Wenn es im Winter stürmt und schneit, haben wir eine Flasche Glühwein allzeit bereit - life in Germany and Austria

[LinzerTorte]

As I couldn't find a suitable poem mentioning Glühwein, I composed my own. Please don't laugh.

All welcome - anyone living in Germany, Austria or anywhere else who would like to chat.

Ich wünsche ein gesundes und erfolgreiches neue Jahr! Happy New Year!

Back to my old name, Christmas is over! Tree is going out tomorrow. When do you do your trees?

Tree decorations are down since we're going away tomo till saturday.
Have a fab time in München hupa.

Happy New Year!

The tree will come down when I muster up the energy and motivation to get off my lazy bum - DS has been up since 7am (on New Year's Day - I think I need a word with the boy) practising his newly discovered skill of sitting up (holding onto my fingers to keep himself steady). He is very pleased with himself but so excited by this new ability that he refuses to accept that he is tired and so keeps sitting up, falling asleep then falling forward & waking himself up and the process starts all over again. Strange child :)

Enjoy Munich, Hupa, and have a lovey break, Canella!

Now to the important issues of the day - coffee and a mince pie or Christmas cake (or both)....

Happy New Year all! I've just changed back to my old name too; will take the Christmas tree down tomorrow when we're back home.

We had a lovely Christmas at my parents' and flew back yesterday - the train journey to the airport was surprisingly smooth, but it was downhill all the way after that. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours as the incoming plane had been diverted to Manchester and had to make its way back to Bham, so it was 11 pm by the time we left Munich. The drive to my ILs wasn't much fun; it was dark (obviously), wet and foggy and to cap it all, the bridge in Passau was closed and the diversion added an extra 40 minutes to our journey. It was nearly 2.30 am by the time we got to my ILs, so we all slept until 11 this morning. Must admit I can't wait to get home, but DS seems to be OK at the moment (not too badly affected by the dust/cat) so we'll probably stay until tomorrow.

Have a good time in Munich hupa and a good trip Canella. Exciting news re the sitting up Gator; I found it a lot easier once they could sit up and I could put a few toys in front of them to keep them occupied for a few minutes.

Happy New Year!

admylin DH and DS1 saw our tree up for firewood - it smells lovely when it burns (best thing about it - oops don't mean that!) though it'S best to keep it sawn up in the garage for a few weeks to dry otherwise it sparks and sizzles and you have to intersperse the odd bit of fresh Christmas tree with the old firewood. Do you have a wood burner?

Canella have a good trip!

Linzer Glad your trip was enjoyable though the return journey was rubbish! Must be annoying to be stuck an extra day at the in-laws when you are ready to be home.

Gator yay for sitting baby! When he's able to do it without holding your fingers it will make a real difference as he will be able to sit on the floor and play a bit - though my DS2 now is at that stage with standing, where he wants to stand holding my fingers all the time. We got him a walker for Christmas but it's not stable enough for him at this stage :( Luckily it's activity aspects are getting use but he has already pulled himself up on it and gone right over the top, as well as just pulling it over - he much prefers me to sit next to him on the floor so he can pull up on me... ho hum.

Baby's still not sleeping but I have been going back to bed when DH gets up in the mornings every other day or so, as he's been off since 23rd - that's over now as he's back to work this morning! Still I find I am lazier (in terms of getting out of the house/ walks with the kids etc.) when he is here as he sits around so I feel as though I am allowed to too! So maybe I will get back to morning walks from tomorrow.

Hope 2012 is good for everyone!

Oh yes, those with older DC - at what age do you start letting th DC stay up til midnight on NYE? DD said she wanted to, but I put her to bed at 7.30 (as I am mean and she is a bit full on at times) and she fell asleep straight after her story, so clearly not ready!

Wow that was an epic journey linzer. glad you got home in the end.

Dh does that to our tree too 5more - it lasts nearly the whole year for us since we dont use our fire so often.

I let dd stay up last year when she was 9. And I think a couple of years before that she asked us to wake her. But last night she was exhausted by midnight and since we were just sat watching tv, she saud next year she'll not bother. Didnt even ask the boys - they were both asleep before 8.30. (although ds2 woke up again with growing pains at about 11.30 &didnt settle till after the fireworks were done).

Having a freezer tea tonight - got a really weird combination of foods but the kids cant wait.

Linzer, that was a long trip back home. So, were you still in the air at midnight and was there a mid air celebration going on? Did you get any good shopping done during your holiday? The sales must have been so cheap compared to here.

Gator, great that baby is sitting, he will be discovering a whole new world! Have you still got mince pies left ? I didn't have one this year as I'm the only mince pie eater in the house so I didn't bother.

5more, my night owls have been staying up at new year since they were in 2nd and 3rd year but would drop into bed 5 minutes after midnight. This year they were up until after 1am! I guess it won't be many years until they'll be wanting their own party with friends! Did you all do fireworks? Some people in our street started at about 8pm and there were constant fireworks going off, strange but maybe it was families doing it for dc, no idea.

Canella, hope you have a great trip and plenty of snow. No sign here but we're up in the north and it's warm for the time of year.

Hupa hope your weekend in Munich was good. When does school start again? we're back on Thursday.

Well tree deco is off, just have to throw the thing of the balcony later and take it to the collection point to be disposed of, shame we have no wood burner or anything. One year when we lived in a village the local horse owner said we could chuck it in their field as the horses like it but I don't know any around here!

We were driving past Deggendorf at midnight so were watching all the fireworks from the car, and decided it was the best place to be as the weather was so miserable. They brought round glasses of Sekt on the plane, but unfortunately DH turned his down because he was driving - I told him I would have had it! (But they were quite large glasses and I'd only just finished mine when we landed, so it was probably a good thing that I didn't. Not to mention my lack of alcohol tolerance.)

Aargh, really need to rant about my ILs - DH's DSis and her DC in particular - but will restrain myself for now mainly because I don't have enough time. We're just about to go out food shopping and will be going home after lunch. It will either be Eiernockerl or mashed potato and fried egg today, as we had Gemüsetascherl yesterday. Still, it's an improvement from the days when MIL used to ask me what she should make for lunch. I used to get fed up and tell her that when I didn't know what to cook, I would look up a recipe in a recipe book. That's probably why she stopped asking me.

Rant away Linzer, what have they been up to this time?

I should be out food shopping too but dd wants to come and she's under the shower! I feel like buying nothing but salad stuff and water after all the rich food finished off with raclette yesterday as we didn't manage it for new year. I don't want to see a chocolate for atleast 3 months!

On new year eveo ne of our neighbours down stairs was drilling something with a high power drill and half of the flats lost electricity. Great, just as I was going to start cooking. Took ages to get switched back on and by then we'd started on the wine and dd's lovely tray of snacks so we didn't bother with raclette, we had a second tray of snacks instead! Anyway dd is turning into a very creative and good cook!

Oh, I just found them a bit patronising at times. This time we had a mini-lecture on why we shouldn't give DS a piece of food that had been on the floor for all of about one second by... DH's 17 y.o. niece. DH said that MIL would have cleaned the floor well - "yes, but it will have got dirty again in the meantime". Grr, they're all so PFB about everything (including our children).

Another problem is that I'm oversensitive and still get annoyed about certain things that SIL has said to me. She helpfully told me just before DD2 was born what hard work it would be having the DDs so close together (they're 2.5 years apart!) and that even when they were 5 and 3, for example, I'd never be able to leave them alone and would have to keep an eye on them the whole time. Silly me, not leaving a sensible 5 year age gap so that the older child could supervise the younger one. (Ha! I was actually leaving them on their own - while I was in another room - when they were 1 and 3.) I wish I'd had the courage to tell her that they were far more likely to play together and entertain each other when they were a bit older - and they do. (DH, five years younger than his sister, said they had very little in common when they were growing up and rarely played together.)

Apologies for rant - I may well have ranted about the age gap thing before.

DH has hired a carpet cleaner today and has just said he'll be taking a break in 10 minutes, so must go and make some coffee. Am also waiting for my new phone to arrive; it should be coming between 9 and 11, so will probably arrive at 10.55 am.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Linzer I hope your new phone has distracted you from thinking about your IL. The eating off the floor thing made me laugh, as we are supremely unconcerned about it (and our floor is probably not as clean as your MIL's), but I feel terribly bad when I hand something back to DD in the presence of other mums who then turn out to have a rule about not doing so.

hupa and Canella hope you are enjoying your time away.

admylin are your dc back at school today? DD is back at kiga, but DH is home this week (we were planning to be in the UK, but I got offered work I didn't want to turn down). Weirdly, I'm the opposite to 5more in that I feel I have to spend my time doing useful things when he's at home so he doesn't get the impression I spend all day on MN, but I'm gönning myself the time to post this since I won't be home from work until after 10 this evening.

Gator isn't it exciting watching dc learning new skills? DD managed to drink using a straw for the first time on Sat, I was nearly as proud of her as she was herself. Obviously, learning to sit is somewhat more useful as a life skill!

Christmas dinner went down well here. The salmon was a good choice, being fairly simple to make, but otherwise I just did typical Xmas accompaniments, including stuffing. It was the first time I've made it, but PIL enjoyed it, apart from MIL saying it would benefit from some Speck. How do other people cook stuffing - I baked it in a lasagne dish, but roasting/frying balls of it sounds like it might taste better.

Guess I'm not the only one with a resolution to spend less time on MN .

I have been reading the thread in AIBU about getting organised and someone has said she shreds all paperwork older than two years. Does anyone on here know how long I should hang onto paperwork in Germany? I think there was a discussion previously about keeping university immatriculation documents forever, but what about bank statements, payslips, and so on?

Silken, I'd hang on to as much as you can if you have the space to file it. I've just had a letter to say something is missing for my pension calculation and I can prove some income that I had from old bank statements that I have kept. It was the first year I stayed home for Erziehungsurlaub with ds who is now 13! Good job I can prove it though as otherwie it wouldn't count towards pension points.

I also read that getting organised thread and kept thinking it sounds so easy - bu then looking at my pile of paperwork and drawers stuffed full of rubbish, bits and bobs!

Linzer, did you get your phone at last? How did the carpet cleaning go? Impressed with your dh, is he off work and bored?!

It's not a resolution silken, it's just DH being at home. I'm exactly the same as you as I wouldn't want him to get the right wrong impression, so my MNing has been severely curtailed recently. Oh well, less than a week now until everyone is back at work, school and KiGa.

I need to find that getting organised thread (haven't had time to look at anything other than the threads I'm on for weeks), but it sounds as if Germany is like Austria and you need to hang onto everything indefinitely. I remember posting at the time about DH needing to produce some kind of Schein for his pension for every single semester he was enrolled at university; luckily, DH being DH, he had of course kept them all. He has boxes and boxes of university stuff, whereas I've kept my degree certificates and dissertation and that's it.

My phone arrived eventually, but only after DH phoned them up - I'd been tracking it on the website and apparently they'd tried but failed to deliver it, although we were at home all the time and they had our phone number. Anyway, it's finally here - I took it out of the box, had a quick look and put it back into the box as I'm scared of doing something wrong! Think I'll have a proper look at it later after I've tidied up some of the chaos (we've finally finished opening all the Christmas presents now, but DD1 still has our birthday presents to open).

Off to look for that thread now - not that I'm procrastinating or anything.

Linzer, did you get your iphone set up? Have you got a flat rate for internet/phone when you're out and about? We had a friend stay over at New Year and he had an iphone, first time I've had a proper look and it's definately nicer than our samsumg smart phones!

Silken, no school starts tomorrow - unless I got it wrong and they should have gone back today - dc still in bed anyway! I'm finding it hard to adjust to having teens, they want to stay up all night and sleep all morning, only have half a day to do anything etc.

So what are your resoloutions everyone? I haven't thought about it really but I'd like to crack the mystery of dativ, negativ, akkusativ this year. Can't have my 13 year old correcting my letters! Jenny is a German teacher isn't she? How do you teach that to students? When I ask Germans they say oh it's easy you just ask wer oder was, wen oder was or wem oder was but that trick doesn't help me one bit.

Ha ha, admylin, it sounds like heaven to have dc who stay in bed until midday. My rehearsal didn't finish until nearly 10 last night, so it was after 11 when I got in and past midnight before I was asleep. Fortunately DD slept through until ten to six, so I got a reasonable stretch, even if it doesn't feel like it today. I know some of you with babies are far worse off, though, I'm just moaning because I know I've got another three nights like that this week.

I'm now dreading going through my papers and finding I've binned something important somewhere along the way. The problem at the moment is that, although we have a filing system, it's not very handy (high shelf requiring stepladder), so we tend to pile everything up intending to sort it later. We will have a lot more room after we move, but I know that creating an efficient filing system at that point will not be a priority.

I remember learning DOG WUF in school for prepositions that take the accusative (durch, ohne, gegen, w?, um, für). Während and wegen take the genitive (easy to remember "deswegen", at least). Prepositions describing place (in, auf, etc) take the accusative if there is movement and the dative if not, eg. Ich gehe ins Kino. Die Toiletten im Kino sind ekelig. There was a song for prepositions that take the dative, but I can't remember it. Is that any help? And what's the missing w- word, anyone?

Thanks for the tips silken, have copied them and placed them in my Learn German file to study later! I didn't do German at school so maybe that's why I struggle. I went to VHS courses in Germany where some of the teachers were good, others less so and I just didn't get the lessons about dativ etc. Although I can do genetives for some reason!

Just got back from buying dd her hockey kit - it was even more expensive than I thought it would be, came to over 80? for a top, skort and socks. Daren't even look at my bank balance and in a week I've got to pay for her choir 3 day trip away, then just after that pay for the class trip for 1 week in the mountains at the end of February.

I think it's probably wider, silken - although must admit I cheated and googled it. I don't think it's a word I'd ever use; the only phrase I can think of with wider is "wider Erwarten". The other thing is that people don't stick to the rules very strictly here, e.g. it's far more common to use the dative after wegen than the genitive (wegen dem Regen rather than wegen des Regens). Wegen des Regens sounds very formal to me; have just checked with DH and he said that it's correct and is what he tries to use, but it does sound more formal.

admylin I've been having fun playing with my new phone, but still can't work out how to turn the ring tone on - think I may have to google. I'm paying ?15 a month for 1000 texts, 1000 minutes and 2 GB, which was the cheapest plan; it did mean that the phone itself was more expensive, but overall it worked out cheapest over the two years.

DD1's birthday party is starting in less than an hour, so I'd better go and do some tidying up. She's having it at the pottery studio again but you can't really drag it out for much more than two hours there so we're coming home for the last hour.

Hope the party goes well Linzer and big GGGGrrrr at your in-laws, especially the niece - 17 and thinking she can talk to you like that! On the age gap - I worried that the gap to baby is too big (3.5 years from DC2 to DC3, and 5 years from DC1 to DC3) so I'm with you, anyway what made it her business?

I am rubbish at being organised, and your German grammar conversation is way over my head, I am feeling very inferior!

School's not back here til Monday, but have just dropped the older 2 at Oma and Opa's for 2 nights - mixed feelings as they have no boundaries, and the kids eat junk and don't get put to bed (just fall asleep on the sofa) while there and they tend to come home spoilt brats and need re-programming when they get back! Ah well, they enjoy it...

5more that's so nice to have the option to send one or even two for a couple of nights with grandparents. They're meant to spoil them! Enjoy the time with ds too - did you make it out for a walk today?

Don't worry the grammar talk is too much for me too which is why I have filed it for now! I will study it though, later!

Hope the party was good linzer, did you put a party tea on aswell? Your phone deal sounds good. We all have pay as you go mobiles and the dc use wifi at home to go online which is good as I don't want them online when they're out and about really. Some of dd's friends make constant twitter or facebook comments to each other from school between and during lessons!

Hope the party goes well, Linzer! Your new phone sounds fab - I like the idea of a smartphone but am just sticking with my PAYG brick for now. I'm at home most of the time anyway so just use the laptop here for the internet.
I'd have been a bit mad at the 17 year old too! I think I thought I knew everything at that age too, but I don't think I'd have had the guts/cheek to comment like that.

Silken Glad the salmon went down well and yay about the straw use :) It's so cute when small children are really pleased with themselves.

I'm not sure what the 'w' word is, we learned durch, für, gegen, ohne, um and entlang for accusative, then we had a list for dative, a list for genetive and one for dat/acc depending on whether it was static or motion. We just learned the lists by heart & I still run through them in my head if I'm not sure.

admylin If you like I can scan the relevant pages from my grammar books and email them to you. Let me know.
The hockey kit sounds ridiculously expensive! At least DD is into a sport though, that's always a positive.

5more I hope your DCs have a nice time at the Grandparents' and don't need too much reprogramming when they come back. How is the sleep situation at the moment?

I had my first taste of other mums and babies today at the Rückbildung course. They were mostly really nice bar one know-it-all, but who knows, maybe it was just a bad first impression. It was nice to talk to other grown-ups for a change (well, obviously DH is a grown-up!) but it has confirmed my suspicions that I am useless with babies other than my own. I am thinking of signing up for the Strampelbärchen to give us both something to do and some new people to talk to (I found myself having a conversation with a stuffed monkey this morning, that can't be healthy!)

Gator, those lists would be great if you still have them. I have 3 or 4 German for Ausländer books but I still don't get it! Well done for joining the groups, it's great to get out and have some sort of company even if it takes a while to get to know people properly.

Linzer, how did the party go?

Dd is extremely happy with her hockey kit, she wore it all yesterday afternoon until bed time! I am still in shock at the price, looked at the reciept again and it was nearer to 90? really. Crazy price and she'll need a field hockey stick after Easter as she has an indoor one at the moment for the gym.

Dh's boss said he'd like him to go to Dublin in summer to present his work but still no funding so he has to apply for a travel grant. I've aske don here a she's stuck at the 2 or 3 lines that he has to write 'reason for applying for a travel grant' - I said to put my boss is too mean to pay or we're too hard up to pay out of our own pocket but that's no good is it?!

Well, I survived the party - it was actually fine, but I still treated myself to several glasses of Sekt afterwards as a reward (we did have a bottle to finish off... only two mothers wanted any, and they both wanted more Orange than Sekt). We had over an hour at home in the end, but it went very quickly with opening presents, DS putting on a short show with his new electric guitar (all three of them had been rehearsing a show, but the girls didn't want to go through with it) and then pizza.

5more My ILs don't understand why anyone would want three DC either (unless they were desperate for a girl/boy, as we obviously were ). Re age gaps, there are obviously disadvantages and advantages to any age gap - it just annoys me the way they seem to think that there are only disadvantages to having the DC so "close" together.

Gator The postnatal course sounded good - know-it-all excepted, of course. I don't remember learning any lists for dative and accusative, so just guess/mumble quickly if I don't know. I do remember having to chant der/die/das/die, den/die/das/die, etc. and now get very confused by the cases being in a different order in German (genitive being 2nd rather than 4th, etc.)

admylin at the price of the hockey kit although, like Gator says, it's good that she's found a sport she enjoys. Hope your DH manages to get a grant for Dublin, although it's ridiculous that his work trips aren't automatically paid by his employers.

admylin I've pm'd you about the prepositions. The grammar book is even less user-friendly than I remember but I can send the bits to you anyway. There are exercises to go with it too. I think the only reason we had to buy this particular book at uni was that the head of department was the author!

'My boss is a big meanie' is a perfectly valid reason for a travel grant application form! Maybe you could add some tear stains for extra effect :)