead. Umm, Kilian started gymnasium on tuesday, seems to like his teachers and has nothing bad to report, other than his whole "school sucks" schtick, which we have told him is getting pretty moldy. There's an Irish girl in his class, who must have moved here fairly recently because her German isn't quite up to par yet. Kilian says she lives in Buchbach. Also it looks like about a third of his class are kids he went to elementary school with, though none of his friends made it into gymnasium. We'll see how this develops.

Kilian also met his um, therapist today. He says she's a psychotherapist. I was (perhaps more wishfully than accurately) thinking of her as a behavior therapist. Robert still seems to be operating on the assumption that Kilian's forgetfulness and poor social skills and all of it are the result of some buried inner conflict, and once we can dig up and identify the source of this inner turmoil, both turmoil and behavior will magically disappear. This is, um, not my take on ADD, but as Robert makes the appointments and has the therapist for a best friend and is on a first-name basis with our regular doctor, and has also been through therapy himself, he is well convinced that I cannot possibly know anything about any of it, so we are doing this his way. I'm not real happy about this, but I am altogether without support here, so right now a solution is not leaping to mind. If one does, I'll be sure to let you know.

Gus has started morning kindergarten. Today I had a conference with his teacher, Monika. She says he seems to be um, not very friendly and not very cheerful and only wants to play with Jonas and then only when Jonas does what Gus tells him. She asked permission to have an "occupational therapist" (um, that's what Leo says an Ergotherapeutin is, but that's not really what I was thinking of) take a look at Gus. It is probably nothing serious, just the adjustment to a new group and having to get up early, but she said that if we wait a few months, and then decide there might be a problem, we'll never get an appointment. So there's that.

And there's soccer. When I called, the guy said "just bring him down to the field Wednesday at 5:30". So we did, and the guy there told Robert there was no more space (in a group for 4-year-olds?), and we should get on the waiting list and maybe next year he could get in. I do think that if it were full, the guy on the phone should have said something. Anyway, it occurred to us rather belatedly that Gus should probably not play for Dorfen anyway, but for Buchbach, because Robert and his brother and his father all played for Buchbach when they were young. And family traditions are nice. And Robert said he would take Gus to training in Buchbach, it's only a 15-minute drive, no problem etc., but it turns out that the Bambini training is on Monday, the one day in the week that Robert really really has to be in Munich. Isn't that always the way?

So I'll take him. I do want him to play, and I love the idea of him being the third generation on the same team, and Mondays are fairly clear for me.

Ooog, that reminds me of one other thing: Kilian has school from 8-1 every day, but he also has to go in from 2:30-4 on Mondays, for art class. This causes a serious conflict with hockey, which was already becoming a problem. The training schedule says training is from 4:15 to 5:15, three days a week, but they have to show up 1/2 hour early for warm-up, and stay 1/2 later for cool-down - peel off 30 pounds of hockey gear, run around the stadium five times, take a shower - so that's two hours, three times a week, for kids whose school workload is just about to increase fairly dramatically. We have been getting increasingly alarmed at the kind of time commitment they want from a bunch of 10-year-olds (although, I gotta say, last Saturday was their first game and it was really exciting - they are getting a lot better), and now we'll have to tell them that Monday simply doesn't work. Not only would he arrive when practice was half over, but it leaves him no time for homework or anything else.

Conflicted. Sports are good for kids. Especially for teenagers, as they tend to get obsessive, and there are a lot of things you could be obsessed about that are worse than hockey. It's been really good for him, overall, but I think six hours a week is going too far. I think we would be okay with skipping Monday practice, but that's not really very good for the team as a community. What to do, what to do?

Let me just take a moment to offer a small prayer of thanks that my problems are this trivial. Still, any advice or opinions appreciated.