Sock Madness!
With cold, dark and long winter nights (being very dramatic here!) upon us, I’ve been keeping myself busy with some craft. And without realising the foot fetish behind it all, I’ve been both constructing and deconstructing – socks! Results below. The knitting took me ages, and only by sock number four did I have it right (so one child wears a very odd pair of socks and one has one odd and one good sock). The sock animals were a lot of fun, and I’ll be making lots, lots more of them! Some raw materials for the next crop are included in the last shot. Let’s see what they end up as!
And, as promised, here are the finished products! In a shameless bout of self-advertising – these munchkins are now available for sale at:
Christmas baking
Ok, it’s been very, very quiet on the blog front for a while, but since the chestnut exploits it has become COLD COLD COLD here and time for Christmas baking! It’s been many years since I last baked Christmas goods in winter, and it’s an absolute joy to be doing it when it’s cold outside, there’s a sprinkling of snow on the roofs and the Christmas market stalls are being set up in town – it just feels like the right thing to do. Baking during the Australian summer in 40 degree heat was always a bit of a challenge – the oven being on all day didn’t do much for the internal climate of the house (in more than one sense!).
Now it’s on to baking. I have a couple of favourite baking books – both of them childhood memories. One is a G&U publication, “Backvergnuegen wie noch nie”, claiming to be the first comprehensive German guide to baking, the other a Swiss collection of recipes by Betty Bossi, “Guetzele”, the Swiss word for cookies. The jar in the picture contains “Mailaenderli”, a simple butter cookie recipe with a bit of lemon peel for zing.
Instructions and results
The kids have been fabulous this year at rolling out the dough, cutting out the cookies and decorating them – I felt somewhat superfluous and made a big deal out of the fact that I and I alone controlled the oven and was in charge of determining when the goods were ready. Today is our fourth full-on baking day and we’re just waiting on some dough to reach the right kind of consistency in the fridge before getting on to more cookies! These ones are spiced, crispy “Knusperkekse” and come from Brigitte, a German women’s weekly magazine. The recipe is available online at http://www.brigitte.de/kochen/rezeptsuche/rezept/index.html?id=3792. I can also highly recommend the “Engelsaugen”, angels’ eyes, at http://www.brigitte.de/kochen/rezeptsuche/rezept/index.html?id=3801&rezepttitel=Engelsaugen.
YUM!
On Chestnuts
Well, autumn is well and truly here, and for the first time in ten years I’ve been out chestnut gathering. It must be the ‘hunter and collector’ gene coming through, since the chestnuts I am talking about are horse chestnuts, not the edible sweet chestnut. The horse chestnut has a fat juicy fleshy green shell with spikes and thorns - think blowfish. The edible sweet chestnut has a thinner shell but many, many more spikes – think sea urchin. Sweet chestnuts also have a little tuft of hair sticking up the pointy end, whereas horse chestnuts are rounder and don’t have a distinctive point.
Just about the only thing you can do with horse chestnuts is craft – find something sharp enough to prick a hole in them and insert chopped down tooth picks! We made hedgehogs and a snail, and later a rather fetching (however heavy) bracelet and dinosaurs, rockets, cars… and we still have two backpacks full of them!
Languages are not dangerous
My husband found an article about a study on children who stuttered, which found that those who were bilingual before the age of five were more likely to stutter than those who weren’t.
=> see
http://news.smh.com.au/world/bilingual-kids-more-likely-to-stutter-20080909-4cid.html
and an abstract of the article at
http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/adc.2007.134114v1
The study does not discredit bilingualism, in fact it points out that learning the majority language – in this case, English – later, after the age of five, seemed not to have an influence on developing a stutter.
What I couldn’t find out is what other factors there were to distinguish the stuttering bilingual children from non-stuttering bilingual children – what socioeconomic factors played a role, whether the children were happy with their speaking two languages, how they were seen by peers, whether their environment was supportive of the languages spoken etc. While I did not conduct the research and by no means wish to suggest that I know better than a dedicated and experienced team specializing in language development, I do wonder whether it is really bilingualism that is at fault here.
This view of bilingualism as a danger to healthy speech development reminds me of that taken in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was seen very critically and usually advised against. I do wonder whether there is a certain language bias involved as well – ‘useful’ languages like French, English, German, Spanish, Chinese versus ‘problematic’ languages like Turkish, Arabic, Urdu? Was it maybe that rather than being bilingual, the children were from recent migrant families in which other factors were more of a problem than bilingualism? And would it really work to hold a child back from speaking the majority language until they have reached the apparently critical age of five? What about kindergarten, preschool, friendships outside of home?
Languages are not dangerous. They may just point to a problem that is harder to see and harder to tackle.
Comments welcome!
Knot not knit!
A little while ago my daughter had a birthday and was given a knitting doll. I remember having one of those as a child and thought we’d found a way to combine Barbies and creative play – “let’s make some scarves”. Hm. I don’t remember it being THAT difficult. Either I’ve completely lost my craft skills or this particular make has a few construction flaws. After a few hours of frustrating work with tightening yarn, dissolving strands and desperate cutting, we gave up.
A few days later I came across a ‘knotting star’. Now THERE’S a toy that ticks all the right boxes for me. Simple, beautiful, no batteries, natural materials and easy as well as satisfying to use! You have a star with eight grooves and seven strings, which leaves one slot empty. Turn the star so the empty slot faces you, then count ‘one, two, three’ strings up and put that string into the empty slot. Turn the star into position one and repeat! The outcome looks much cooler than the knitting doll’s. It’s fast, simple and while I haven’t come up with countless possibilities to use the string yet (other than bracelets – suggestions welcome!), it keeps everyone entertained around here, including a six year old boy who wouldn’t go near the knitting doll!
Bilingualism – now you see it, now you don’t
When I was pregnant with our first child, we decided that we’d raise him bilingually. Anything else, as everyone in my environment made it perfectly clear, would have been unfair – it was seen as a huge advantage in life (which it certainly is) as well as ‘easy’ as we would only need to speak ‘our’ language with the child and everything else would fall into place. Even the maternal and child health nurse (who carries out scheduled examinations of infants in Australia) insisted I speak ‘my’ language with the child and supplied me with a pamphlet on the benefits of bilingualism.
How things have changed. In my line of work – asking people indiscreet questions about their lives – I heard many examples of migrants who had come to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s and who told me the exact opposite. How they had been encouraged to stop speaking ‘their’ language at home in order not to hold their child back.
It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought, though. Bilingualism doesn’t just happen. At least not the kind that most people think of spontaneously – that the child can ‘pass’ as one or the other, that both languages are equally strong. Even with a lot of effort and determination, both my children spoke better English than German once they started going to kindergarten. There were just so many more speakers of English around than German. Particularly our younger child did not speak German voluntarily at home – she spoke English with her brother and father, why put in the effort to speak German with Mum, who she knew to be perfectly capable of speaking English – she heard it every day! Bilingualism is very, very hard work. We did a lot to introduce other speakers, and particularly other German-speaking children, to our offspring (it’s a hard life having a parent who also researches your development). We modified our textbook approach to ‘One Parent, One Language’ (OPOL) to the somewhat lengthier yet very honest ‘One Parent One Language When Only One Parent Is Present, But Speaking The Minority Language When We’re Together, Well, When Together At Home, When We Are At Someone’s House Who Doesn’t Speak It We’ll Still Speak The Majority Language’. Doesn’t roll of the tongue as well but it worked. They both spoke German, more or less fluently, but I haven’t had enough experience with monolingual German children to be able to judge whether their mistakes were typical of bilingual children, typical of all children or just typical of our children. Yet the language they had more practice in was certainly and quite naturally English. We didn’t want to encapsulate them in a German environment.
After four or five years of having one dominant language, you would expect a child to be able to recall it any time. When we moved to a Germany, we thought that just keeping up the ‘One Parent, One Language’ (OPOL) principle would be enough. We’d put in all the hard work in Australia and now the foundations for both languages had been laid, right?
Well – not so. At least not quite. While our younger child was put into a ‘migration background’ (as they call NESB over here, but with rather negative overtones – more on that probably in a later post) group and had some help to finally master the German ‘r’ and our older child still struggles to accept the existence of the dative case, they also started to lose their fluency in English. Even though they were still read stories in English, even though they told their father about their adventures every day, even though we use Skype and good old-fashioned phone calls to our family in Australia, they slowed down in their speech when speaking English, they had to think about it more and more and they would suddenly do exactly what they did in Australia – understand what has become the minority language but refuse to speak it. Even more shockingly, when we opened a long-saved can of baked beans (won’t do any advertising here but Australians will know which ones I’m talking about), they asked ‘what’s that?’!!!
Do we really have to start all over again? Hopefully not completely. They are old enough now to take pride in their bilingualism, and they are open to putting in some effort to maintain it. We’re once again modifying OPOL to something way too long for acronyms and are hoping that once again, it will work…
Good link: If you’re in Melbourne, check out this: http://www.rumaccc.unimelb.edu.au/events/
End of summer
I noticed the first leaves turning brown today on a chestnut tree. It is a beautiful specimen, in a street I come through at least twice a day, and is now full of chestnuts, ripe and spikey and waiting to drop onto some unsuspecting passer-by. Not so long ago I admired its beautiful white flowers, with a few pink dots in the centre. Then the leaves came out – luscious, green, enormous. Its canopy created a shady mini-climate zone on hot summer days when I rode my bicycle under it and felt the temperature drop. It’s been ten years since I last saw autumn leaves in my home country, since I noticed how the colours change even on a day nudging 30 degrees, how the mown grass smells different at the end of summer from how it smelled earlier in the year. It still feels like a luxury to be able to see all this. It also makes me realise that one needs to make the most of the sun now. Winter will be long and dark and with very, very few colours. Melburnites love their black, and they can afford to – even in winter there are splashes of colour without people having to contribute to them. Here, scarves, hats, gloves are often brightly coloured, with patterns and pom poms. But now, on these last days of summer – ‘Altweibersommer’, old women’s summer – people are out and about in a frenzy. Like the wasps who turn nastier than nasty around this time of year – as though they know that they’re all going to die soon and better get some stinging done before they do, tumbling about, getting clumsier by the day.
Summer holidays are nearly over for school children, and they crowd the ice cream shops before heading off with mum (or dad!) to buy school supplies. Maybe one more day at the pool, and then… glorious European autumn.
There’s a great poem by Rainer Maria Rilke about this time of year entitled “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day). I found some good translations at http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/rilke/rilke4.html. Reading Rilke is one of those teenage rites of passage in Germany, maybe elsewhere, too. Coming back to his poem – well – a few years later feels like reading an old diary entry – you suddenly remember the strength of sentiments when it was written even though without it all those memories seemed distant and a little embarrassing.
