Crossed wires

This is our mess of English/czech wires under the telly.  I’m terrified I’m going to blow something up – it’s a sort of international tangle, a bit like my life at the moment.

…I’m still having difficulty understanding when I can pick the children up, what time lunch finishes, are they in after school club?  I've yet to get my head around the system. 

When I arrive at the school there are 2 bells to ring – one for each after school club where presumably my children are.  Parents line up to ring the bell and request their child, then the child comes down and is taken home. Seems simple enough.

When it comes to my turn they a) don’t understand me  b) don’t know where my children are c)  there’s always some unknown drama that they are doing something else or in another class (daughter was in an art class yesterday that I wasn’t aware of)

So of course this daily ritual of embarrassing myself n front of the other parents who stare at the foreigner is beginning to get a bit traumatic… The old lady on the school reception desk is my saviour – she’s helped me a few times, and now poor thing has started to get involved.  I see her watching to make sure my children have arrived safely.  She tries to help me by saying the odd word in English like ‘Monday' whilst nodding her head earnestly and I nod back smiling - thinking what have I got myself into?

….I should really congratulate myself, so far I have managed somehow to get both kids everyday.

The dictionary was our saviour this morning before school. Youngest had his first swimming class and didn’t want to go.  It took me a while to get to the bottom of it and finally discovered it was because he was worried if he would know the Czech terms for front crawl - ‘plavat kraul’,  breaststroke  - ‘plavat prsa’ we couldn’t find backstroke, but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad…  After we looked them up he felt more assured and went happily into the classroom : )

We also needed the dictionary when my daughter came home with her homework – Czech grammer.  Hmmmm, maths I can deal with but Czech grammer???  We used an interesting mix of resources to help us – first we had to translate the questions using Google translate and the good old dictionary and when we got really stuck we scanned in the homework sheet to daddy who back in his desk in London helped us solve the missing blanks (shhhh don’t tell the teacher….)  thank god for technology….!!

And I haven't mentioned the guineas for ages..here's Peanut also looking a bit traumatised