Today we got together with the Knipples. We picked up some goodies at the bakery and came over. Steve and De are really fun to talk to and I think we stayed there about 4 hours. The boys turned their house upside down in that time. But it was so cool to just hang out and all our kids got along really well, no one is aggressive and Logan is not possessive of his toys at all. He was happy to share everything, which is really nice! We talked about all kinds of stuff, kindergartens, staying in munich, how draining kids are, what we can’t really do anymore (like travel around), great english TV shows, you know, whatever.

After that, we went home and the kids had a much needed nap. I snuck out of the house and went to Stitch n’ Bitch. I was at the end of the table, so didn’t get too involved with the conversation, but it was good just to hang and knit. It was a little stuffy there and I almost left because I couldn’t breathe well, but after having something to drink, it was ok. Or maybe I just got used to it. On the way home, I talked to Evangeline and she mentioned that I can find work helping students with their papers - thesis and stuff like that. She also mentioned that I should do something like “creativity classes” because Germans want to be more creative. Sounds interesting, but I don’t know how I would go about doing something like that. She is just full of ideas for work for me, it’s kind of refreshing to hear. I’m still not ruling out teaching English, I’ll have to call the place and get more info.

Then, to top everything off, I got the motivation to look into more kindergartens. There is a page that lists almost all of the parent initiatives here in the city. A parent initiative is a kindergarten that is run by the board members and parents, everyone has to chip in. Doing maintenance, administrative tasks, maybe website stuff (hopefully for me), preparing food, lots of things! It keeps the costs down so that it’s more affordable. I devised a point system where I have 10 criteria for a kindergarten. It’s “weighted” so that the most important criteria (how close to us it is) is worth 10 points and the least important (includes lunch) is worth 1 point. Here are our criteria by importance order:

1. (10) Near?
2. Montessori?
3. Teacher/child ratio under 7?
4. Garden?
5. Cost under 250?
6. Music/art?
7. bilingual?
8. Gymnastik weekly?
9. ubahn accessible?
10. (1) lunch provided?

I am looking at 20 kindergartens, which sounds like a lot, but they only have a few places so getting in is really hard. If you consider all of them have about 12 - 15 places total, only 2 or 3 places are free per year. So really it’s a matter of where will take you. BTW, in case you didn’t figure it out, the kindergartens here are what preschools are in the US. They are for kids from 3 - 6 years old and then you start 1st grade at 6 or 7.

Needless to say, researching this on the internet took a few hours and I went to bed really late, but I was satisfied with all the work and not so worried about finding a place for them. There are a lot of cool options when it comes to kindergartens and I hope we get into one of our top 5 places!!! Wish us luck.