School daze 2

Sorry, I realised that the last blog was getting too long. So, here is what happened in my own pre-school selection for Eve.

There are a few good ones locally and I tapped the local working mothers network to ask for advice. Two came out on top so I arranged to go and see them. I have absolutely no idea what to look for in a pre-school. I googled "what to look for in a nursery school" and was mightily scared by the number of basic child safety things I am supposed to look for (are the staff checked for criminal records, how are complaints from parents dealt with, is there are a large sign outside saying "we beat children, and enjoy it"). So I asked my Mum, who replied via email "I have no idea. Your father says to make sure they have lots of toys". Helpful!

In the end, Mummy instinct came to the rescue, as did Eve. Of the two, both very good, schools we visited one was larger and clearly had more space for the children to be let loose in. As Eve is not being prone to sitting still for periods of more than 5 minutes, this was a big plus. The teachers were all happy to chat to me about what they were doing and they openly welcomed Eve to join in the classes. They had lots of toys (thanks Dad), lots of books and the children there seemed really, really happy. After we had visited both I simply asked Eve which she preferred, which turned out to be the same one as I did. The Mummy instinct is strong in this one (sorry, bad Star Wars pun there!).

We start in July, after we come back from a trip to the UK for Eve's transition time before she starts school proper in September. She can't wait and has already told me that she wants to get the school bus each day and needs a special school bag because now she is a big girl and going to school.

School daze

Last week (apologies for the delay but the lack of blog access at Gnome bank means I don't get as much time to write as I once did) saw me making the crucial decision about pre-schools for Eve. In HK this is no small matter. If my local Chinese colleagues are to be believed, this is the single most important decision I will ever make about Eve and if I get it wrong I could ruin her life. I do not exaggerate. The Chinese cultural focus on education is huge. You can't go down a main street in HK without bumping into hole-in-the wall schools for music, art, academics. The local media has widely covered the burgeoning industry in celebrity tutors, whose faces beam out at you from the backs of buses and have such trendy names as Ken O.

Of course, like most things a large degree of this is down to money and education is a good money making enterprise. I don't know a parent alive who wouldn't give up the clothes off their back if they thought it would help their child get a head start in life. However, there is also a grain of truth in that HK schools are intensely competitive.

If you are a local Chinese parent you have the choice of the local system. However, the good local schools are much like anywhere else and over subscribed and highly selective in the students that they take. They also tend to have either formal or informal feeder pre-schools and primary schools so it becomes even more essential that the right place is gained at the age of 2.

All other parents, expats included, have to look to the private or semi-private system. The private schools (known as "international" schools here as if this gives some sort of extra status) are relatively easy to get into as long as you throw money at them. To even be considered for a place you need to buy a debenture - a sort of bond system that the school uses to raise money. The cost of these vary, but the top ones come in at around HK$1million (about GBP 80k or US$ 130,000). This doesn't even guarantee you a place! You then have to pay a fee for application to the school and if you get in you are looking at a cost of around HK$100,00 per year just on fees.

The other system is a throwback to the colonial era and is called the English Schools Foundation. This is part funded by the government and the annual fees are about 75% of what you pay for an international school, it has a mixed ability intake and even special needs support and you can only apply the year your child is due to go. They don't have feeder schools and admission is mainly based on language because the mission of the schools are to provide education for children who don't speak Chinese and can't be educated in the local system. That said, about 80% of the students are local Chinese anyway. Guess which system Eve will go into!

Photo meme

I have no idea whether this will work. Anything more complex than typing my blog is beyond me because a) we have a mac and I have no idea how to do anything on it and b) my default settings are all Chinese so if I face even the smallest problems I get all befuddled. Oh well. I was tagged by London City Mum to take part on a photo meme (?!?!). The rules are thus.

1. Open the first (oldest) photo folder in your computer library
2. Scroll to the 10th photo
3. Post the photo and the story behind it
4. Tag 5 or more people to continue the thread

I don't know 5 people who blog who have not already done this, so I will risk the wrath of the modern chain mail demon and do it all except the last bit. Any readers I don't know about, please pick up and run with this one too.

The photo was taken I am not entirely sure when. Over 7 years ago, because that is how long I have been living in HK and this was taken when I was still living in the UK. It is Christmas (hence the hats and cigars). The man waving like a look behind me is the Boy. The man next to me is my brother in law, S.

I am pretty sure that neither my sister nor my brother in law read this (Mum and Dad, don't tell them), so I can be relatively honest about my brother in law here. I adore him and have more respect for him that almost any other man I have met.

He grew up overseas and moved to the UK in his twenties. He met my sister in the bar where he was working as a bar man. After a while he decided that he wanted to get out of the bar and get a professional qualification, so studied like a demon, took some very difficult exams, and got a much better job. He married my sister, making her very happy.

S is most definitely a boy's boy. He plays rugby (front row so not a shy and retiring flower like those pansies at the back), and loves his sport and his beer. The Boy loves it when we go to visit on our trips home because we can guarantee that any rugby, or football, of any note will be on the TV. He happens to rides a gorgeous big black motorbike, I left him my small one when I left the UK and he quickly moved onto something sleeker and faster. He is also a dab hand at DIY - he and my Dad practically rebuilt my sister's house so that they now have a lovely family home in London.

However, S also dotes on his two children, to the extent that when my nephew was born he decided to give up work and stay at home and look after him and my niece.

There are very few people who have the patience to stay at home and look after children, and even fewer men. I am not in any way being sexist here, but being a stay at home Dad is going somewhat against the grain of society and that has just got to make it harder. My niece and nephew adore their father (who is also an active member of the PTA where my niece goes to school) and he is doing a fantastic job with them. He is also an amazing cook, his pork belly is better than any I have ever had in a restaurant.

As if often the way with families, especially in laws of the opposite gender, we don't tell each other anything like enough that we love them and how fond of them we are. I genuinely could not wish for a better brother in law.

Thanks LCM for giving me the chance to say that.

For the love of a giraffe

My sister, who picks brilliant presents for children (having two adorable ones of her own) sent Eve a lovely gift for her birthday. It was a giftbox containing the wonderful children's book "Giraffes can't dance". If you have not come across it yet, I can highly recommend it as a delightful book, and the others by the same team are similarly charming. They have not quite exceeded my love of Julia Donaldson (Gruffalo, Sharing a Shell etc) but it comes close.

The giftbox came with a height chart and a small cuddly giraffe. Eve loved the book and the giraffe. There is a part in the book that describes Gerald (the giraffe) learning to dance and Eve would grab Gerald at this point and do the actions, including swishing his little tail. Gerald became her absolute favourite toy.

Last week her godfather was passing through town so off we went to meet him for an early supper. She wanted to show him Gerald so he came with us. I was a bit distracted in the cab (we were sharing it with another Dad, see previous post) and I was a bit rushed getting out of the taxi and realised too late that the beloved Gerald had been left behind. I didn't worry too much. The trusty Amazon would come to the rescue and I could just buy another one. I told Eve that Gerald had gone on holiday to London to see her cousins and would be back soon.

Getting home that night, what I expected to be an easy task turned into something quite different.

Amazon has every version of the book imaginable but no giftbox with Gerald. No matter, a couple of bookshops in the UK and New Zealand had it. Except when I went to their websites they were out of stock. It turns out that the cuddly Gerald was a special limited edition and is no longer sold.

With an increasing level of panic I turned to Ebay. Nothing in the US. Nothing on the HK site. I finally found someone who had 4 copies, seemingly the last 4 in the world, in the UK. All I had to do was register and pay, it even had the helpful "buy it now" tag so I could be assured of a new Gerald, although if the truth be known I probably would have bid an obscene amount of money to get my hands on it.

Except I hit a bit of a problem, you can't register on the UK website if you live overseas. It sent me to the HK Ebay site to register, where the whole registration process was in Chinese. By now I was starting to get really worried. Will Eve grow up always hating me? Will she always feel insecure that one day I might forget her and leave her in a taxi? Will she never trust me to tell her the truth again?

I managed to change the registration page to English, whay hey, and then registered. It sent me my confirmation email, which then sent me to a confirmation website that was, drum roll here folks, entirely in Chinese!

Back I went to the UK site and struck upon the brilliant idea of registering under my parent's address. Except it already had me registered via the HK site, which I couldn't read or confirm the registration, so, in effect, I could bugger off.

I started to sob.

Then I remembered that a good friend of mine is a bit of an Ebay-er. One phone call later, she had ordered Gerald and he was being sent to her.

He arrived today, she gave him to me whereupon he went straight into my handbag to ensure I didn't leave him behind in the restaurant. He is now sitting on the dining table where Eve will see him when she wakes up.

Phew

Hello, um, hello

Due to my nightly trips to the playground to pick Eve up I have built up a small network of parents and nannies of Eve's friends with whom I am now on speaking terms. I know the names of almost all the nannies, but when it comes to parents I have a complete memory block on the names of other parents.

It's not like there are a lot of them. In HK, where help is so cheap and work hours so long, it is a small band of us who bother/manage to make it to the playground of an evening to collect our charges. In fact, I think I probably only know the parents of 4 or 5 of Eve's friends. However, remembering their names are beyond me. It's not that we haven't been introduced, we have. However, within a goldfish-memory-like split second I forget them and default to calling them Oscar's Daddy or Chris' Mummy. They are all designated in relation to the offspring. I know I'm not the only one either, all the other parents seem to have the same problem. We studiously avoid using each others names except when talking to the children, when Aidan's Mummy becomes a perfectly acceptable name to use. I know what Oscar's Dad does for a living, where his parents live in the UK, his favourite beer (Friday beers in the playground time), even his type and size of motorbike - but I'll be damned if I can remember his name.

Last week I shared a cab with a parent I know quite well (Kieren's Daddy) and the whole cab ride I had to studiously avoid saying his name. It would have been awkward were it not for the fact that he had clearly forgotten my name too.

The worrying thing is that I know, and can remember, most of the nannies' names.

Gratitude for gratitude

Thanks ladies (you know who you are) for taking up the Gratitude Tag idea. Despite being in a place where the bastardised commercial US mother's day is followed, on Sunday Eve and I will be going to a nice Anglican Church where mothering Sunday will be celebrated and Eve will be forced at Sunday school to make me something with loo rolls and sticky back plastic. It will be the first of many I hope.

So, I've found a church I really like (week 4 and I even know the names of most of the congregation), and somewhere that mother's day will be celebrated at the proper time.

For Godness sake

New year, new resolve and along with giving up booze for lent (which I am regretting after one day), I also decided to try again to find a church in Hong Kong that suits me and Eve. I have started going to a rather good bible study group run by a colleague so asked around the members and one church was suggested. It struck me as being a bit happy clappy for high church anglican me, but I am willing to have an open mind so trotted off there this Sunday.

It started off well. I was quite warmly greeted and told that I had the option of Eve attending Sunday school or the service. Finally, I thought, I can worship with my daughter. There were lots of children in the service, which started with two songs and Eve and a little boy danced happily at the back while people looked on smiling. I was feeling really rather positive that I had found a place that we could call our church.

Then it all went wrong. "Will all children under ten now leave" came the announcement. Um, what, my child? I didn't really feel I could pipe up and say that the nice lady outside had told me that children could stay in the service. So I left. We were carted off to a classroom where the children watched a video about buying a cow for a village in China. All well and good, except Eve had seen the climbing frame outside and was refusing to sit still. The video, which was a bit too raw in its detail of life in an impoverished village in China for your average toddler, ended with a large, fat man coming in to tell us that every child had to bring in twenty dollars next week to send to the village. Um, hello? Shouldn't children do something more meaningful than asking their parents for money? Earn it? Do a sponsored swim? But then this is Hong Kong where money is supposed to solve everything.

Then it got worse. All the parents left, except me. Three teenagers then taught the Sunday school. Except it involved giving the kids a colouring book about Jesus and then trying to stop them hitting each other. For about half an hour all they did was keep the kids colouring. After about ten minutes Eve was trying to make a break for the climbing frame again so I took it upon myself to read her the story she was colouring and try to engage her a bit. Then we sang a song, by which point Eve was so bored and annoyed with her Mummy not letting her go to see the climbing frame that she just went and opened the door herself.

Then all main service finished and all the parents came to pick up their children. So, in effect, all this actually turned out to be was moderately religious childcare. The teacher even had the audacity to tell me that Eve was a bit too young to concentrate for that long and maybe I should take her to the creche instead. I bit my tongue and restrained myself from simply replying that she was bored out of her mind colouring for 45 minutes.

So we left and I will not being going back. The sad thing is that Eve really quite enjoyed it and has been showing the Boy and H her little bible book that she coloured with real pride. She is even talking about Jesus. This is enough to keep me going and try to find a church that Eve and I are both going to enjoy being at together.

Watch this space.