Kindergarten Fest

Liam just had the yearly kindergarten fest a couple of weeks ago.  This is much like the many other fests, but as it is for a kindergarten, there is no beer.  More coffee and cake.

The kids always put on a play of some kind, and this year it was a play about “Petersson and Findus” which is a popular children’s story from Sweden.  The main characters are Petersson the farmer and his cat Findus.  Liam’s role in the play was as one of the farmer’s “crazy chickens”

They lived in this lovely henhouse:

At a key moment in the narrative, the crazy chickens all run out of the house.

  And then, as chickens often do… they perform the crazy chicken dance.  Here are highlights of Liam’s moves.

Then naturally, the police come, round up all those chickens and take them away.

My child is a natural showman.

Ammerbuch Fire dept day

The village I live in is called Entringen, which is a pretty small place of around 4000 people.  As is the case for many small places, we are grouped together with a few other villages to be considered one larger town for many municipal services and functions.  There are five villages that are grouped together to make up Ammerbuch, and we share things like a mayor, Police, and of course, Fire Dept.

The Ammerbuch FD purchased an exciting new fire truck this year and it was time for the annual open house and festival to show it off.

Germans are mad on “fests” and there seems to be one going on every week from April-October.  There is always a superficial reason, like a fire/police/hospital hosting, or maybe some cultural club of some kind like a brass band, but all the fests seem to have the same basic elements:

1. Booths with sausages and snacks
2. Beer

Basically, they serve as a nice reason to get a whole bunch of people out of the house and in a common place to hang out with snacks.  Generally a good thing.  Our Ammerbuch fest was typical, a big food and beer area, then booths around the outside from the fire dept, red cross etc describing themselves and their role in the community.

Since Liam is still a big Fire Truck fan, we had to go and check it out.  We looked at the schedule and planned our arrival to watch the mock-accident.  I correctly assumed Liam would enjoy watching smashed up cars get cut apart by firemen.

There was quite a large crowd there by the time we arrived, so Liam got some help from his giant Uncle Bernhard to see over the heads of everyone.

As interesting as the whole accident was, the highlight for all the little people was that all the trucks were parked and open for them to run in and out of as they pleased.  Liam liked the new fire truck best of all since it was the biggest.

The glare off the windshield makes it a little hard to see him in there, so I went around the side for a better shot on the next fire truck he climbed in.

All in all a nice way to enjoy an afternoon.  I did wonder a couple of times what would happen if there was a fire someplace during this fest.  All the firemen, ambulance workers and their equipment was pretty tied up in the crowd.

Back to Posting

Wow, that was a fairly long hiatus, but there has been plenty going on.

As many of you reading this will have already heard from us in the past weeks, We learned in the days after Henrik’s birth that he was born with Down Syndrome.  While this is certainly not the news we were hoping to hear about our new child, it does not in any way diminish our happiness and excitement about the new member of the family.

The doctors and nurses at hospital were great with us in how the news was delivered a well as pointing us towards the resources for parents of a handicapped child.  Germany has quite good support infrastructure and is very much in favour of integrating kids with Henrik’s condition to the regular education system. 

So aside from some extra therapies and doctors appointments, we will be raising him just like any other child.  Indeed, the first couple of years with a DS baby are not particularly different from those with a healthy child.

The first big tests came just a couple of days after his birth, as around half of all DS babies have a heart flaw that requires immediate surgery.  We were very fortunate that Henrik was in the 50% that are good and healthy.  In fact, he is otherwise the picture of health.  Heart, lungs, liver, kidney, brain, all checked out as perfect.  Another characteristic of DS kids is low muscle tone and strength, but again, Henrik is absolutely normal in this department.  He can feed fine and is even lifting his head on his own after just three weeks!  He is powerful.

We are hoping that we will continue to get only good news regarding his physical development and his handicap will be  a mild one.  There will be some challenges ahead, but that is something we will adjust to over time.

Now… some photos.