The Picnic (Home Sick)

We didn't want to get sick, of course, and we tried everything. But sickness is part of life and winter and public education, and, on the night my daughter's fever set a personal record, our sainted pediatrician was open late treating a relentless line of sniffling kindergartners. That was Thursday, we got the medicine Friday morning. It's Saturday afternoon as a write this, and my daughter is restlessly watching one of the "BBC Earth" films. She wanted to see the one where "the shark eats the seal," which is the first one. This might sound like bragging, as in, "I-got-my-daughter-to-watch-something-educational-nanny-nanny-boo-boo," but really, this my penance for letting her watch a DVD of Disney Princess greatest hits earlier this morning.

Speaking of morning - this morning was very short. Blessedly short. For all the suffering and worrying about a sick child, there is one delicious mercy. We slept in. All of us, including teenie one. Normally, one parent sleeps in while the other does his or her Christian duty to wake up like it's a Tuesday to feed and clothe and entertain a tiny little person. This morning, for perhaps the first time in her life, she out-slept the both of us. I woke up to nothing but sunbeams and quiet. My wife had already gotten up to fix coffee. Our church had it's women's day, where all the ladies sang and ate and encouraged. So I think she's having a good time, even if she had to get up for it. The poor woman. She had a terrible night sleep anyway. My daughter has a fever, but I wasn't spared the sniffles, which means I snored like an eight-hour freight train. My wife informed me of this first thing when I emerged from the bedroom. Maybe she didn't sleep in after all. 

So after a leisury breakfast involving peanut butter and bananas (when you find peanut butter in Europe, you buy lots of it), I helped my sick little daughter up. She ate her light breakfast, slurped her antibiotics and played and toddled around. Not needing much attention, I left her to do some Internet reading (don't worry, my chair was about five feet away from where she was laying on the couch). 

I got lost reading a lovely essay, when, I felt a little tug on my jeans pocket. She's up. "It's time for a picnic, Papa!" I look outside. Snowflakes, lots of them, but too indecisive to stick to the ground. Not picnic weather. Nonplussed, she unrolled a piece of bubble wrap from a package we opened long ago and laid it out on the living room floor. She invited me to her feast, and Î sat down. "What are we eating?" I asked. 

"I have hambooger for you, papa!" 

"mmmm... hamburger. I love hamburgers." I wanted to ask if they were made with horse meat, but I don't think she's up enough on current events to get the joke.

Hamburger finished, she announced, "Î have spaghetti for you!" I'm normally not in the mood for a bowl of spaghetti after a burger, but I didn't wan to be impolite.

"Thank you. Mmmm... that's some good spaghetti!" 

Then we each took a few minutes to pop the bubbles in our picnic blanket. 

Real lunch was served later. I let her watch the Princesses (while wearing her official Cinderella dress) while I fried up some pressed sausage and boiled some potatoes. The Germans call pressed sausage "Fleischkäse," or "meat cheese." It's because it looks and tastes like meat but has the consistency of cheese. I realize this sounds like a form of cafeteria torture, but it's actually quite good, especially if you have onions and a bit of Bavarian sweet mustard. I managed to fry it up on the 2nd try - the first time I left it in the pan too long and the alarms went off. Delicious, even after hamburger and spaghetti. 

Surviving the German Winter Part IV: Temptation

This is part IV of an award-winning*, four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here, part II here, and part III here. 

Remember your New Years resolutions? New Year, new you and the rest of it? Remember how through the harmonious combination of diet and exercise, you were going to sculpt your body into something that, come summer, will cause traffic accidents outside your house as you flex in your living room with the window open? If you've managed to keep them until now, then let me say this: respect. So many of your comrades have fallen victim to Jack Frost. It's a sick irony that New Years' resolutions are made in the dead of winter. Winter is no season to avoid chocolate. Winter is no season to ride your bike three times a week. You'd be lucky if you can brave the cold enough to get from your office to a fitness studio.

Now don't get me wrong. I've managed to work out during the winter. For a few moments when I step out into sub-zero temperatures to go jogging, I feel like a superhero. I don't feel like a superhero, because I move with superhero strength (nope). I feel like a superhero because winter running tights are the closest I get to wearing a superhero costume in public. If I could find them in patriotic blue with red briefs, I'd be even closer. Mercifully, they're black. The idea is that while running, no one has to see me in them for more than a few moments. Besides, all the Germans wear exercise tights while exercising. Anything less form fitting would be unnatürlich.

***
A brief aside on exercise fashion. When we were back in the States for Christmas, I couldn't help notice how many women wore exercise tights for non-exercise purposes. In the grocery store or around town, the uniform was as follows: exercise tights and tennis shoes (both perfectly clean with no trace of sweat) with a stylish, semi-professional shirt and perfectly placed hair and make up. It was puzzling for these ever-europeanizing eyes. The look suggested, 10K on the bottom, business casual in the middle, job-interview on the top.

***
Ok, winter exercise. Things were going well until one frosty day, I sought to prove I wasn't a Warmdüscher and went running on one of the few forrest paths that wasn't salted. There was only one minor fall, but the awkward running on hard, hard ice was enough to give me a slight tear in the achilles and a week's limp. The doctor gave me some of that magical Chinese tape that all the soccer players are wearing, but the incident was still demotivating. Superheroes don't get small tears thanks to ice and bad form.

I am back to running - carefully - but temptation is much harder to avoid.

This is how it goes: I squeeze my body into my exercise tights and head for the front door when I hear something in the kitchen. It's a voice singing "Baby It's Cold Outside" the way Nora Jones sings it. What is it? Oh, don't play the curiosity card. I know dagum well what it is. It's that Swiss chocolate bar that I was supposedly saving for the moment my ambitions were realized. It's supposed to be my, my reward, for crying out loud! Well... some things deserve a reward. Something like thinking about going running in the sleet. (Big eyes. Pouty face) Just one. little. chocolaty. square. Where's the harm in one tiny little square? Besides, I'm an American! A free person, using my agency to maximize my utility! Why do I need to conform to puritan notions of nutrition? I can have a little taste - just a taste - if I want. Who's going to judge me? If I eat, say one row of squares, I mean, I could devour the whole chocolate bar, but what's the harm in one, harmless row of squares? I mean, baby it's cold outside, and I, frankly, could use a little comfort in trying times (like January or February). I deserve to be comforted, and I don't see why you should judge me!

But what's this? No... Some how, my chocolate bar has found a boy chocolate bar and multiplied. There's a good dozen Swiss chocolate bars that inexplicably found their way into the secret corners of our kitchen. Dark. Milk. White. Hazelnut. Minty. Oh, and Marzipan! No prejudice, just the entire variety of chocolate experience in one snack drawer. I mean, I have no choice but to try them all. It's my duty as a connoisseur to know, to understand all of the tastes! I could write a blog about it, too, and wasn't that another one of my New Year Resolutions? It won't be more than two or (in extreme circumstances) three squares each, and, yes, I know that will all add up to more than one chocolate bar, there will still be plenty left to share with my wife and daughter, provided they come home soon. Speaking of my daughter, I know the packet of gummy bears is her reward for successful potty training, but... she won't notice if a few are missing. You can't accuse me of taking candy from a baby - she's over three! Baby was so a year and a half ago. Oh, and what is that smell? Why, did the oven just give birth to cinnamon rolls? Two or three, while they're fresh. I shouldn't eat too much. After all, I intend to pop open a hard earned Hefeweizen at the end of the day, so I need to save room.

...yeah...

The worst thing you can do for your New Years Resolution is lock yourself in from the blizzard surrounded by candy and beer. Just don't do it. Instead, pack your winter stocks with tomato juice, herbal tea, mandarin oranges, walnuts and whole-grain bread. Also, don't go running when your belly is full of chocolate. And, don't run on the one path in Germany that isn't salted. Take it from me.

*I gave myself the award for best series published on the blog in February. 

Surviving the German Winter Part III: Don't Get Sick

This is part III of a four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here and part II here. 

The most important thing about the winter? Don't get sick. Ban disease from your presence. Avoid it like.... ok, I won't finish that sentence. Winter sickness is spawned in the floors and desks of kindergartens and elementary schools all over the world, where it's then carried to bus drivers, parents, grocery store workers, office drones and government employees. If you have kids, then, or if you know someone who has kids, or, if you're vaguely aware of the presence of children within a fifty-mile radius of your front stoop, then you need to take the appropriate defense measures.

First, flu shot. It's just a pinch, folks! Then, the teas. Here in Germany, flu shots are under-girded by liters upon liters of Gesundheitstee. Gesundheitstee comes from the German words, Gesundheit, which, you probably know from sneezing, means "health", and Tee, which is how I spelled the word "tea" in first grade (someone should probably point this out to the Germans and get back to them once they corrected their documents). Most of them taste like hot, piping vegetable liquid, which is to say they're delicious. Also, innovate Germans like my wife make tea using real ingredients. You know those tea bags full of ginger and honey flavoring you can get at the grocery store? Well, here's a breakthrough - for roughly the same time, cost and effort, you can make ginger-honey tea using... wait for it... actual ginger and honey, which is a heck of a lot healthier than whatever it is they put in those other teas. Ahh... warm hot tea is just what you need after a day of your daughter using your sleeves as a hankie. Put in a spoon full of honey and open a Charles Dickens book if you're really feeling wild. You can also bathe in the stuff, or try to breathe it to relieve your throbbing sinuses. Just remember, don't drink the tea you bathe in.

Then, vitamins. Vitamins, vitamins, vitamins. Germans have many vitamin-enhanced products, often things you fizz up in water or pills or vitamin-enhanced tea, with various combination for every situation or stage in life. Then, Der Spiegel told us that the Pharma industry was lying to us (the title of the piece translates: "The Vitamin Lie," but they should have taken a page from Dawkins to call it "The Vitamin Delusion," which would have been snappier) and that we could get all the vitamins we need from food. So now, I'm eating less vitamins, except the vitamins that I'm getting from food, which I'm told is plentiful.The way to do this is buy those tennis ball crates they use for practice and fill them with oranges. An orange a day keeps the sickness at bay. At least, until you get sick. I don't recommend using the tennis ball shooter though, at least if you want to use the oranges.

Then, of course, there's prayer. I can't say if prayer gives me some sort of psychological advantage in the face of disease, but that's not the point. I wish prayer worked like a magical incantation, where I get to use supernatural forces to bend the world to my whims. Otherwise, I would have waived my wand to straighten my teeth like Hermione Granger did instead of suffering through five years of braces. It works like this. I pray for my health, which could affect my family's health, or finances and much more, and I find myself trusting God with these issues. This introduces peace into my life. Then, I pray for the health of my wife and my daughter. My wife has been sick this winter, and my daughter could easily get sick and get us sick. But I trust God with this. Some more peace, usually, but even better, praying them leads to think of them more, realize my thankfulness for them, think of them more than I think of myself, and love them in ways even deeper then before. This happens as well when I pray for those in our community, especially for those who've gotten sick.

The problem starts when the prayers turn into actions. I had a roommate who hated prayer. He was from Mexico, and he believed the church there just prayed about problems instead of taking steps to solve them. That hasn't been my experience. The best pray-ers I've known, the ones who've really done it and stuck with it, have been the ones who were quickest to put love into actions. That's why a friend of mine got sick. While another friend and her husband suffered through the flu, my friend took care of their daughter and caught whatever bug they had. I think she's near recovered, but as I write this, my wife is watching her daughter while she's at the doctors office. With such actions, my wife's liable to find herself sick this winter. Which is no fun. I pray she doesn't get sick she's been fighting a cold already. But giving your body for love has a president in Christian history.

Surviving the German Winter Part II: Play in the Snow

This is part II of a four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here. 

Once the snow comes, the kids naturally want to play in it. My daughter has seen enough Christmas specials to know that as soon as the ground is white, all the neighborhood kids burst out the front doors, armed with sleds and cherry-red mittens. They make enormous snowmen with pipes and coal for eyes (I have never seen a three year old walking around with a pipe and and two lumps of coal, though I guess that's what they all did in the 50s when the Christmas specials were filmed) and toboggan down enormous hills. These are my memories as well. What I don't remember is the battle Armageddon my mother must have went though just to get three kids dressed for the winter. I'm struggling with just one.

It takes about seven and a half hours to dress your average three year for snow. Five of those is just getting her little fingers into those friggin mittens, but the rest consists of several pairs of tights, wooly socks over thins socks, hats not truly designed for children, water-resistant snow pants with zippers to bleed your fingers and the most incomprehensible pair of snow boots in the world (they look so simple, then you try to put her feet in them). Once my daughter is wearing enough layers that I could safely roll her down a mountain with a sled (don't worry, haven't tried it, no plans to), she removes her scarf from her lips and announces that she has to go potty.

With this news in mind, I teach my daughter three choice curse words, and frantically unbutton and unzip enough for her to do her business at the proper way in the proper place. By the time everything's ready to go, of course she's already soiled herself. I can now only sigh and check which of her many layers are salvageable and which need to go directly to laundry. My daughter, then, sees her shadow in the bathroom light and declares six more weeks of potty training. Or, I could just remember to let her empty herself before we hit the sleds.

Of course, we've managed to go out in the snow a couple times this winter. It's fun - watching a little girl discover how snow crunches under her little boot is a reminder of all that is good about life. But it only takes a couple of snowfalls to crush a few of your idyllic snow scenes, and this has much to do with the nature of snow itself. You really can't have it all. Snow that is powdery and good for sledding is rubbish for snowmen, and wet, heavy snow ain't up to snuff when it comes for sledding. The snow is the great decider of your activities, even as your daughter is screaming "I WANNA BUILD A SNOWMAAANNNNNN!!!" Nope! We're going sledding, darlin'! This is after we built a snowman that looked more like a six-inch dollop of whipped cream. Just like in the commercials.

Surviving the German Winter Part I: Salt it. Salt it Good.

I came back suntanned and smiling from my Christmas vacation only to find Germany suffering under a plague of fog and gray. This happens every year, but I tried not to think about it when I was cycling around the big lake near my parents' Orlando residence. A few weeks later, we're adjusting, and as a brave, experienced winter warrior (with icicles hanging from my beard as my huskies struggle to pull textbooks over the Swabian Alb), I feel it my duty to offer the following survival advice for sun-stroked southerners. This is the first in a four part series on surviving the German winter.

When the winter comes, the Germans salt it, and salt it good. I used to live in the Washington  DC area,  and no one bothers salting anything until at least two blissful snow days pass and everything from the local schools to the national government shuts down. This annoyed the hearty northerners, who see snow as an invitation to the office, but for the rest of us, well, hello snowball fight! In this part of the world, there's no difference between work day and snow day. I awoke one morning after it had snowed through the night only to see streets and bike lanes so clear, you'd think the Red Baron had flown over Plochingen in a salt-shooting crop duster. Well, no, that's not how it really happens (unfortunately). As soon as potential snow is reported, salt truck swat teams are deployed all over the nation. They are the salt of the earth, and if the earth loses its saltiness, all the Daimlers slide into the Neckar River causing world-wide economic inefficiency, which is the worst possible thing that could happen. Also, since the cyclists here aren't the kind of Warmduschers who use sub-zero temperatures as an excuse to sit by the heater, the city is kind enough to salt most of the bike lanes as well. Warmduscher literally means "warm showerer" but really means wussypants. In Germany, you're a wussypants if you waste valuable energy resources by heating water to wash yourself.

However, the state doesn't salt most of the sidewalks. That it leaves to the power of collective legal coercion. Back home in the USA, you can spill hot coffee on yourself and and sue McDonald's for millions. In Germany, the quickest way to get rich is to slip on the ice in front of some irresponsible person's (likely, a foreigner) house who failed to salt and shovel before sunrise. Thus, every snow day at 6 AM, Germans of all ages can be seen working like ants to de-ice the sidewalk in front of their house with the harried look we all get when thinking about potential lawsuits.

Even as this excess of salt turns the average snow-on-the-street into a grayish sludge, the snow on the roofs and mountains remains exquisite.  In my sunny Christmas post, I joked about preferring a sunny Christmas to a white one, but a good blanket of snow is better than pretty much any other winter weather north of the Mediterranean. You see, for this southern expat, the worst part of winter has nothing to do cold or ice or frost, but everything to do with the darkness. The sun barely bothers to rise this far north and usually wears gray clouds like a dull fur coat. The lack of light turns the world pale and bleak and lonely. This is worst when combined with that weather we now call "wintry mix." The clouds spew this horrid precipitation that's somewhere between rain and snow and sleet and spit. Temperature and water particles combine as if the heavens are mocking the lack of commitment so pervasive in my generation.

Snow, though on colder days, gives winter a surprising warmth. The mountains and the rooftops are frosted white, and each snowflake works together to catch whatever light their is and reflect heavenward, reminding every pilgrim that in the darkness the sun still exists, and spring will be here soon enough. Let it snow.