Going, going, going

Last week was my first full-blown research trip to the federal archives in Koblenz (near Bonn and Cologne), a six hour train ride away from Berlin. I was munificently hosted by Günther and Ingrid Rumbach, an older LDS couple that live about seven minutes away on foot from the archive. It was a productive, if exhausting week. I looked at many more sources than I anticipated and will probably not need to return as often as I originally thought. Lia, meanwhile, was back in Berlin, fending for herself, alone with the girls. They nearly killed her. I don’t think it is only because she loves me that she so joyfully welcomed me home.

This week Eli started at the Haus-der-Kinder kindergarten and Julia transferred to the Löcknitz elementary school. Eli loves her Kita, a cozy little establishment with a small group of kids and a pair of lovely teachers. Eli’s peers love her. They cheer her welcome when she arrives and call farewell in chorus when she departs. Her best friend is a little girl named Melissa. Neither girls understands a word of the other’s native language, but they beam and giggle at each other through the day and hug rapturous goodbyes when Eli goes home.

Julia’s adjustment has been harder, not least because she goes to a school where one is expected to learn, while Eli goes to a daycare where one is only expected to play nicely. Julia’s first school wasn’t a very good fit for a variety of reasons, and we were grateful to get her into a better one. She’s been very brave about all of this, but isn’t yet sold on the idea of learning German. But it’s only been a week at the new school. Each day she makes new friends and feels more comfortable.

Readers can well imagine how Katharine savors her one-on-one time with Lia. This may not be exactly what an already modestly spoiled child needs. A couple days ago I asked Katharine to offer our morning prayer. It was a very brief prayer, mostly centered on an expression of gratitude “that everybody loves me and wants to kiss me so much.” Katharine certainly is much loved and often kissed, but it were well she didn’t notice and weren’t quite so happy about it.

All of the girls pronounce any number of enormities on a daily basis but I am neither conscientious enough immediately to record, nor smart enough later to remember them. Charming and hilarious are the one-liners of early childhood—but the best of them are shadows, vanished into airy nothings, leaving not a rack behind.

It has been, on the whole, a hectic week. We did a lot of running back and forth figuring out when which girl needed to be dropped off or picked up and where. I tried, and failed miserably, to register for the fall semester at Freie Universität (I probably won’t take classes, except maybe a German class, but for my fellowship I’m associated with the university). Registration, it turns out, requires going to three different places—once to pay the fee, once to show proof of insurance, and once to file the paperwork—none of which is open more than three days a week or for three hours at a time or at any time when more than one of the other offices is open. If registration at a German university is this much fun, one wonders what delights await the unfortunate undergraduate in, say, Italy.

Friday evening Lia and I had dinner together after the girls went to bed—spectacular eggrolls with a homemade sweet-‘n-sour sauce. I, naturally, was the chef. Then we watched a movie, loaned us by Olaf and Antje. I think I’ve watched more movies in two months in Berlin than in the previous two years in New Haven (though I can still count them on the fingers of my hands, maybe on the fingers of one hand). Olaf and Antje loaned a bunch of movies to the girls, too. I think Lia has had to explain the final scene of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—why Mr. Wonka was so unaccountably angry with Charlie and his grandpa, and then immediately thereafter so unaccountably pleased—seventy or eighty times this week. Anyhow, in this Teutonic world without babysitters, Friday night’s was our best date night right.

Saturday was a gorgeous day. Our home teacher took Lia grocery shopping in the morning, allowing her to fill the back of his van with staples. Earlier in the week, in a single trip to the local Turkish grocer, I bought twenty-one one-liter boxes of milk and nine jars (small ones) of peanut butter. We should, therefore, be stocked till Tuesday. Buying food is the sector of our life where most we miss our van. In the afternoon we went to Tiergarten where we wandered around in a half-hearted search for the mythical playground I found with Julia and Eli on our first visit to Tiergarten but which we haven’t found again. Lia and I played soccer with Katharine, the only one of the girls who shows any athletic ability or inclination, and Julia and Eli collected enormous, fallen tree branches to serve as “walking sticks.” I banned the sticks after Eli poked Katharine in the eye with one of hers.

As we in Berlin keep the noisy tenor of our way, life in our homeland seems peaceably to carry on without us: a hurricane in Connecticut, an epidemic of the farcical on all fronts of American politics, the inauguration of another season of college football. Not much, I confess, to make one homesick.