First Day of School - Almost.

Note: For people who care about such things, the account below is from Monday.  I fell asleep over my keyboard on Monday evening and didn't finish till Tuesday :)

We awoke at 7 this morning to start the first 'normal' day, i.e. kids go to school, Martin works, Janice pretends to do housework while sneaking off to nap or google the answer to some burning and completely insignificant question.  It didn't work out exactly that way.

Z woke up using his new, very own alarm clock (J has one too - amazing how entertaining such a thing can be - but I leave that for another story).  I shook J awake and told him it was time to wake up for school.  He looked at me, looked out the window, back at me, and said, "Are you crazy?  It's the middle of the night?".  I said, "That may well be, but it is also 7am and you need to get ready for school".  "No way", was the response.  I pressed on with the no-I-really-mean-it and you-really-have-to-get-up-now-or-you'll-be-late-for-school standard arguments.  He finally complied.

But then he had to get dressed.  And he did get dressed.  But he wasn't dressed... not for German school.  Turns out, all of Julian's pants are sweat pants.  Very practical - I am a huge (in more than one way) fan of sweat pants.  However, one should only wear sweat pants in Germany when one intends to sweat.  So, not to the grocery store, nor to the mall and definitely not to school.  We dug up one pair of corduroys from the bottom of the drawer and added 'pants' to the seemingly infinite shopping list.

Z had 'normal' pants, so he was good to go (We later learned, that at gymnasium, it is cool to wear sweat pants. The plot thickens...).  M and I both thought that Z's school would start at 8:30.  Neither of us has the vaguest clue where that idea came from.  I looked up the start time on the school's website, just to be sure.  I told M, "It says 8:10 here.".  He thought he remembered someone telling him that the website was wrong.  Not being able to confirm or disagree, I just shrugged, and said "OK".  We showed up at 8:15, and yes, we were 5 minutes late for the first period.  We waited another 20 minutes for the 'orientation director' to meet with us, and we found out that Z's class would have one hour of P.E. next, followed by a two hour period of Art (Those of you with kids in American public school, stop salivating.  It is unseemly.).  Because neither of those subjects are taught by the home room teacher, we were asked to either come back for the very last period of the day, or simply return in the morning.  We took option B.

The four of us then proceeded to J's school, the Grundschule (I like that word, Ground School :).  There, we were greeted by the school secretary who immediately identified us as "Familie Steinmeyer".  Seems we have acquired a bit of local celebrity status, as "that American family".  Poor Martin.  We were escorted to J's classroom (already in session, as it took some time to straighten things out for Z). The teacher was incredibly sweet, and seemed a bit excited to have such an exotic creature joining her class.  She has spent a year in the States, so her English is perfect.  Yay!  We left J there, promised to return for him at 12:30 and headed straight back to bed.

Not really.  That's what the three of us wanted, for sure, as we had all (ok, all but M) been sleeping until 9:30 or 10 for weeks and were pretty much in shock.  We headed straight to the mall.  Two hours, one pair of soccer shoes, shin guards, running shoes, three orders of hot and sour soup plus two orders of spring rolls from the food court, and we were back home.  It was noon.  Twenty minutes to 'relax', and then get J.

We left Z at home to consume the rest of the Warrior book series, and returned to Grundschule Suchsdorf.  The classroom teacher and the German teacher met with us and discussed the day, which went brilliantly, and J told us he had a great day ("My new teacher is fun.  Well, not as fun as Ms. Brogden."  - No one is as fun as Ms. Brogden, so this would have been an impossible status to achieve.).

One down, one to go...

We all went back home and M returned to work.  I made a nice German-style meat stew with as much meat and as few vegetables as possible, smothered in gravy with a side of boiled potatoes.

After dinner, we all huddled on the couch and watched a great family movie.

Not really.  We went back to the mall.  Three pairs of  'proper' pants, two sweaters, a bag to hold P.E. clothes, slippers for the classroom, a small ruler that fits in the pencil case we bought on our shopping trip to Kiel two days ago, one meltdown over the lack of coolness of the bag, followed by return of said bag and purchase of another at a different store, two double-scoop ice cream cones and two hours later, we returned home once again.

Until the next day, when...