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Emil and Theo’s first week of school almost over, we are starting to establish a routine. And it is the best of routines imaginable. The English have a lot of good sense when it comes to starting the day right. And I do not mean the classic Full English Breakfast. It usually consists of eggs (scrambled, fried or over-easy) and bacon, some sausages and Black Pudding on the side, along with baked beans and fried tomatoes and mushrooms. Oh, and a couple of slices French Toast. If you like it hardy and substantial it may just be your thing. A couple of hours after ingesting a Full English, you may even be able to move again. But this kind of meal in the morning has one thing going for it: You don’t need anything else until tea in the late afternoon, when you may feel inclined towards sharing an apple with your loved ones. The name Full English, however, implies that there are tuned down versions of it. Only very few English have it on a daily basis. It is rather more like a cherished tradition, cultivated on special days. But this post actually is not about breakfast.

What really makes for a good start is the time everything begins, over here. School, and work for that matter, starts about one hour later than in Germany. No one here feels any urge have finished three quarters of his day’s work by ten in the morning. Our children have to be outside the school at a quarter to nine. That is when the teacher steps out of the building and tolls the bell to call the pupils inside. For our family that means we can dispense with alarm clocks. Still there is enough time in the morning, for example to have breakfast together (Continental: muesli, bread, ham and cheese, honey, jam and Nutella for Emil), to pack the school bag, to tie the boys school uniform ties. Theo can already do it himself, by the way.

Half past three in the afternoon we pick the boys up from school. The teacher steps outside again and the morning ritual is repeated more joyously for everyone, it is school after all, and the bell now means we can get out. But Emil and Theo assure us every evening that they had lots of fun and very little hard work doing their reading, having lunch with the others, working on their current project (The Big Bang), at playtime or in French lesson.

Katja and I decide according to the weather situation, how to spend the day with Alexander. If it is cloudy or even raining we might go for a jaunt into one of the larger towns in the area: Lincoln, Grimsby, Scunthorpe. When the sun is out we go for walks, rambling around the Lincolnshire Wolds, finding one or two geocaches on the way.

By four in the afternoon we are all back in the cottage. Emil and Theo do their homework and at five we all have tea together. At six, the older boys (Emil, Theo and Steffen) play Mario Kart on the Wii that Kevin and Eleanor’s son Thomas kindly lets us use while we’re here.

We are currently experiencing the luxury of having enough time for the things that we really want to do. This is multiplied by being quite a distance away from home. There are a lot things you are committed to when you are around that we now simply do not have to do. It is very liberating. Everyone in the family is perfectly relaxed and we all look forward to every day with a smile.

Tags: breakfast, caistor, England, food, Montessori, routine

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 23:59 and is filed under english stuff, hingekritzeltes, trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.