Watching What You Say

I´m going to have a little bit of a rant here, so before I begin, a bit of good news is we´ll FINALLY be moving into our new house in the next 2-3 weeks, hopefully we´ll find out tomorrow the date to finalise the sale!! My pinterest House folder is growing by the second and i´ve already mentally spent more money than we´ve got so it´s safe to say i´m pretty excited to be in our own space again!

Now here comes the rant...

At least once a week I/we get asked the question "When are you going to have kids?" Now, i´m a person with A LOT of patience but ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, it has to be the least thought through, most insensitive question i´ve ever been asked in my life.

I´d like to say to the people who ask this:

• You don´t know if we want to have children or not.
• You don´t know if we CAN have children or not.
• You don´t know if we´ve spent the last year trying, but not getting pregnant.
• YOU DON´T KNOW ANYTHING...

I obviously don´t say this, i´d like to, but I don´t. I usually do one of the following:

• Smile falsly.
• Say something along the lines of "Well, we don´t even have a house yet..." (Officially can not say this anymore)
• Change the subject. 

The truth is, i´d love to have a baby, we´re planning on trying as soon as we´re settled in the house but i´m not going to tell every Tom, Dick and Harry my business, what am I supposed to say? "Well actually i´ve spent the past year and a half with the alarm on my biological clock stuck on ring and I can´t find the snooze button!" or "Well actually some days I can´t even face to see children because I want one so bad, and isn´t it ironic that i´m a teacher and i´m with them all day?!" 

You should never ask someone when are they going to have children, you don´t know what that person is going through in their life in regards to that subject. I don´t go around asking single people "And, so when are you going to get a boy/girlfriend?" It´s insensitive, not every single person wants to have a partner, just like not every person who has a partner wants to have children.  

A little word to the wise, i´m getting close to snapping. Yesterday after being asked that question twice in the space of half an hour I plucked up the courage to say something i´ve been dying to say for a long time, I didn´t go full on crazy but the conversation kind of went like this:

Them: "So, now you have a house, when are you going to have babies?"

Me: "Do you know how often we get asked that?"

Them: "Yeh but when I ask, i´m only joking..."

Me: "Yeh, EVERYONE is only joking, it´s not funny..."

It stopped the conversation and we were able to carry on talking about ANYTHING other than the B word. Maybe I should pluck up the courage to speak my mind more often! 

A New Project

So i´ve been "off the radar" for a few weeks, that somehow turned into a few months while we VERY quickly sold our flat, moved into my father-in-laws and bought a new house.

We had the idea to sell our flat in August, it was a very trendy attic in the north of Madrid, I would describe it as bachelor pad with girlfriend accents, which is exactly what it was, and we were fine with that until we got married and started talking about having mini-me´s.

We estimated it would take around 10 months to one year to sell our flat, based on location, size, price etc. We uploaded photos to Idealista, and within 24 hours we had a buyer!

SHIT. We had a buyer, and no house to move into! Luckily my father-in-law has space in his house for us, and ever luckier for me it´s four minutes walking away from where I work! BONUS!

So we quickly packed up our things in boxes, rentes a van, said goodbye to the flat and moved the spare room at my father-in-laws, where we have time to relax, and save some money while we kept looking for somewhere to live.

Most Spanish people live in flats, we lived in a flat, almost everyone we know lives in a flat, but we´ve decided to buy an end of terrace three bedroom house which me, as a person so unused to living in a flat that I could easily have a panic attack every time a neighbour gets in the lift with me, am thrilled about!

I´m doing all the important work like making Pinterest boards and dreaming about colour schemes, woolen couch throws and laundry rooms while Mr. Millennial is doing all the boring work like talking to the bank and paperwork...

I´ll keep you updated on the move, which should happen at the latest by the middle of February and then let the decorating begin!!

I Heart Glenn Doman

This weekend I was a little... Well, shall we say peeved at the fact that we had a course at work which meant having to stay until 8.30pm on Friday and from 9am until 7pm on Saturday (It was originally supposed to be 6pm but overran by an hour!)

I´m not saying I was very happy at being at work half the weekend, in fact I was definitely NOT happy about it, but in the end the course was very interesting (although intense!)

I work, as a teaching assistant in a private bilingual school in Madrid, my class is a class of 18 three year olds and in three years old, we teach everything in English. The course in question was Early Stimulation (which lazily i´ve translated directly from "estimulación temporal", but probably has another name in Enlgish)

So as I sat down at 5.30pm on Friday, after having been working since 8am that morning, I was ready to be bored and even more peeved, but when the teacher started talking about Glenn Doman and his methods on teaching babies and young children, using a range of exercises to develop the body and flash cards to develop the mind, I started to pay attention. This was interesting!

Glenn Doman was a physical therapist who founded, in 1955 The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (Sounds like something out of X-Men right?!) Well, this was originally a non-profit organisation to help children with brain damage, to develop their full potential as the name suggests, using the exercises and flash cards to develop their brains and bodies as much as possible, rather than just leaving them to a life stuck in a wheelchair or a hospital bed unstimulated.

In the 1960´s they began to use the methods on children with no disabilities aswell and the results were pretty amazing!

All over the world centres are using the Glenn Doman methods to develop the minds and bodies of children to their fullest, training teachers, schools and parents in how to develop the minds of children everywhere.

Unfortunately a lot of the exercises have to be done between birth and two years to awaken the areas of the brain, such as exposure to language and my children are three and four years old. We can teach them languages, of course, they are learning English and doing an amazing job I might say! Also I only started to learn Spanish almost two years ago and since a year ago, outside of work I only speak Spanish.

However, there is a point in a childs life (at around six months) when the brain stops being able to distinguish the sounds from different languages which makes pronounciation so difficult when learning a language later in life, which is why Spanish people have difficulties pronouncing English words begining with an S, followed by a consonant, because these words don´t exist in Spanish, they always have an E at the begining, like Spanish in Spanish is Español and Spain is España. Also it´s difficult for English people to pronunce the letters J and G in Spanish which have a very throaty sound which doesn´t exist in English, but from zero to six months, the brain is able to learn all the sounds, which is why it´s the best time for language esposure, not necessarily to learn other languores but to develop that part of the brain to its fullest.

I am dying to use my new found knowledge, and yes, of course there are some of the methods that we can use in the classroom, such as crawling, which sounds a bit daft but is very important in a childs development, but until me and Mr. Millennial decide to have baby millennials i´ll just have to wait for the rest!!

Adulting is Hard

Remember being a kid and thinking how nice it must be to never have to go to school, to be able to stay at home all day watching Sesame Street and eating biscuits (because that´s of course what all adults do isn´t it?) or going out to work, which seemed really cool, where you could have an office with a big swively chair and a computer for doing lots of important writing.

You could drink coffee from a styrofoam cup and wear smart clothes, you could have control of the TV remote and the power to send people to bed.

Ah yes! Being an adult must be amazing!

Until you are one...

Work sucks almost as much as going to school, and it´s even worse if you happen to have chosen to work in a school!

You have to do things like pay bills and rent, wash clothes and clean the house!

Why don´t we wake up one day with all the knowledge that we thought our parents had? Maybe they did know everything and our generation - the millennials - we´re the stupid ones who don´t know how to grow up, maybe we really are the Peter Pan generation, or maybe, just maybe, our parents were blagging their way through adulthood too and we never realised...