Routines

Standing back and looking at today, it kind of summed up, very tidily, what our life here in Zürich has become.  It was a day of little routines, all those things that make life comfortably predictable for the kids.  Ella has accumulated quite a few little chores for each day.  She wakes up each morning and turns on a book-on-tape and practices her handwriting for school: in a burst of ambition in one of the first days of summer, she attempted to finish her whole cursive handwriting workbook, A to Z, in one sitting, but she got bored and crampy within an hour.  So instead she counted out the pages and gave herself a daily assignment, and does it without too much nagging, thank goodness.

Alex gets to spend his mornings less productively: usually his first act of the morning is to beg me to put on a Garfield cartoon for him, and usually I do.  I'm kind of a fan of morning cartoons, too.  But it isn't too long before the boys start thrashing around with nervous energy, and I have to toss the whole lot of them outside.

But, more often than not, nochElla and Paul will peek out from their 4th story apartment, and then they'll run outside to join my kids. Then the whole mass of them will run up to me, asking if they can play computer games, and I shoo them back outside.  It's all part of it.

Lately they've been playing two-a-side soccer, with the entryway to our apartment as one of their goals. Luckily, we have the best, most understanding neighbors in the world. Sometimes they even join in for a pass or two. But the kids don't have a soccer ball among them: they use a super-light playground ball instead.  I was contemplating getting them a proper Swiss football, but Dennis reminded me that they'd probably just break a window.  And truly, they're happy without it, anyway.  None of the four is particularly good at soccer, although Paul takes the role of resident expert. At one point I heard him instructing Ella about the appropriate way to pass a ball.  "Remember, don't use 'stinky toes.' If you pass with the inside of your foot, it will go where you want.  See?"  Apparently they have "stinky toes" in Great Britain and Switzerland, too.

After lunch, my kids curled up for a while: Joey fell asleep for an early nap, and Ella's been spending a lot of her free time this vacation exactly as I would, with a fat stack of comic books.

Alex, seeing a window of opportunity, approached me with a deck of cards and a hopeful smile.  We've played more games of Kinder Bunnies and Sleeping Queens and Uno in the last few weeks than I can possibly count.  Alex sneaks a game in whenever he can: he's a child after my own heart.

When Ella finally took a break from reading, she hopped up from her blanket and dashed to her room. And then, a half-moment later, I heard the swift tinkling of her little bell set as she tapped out Pop Goes the Weasel, double-time.  She does that a lot: a couple of times a day she gets this funny little itch to play, and she'll dash through every song in her very small repertoire.  I've been begging her to let me teach her a new song, but she says she wants to get her others perfect.

I don't know if it's coincidence, but just when Ella started playing, Alex ran up to me to ask if he could take a walk to the candy store to spend one of his dimes.  And he came back, sucking the gummy candy that he had bought, moments after Ella finished.

Unfortunately, Joey didn't miss Ella's little performance.  It woke up him up, and he stumbled out of bed with another high fever.  He didn't want to do much but be held, and he was pretty quiet the rest of the day, alternately sitting with his books and watching his brother.

Ella drifted back outside to play with her friends, eventually going over to their house.  And then, when she was back home, I guess lost track of her.  I say this because, later today, when I was cleaning up, I found these little gift boxes sitting out, each with four coupons: one for "ten hugs," one for "ten kisses," one for "one game nite" (during which, apparently, Dennis and I get to play one of Ella's two particular favorite games) and one for "One trip to the 'teater' (I have a baby-sitter)."  Would that either Dennis or I could come home and announce that we have a sitter.  Ah well.  Our 11th anniversary is coming up in a couple of days, and maybe that's what inspired Ella to do this.  When I asked her about it, she just smiled slyly and said "Oh, those weren't from me."  But I'm on to her. Dennis and I haven't yet started referring to one another as "Mom" and "Dad," nor as "Mother" and "Father."

Dennis came home and watched the kids for me this afternoon, so that I could rush out for weekly German lesson.  It continues to be a private lesson, which is wonderful but also a little intense.  I'm exhausted by the end of the 90 minutes.  But my lesson continued when I got home and took the kids outside to our courtyard to play...and to force all of my neighbors into small German conversations with me as they passed by.

We always end the day with bedtime stories, and I gave the boys extra today, although Joey, poor little sick guy, fell asleep half-way through the second one.  Ella's bedtime routine has grown to include reading a little German story with Dennis each night, something really simple and short out of a German first-reader.  We figured we owed it to her to help her retain what she knew over the next month, and Dennis thinks it's been helping her a lot.  But her vocabulary has been increasing in funny ways: the book that she's been working her way through is all pirate stories: she now knows the word for seagull poop. Her skills came in handy the other day at the grocery store, however, when she was chatting to the lady in line behind her about a toy that had monkeys and treasure chests.

After the kids were all tucked in, Dennis and I spent the evening the way we spend most, making good use of the Hulu subscription that my parents got us for our birthdays (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) while Dennis, because he's lovely, folds all of our laundry. 

It's no trip to the teater, but, hey, I'll take it.