German mums - need some urgent help on baby items!

[thequietone]

Hi,
I've got 3-4 weeks until baby No.2 is delivered. We gave away all our important baby stuff before leaving the UK to friends who needed it at the time. I'm trying to order, either through Amazon or Baby-Walz, a moses basket and stand. What would this be called, or do they even use these for newborns in Germany? Urgent help is required as this baby's going to pop any moment!!! PS. I DO have a cot for the next stage of sleeping.

[finknottle]

Stubenwagen or Wiege

here

Sigh, homework time now with ds2 - would prob waste loads of time cooing over them otherwise. Haven't looked at baby stuff in ages, my youngest is 5

[thequietone]

Thank you muchly!

[SSSandy2]

Good luck with the birth, hope everything goes well. Where are you based and why are you QUIET?!

[finknottle]

SSSandy - could it be thequietone has no children of school age - hence the quietness on MN at least

[SSSandy2]

Well, there is no need to be quiet around us lot. Be sure and come back and tell us how the birth went and how baby number 2 is doing, won't you?

ooh you mentioned the dirty "s" word finky! You could be right there.

I know I really shouldn't keep doing this on MN, but do you know what a teacher at school was telling me the other day? We have a family who moved over from England 6 months ago and put their dc in our school. Well he's slightly autistic so of course the school said they can't make any allowances or do anything special with him. Well ok, think SN here means you have to be in a special seperate school just for SN, so ordinary school teachers probably have no training in dealing with it.

The family are taking him out and going back to the UK because it went very badly here. The teacher refused to teach him so he was left to sit in a corner and read while the class had their lesson.

The final straw was last week when the teacher asked a boy to go out into the corridor and tell the English lad (year 4) something. He went out, grabbed him by the shoulders and beat his head against the wall repeatedly till it split open at the back and left him there bleeding. Went back in the classroom and said nothing.

The boy was found, taken to hospital, had his head bandaged. Now can you imagine being that mother? She went to see the head who said, well we can't do anything about it. Now why the hell not, I ask you? They don't pussy-foot about when it comes to other things here, do they, but bullying in school they cannot do anything about? After my last school experiences you can imagine how I'm feeling taking my dd to school this morning.

This teacher was telling me whenever bullying occurs, the bullied dc ends up having to leave the school and the bully just is left to get on with it. Now why would this be? It makes no sense to me. Are your schools like that or is it just Berlin being a big town I wonder?

[XAliceInWonderlandX]

im in shock after reading that

my ds was asked to leave a privat kindergarten because they felt he could not fit in with the younger children i am very worried about some of his behaviour and have no real support here

I feel for that child and is parent

we are in a small austrian town
and feel there is a very victorian attitude to children

[berolina]

Oh the poor boy SSandy

IME bullying is dealt with very poorly here . I'm already aware we will have to be very careful when choosing school for dc and have privately that if they ever get bullied and the school is inept, they are coming OUT of school, Schulpflicht or no effing Schulpflicht.

(I will email you, I promise )

[berolina]

privately resolved

[admylin]

It seems to be normal for Berlin. In ds's class there are 2 boys who are just ignored. They tag along on field trips but don't join in and they are not even given attention to in class. I don't know why they bother coming. One of them has some learning problems and really needs help, the other is from somewhere like chechnya and spoke no German at all last year. He got 45 minutes of tutoring from the school PER WEEK! They just aren't bothered.

In dd's class however they have a really good teacher (new, so young and still dynamic) and he found out that if you have a child with a certain degree of learning problem your class should qualify for an extra teacher to come in and work with that child. I think they did have one for a while as there are 2 SN dc in dd's class so it is possible if the teacher really wants to help. To get that far though they had to do laods of assessments and tests and get the family involved etc.

One child can't sit still, he's very hyper active and the teacher suggested he sat on one of those balls instead of a chair. His mum had to buy one (and then another when half the class tried his ball out and it broke) so he rocks on his ball and atleast stays put at his desk.

[SSSandy2]

Oh thanks girls for letting me get it off my chest. I suppose school horror stories abound in every country but knowing that doesn't help much. Hopefully thequietone is in hospital already. I shouldn't be scaring pregnant women that's for sure!

Do you know about this one Bero? I keep reading about it in the online papers. You need to actually be registerd in Potsdam though:

www.potsdam-montessori.de/seiten/preise.htm

What some of the American families do here is just never register their dc so they can HE via a correspondance course. We are already in the system which makes it trickier. Dh was telling me about the dad from that Kelly family (the singing one with lots of children, you know) who just thought, ah well I'll HE them. Not realising that he was in Germany, not Ireland maybe. He ended up prison for it apparently. So if you do decide to do it, you have to go to the foreign police and register your children as living overseas. I don't think they bother checking up on it but I'd imagine you'd lose the Kindergeld and not sure how the health insurance/trips to doctors and dentists work out.

Alice, what problems are you having with his behaviour and how old is he now?

[admylin]

We should join in with that campaign to try and get the law changed here. There is one - the more the better maybe. Recently there was even a family on SternTV who had been home schooling and had eventually had to move to Spain to escape having their dc taken away or even police escort to school. they had loads of fines too into the thousands of euro in debt.

[admylin]

here -is there hope maybe

[finknottle]

at that Sandy.

[finknottle]

BTW deleted my rant about SEN and bullying - parents equally bad as schools here imo - as don't want to frighten Thequietone in her condition

[berolina]

He's only 2.8, so lots of time yet. And no SN/behaviour probs - in fact he's likely, in all sorts of ways, to be on the sunny side of the system - I just have so many BIG reservations about it, you know? He's at a lovely Integrationskiga and I really don't want him to have to witness exclusion or disregard of children with SN/language issues/whatever at school.

Not sure the deregging would work, as dc have joint German/British citzenship. (Sh*t, need to get a passport for ds2 before we go away! ). Anyway, dh wants them to at least try school. Thanks for that ink admylin! And for the Montessori one Sandy. Was just thinking the other day Montessori would be right up my and probably ds1's street.

[XAliceInWonderlandX]

hi
ds is four and is very demanding i know children are demanding but this seems excessive

i was a nanny and a nursery school teacher

If i give him attention he is a delight but im exhausted and feel we have not moved on with anything

[berolina]

l'ink, gah!

[berolina]

Sorry Sandy, thoughtr you were asking me about ds, but you were asking Alice

[XAliceInWonderlandX]

hi berolina

naver really spoken to you before

well i have one very demanding four year old and a sixteen year old

and at the mo im in Austria for the second time

dh is Austrian

[SSSandy2]

Well you sound like a childcare expert Alice. What do you think is causing this demanding behaviour? Has it been triggered by something?

I seem to remember dd went through a phase of being mega-stroppy (sort of second round of the terrible twos) at that age but thankfully it passed faster. Could it be something like that? With her I think it was another stage of gaining independence though, which sounds like the opposite to what your ds wants.

[SSSandy2]

Now don't you go holding back finky and letting me be the ONLY one spreading horror stories on here.

On second thoughts, no, I don't think I do want to hear more horror stories

Do your dc go to German guides/scouts? I'm thinking of it. We were watching a dvd from school- Swallows and Amazons. Do you know it? It's set in the 1920s with a bunch of kids who are allowed to row out to an island and camp out there, get into adventures, rowing around in the night, cooking over camp-fires, catching fish, playing war with some other kids and so on.

SO far removed from dd's life. She was looking so wistful and she said oh mum, I'd love to be free and do things like that. Poor city kid. I wondered if she'd enjoy brownies, camping in the forest, that kind of thing.

[XAliceInWonderlandX]

yes he really does not want the independace

always felt kindegarten may pose a problem but not to this extreme

feel if he is not given attention he will cause a commotion to gain attention

tis not helped by me getting getting continually ill

i see him as a little terrier trying to be an irish wolfhound

[XAliceInWonderlandX]

sorry for my really bad spelling

[admylin]

Alice, at that age dc usually behave in a more demanding way towards the mum especially though, trying to find their place in the family, who is boss etc. The trouble with kindergarden here in Germany (and maybe in Austria too) the staff are not really very qualified. The one ds went to was very typical, the girls start at 16 or 17 and do a 3 year training with the odd week or two of theory at a Berufschule. One girl was doing her abschluss year in ds's class and she had to do a project week and write it up with observations (she took a selected few to the forest, made some craft stuff with the leaves, twigs etc) and one afternoon a tester came in to watch her play with the group. Then she had passed her test and became a full Erzieherin. I find a bit more child psycology and theoretic pedagogics should be studied in order to understand and work with children not just singing songs and making pictures.

The girl in ds's group just didn't get him, he was different to the German dc, strong willed and knew what he wanted but at the same time sensitive which I always saw as a positive side of his personality - they signed him off as stubborn and you could tell she didn't like him, how unprofessional can you get. They have never heard of highly sensitive children here (dd, extreme case) and it bugs me when I think I could maybe get them a better start in their schooling if we'd been in the UK. I try to talk to them alot though and explain things.

[admylin]

SSSandy, where that film was made is where I grew up! You can imagine how bad I feel when I look at my own dc's childhood up to now!

A friend had very bad experience of scouts here. Her dd went and a lot of the older dc in the group were using really bad swear words, the mum complained to the youth in charge and he just said what can I do about it (heard that before haven't we!)