"There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one"

I've lived in Germany on and off most of my adult life, and I always got along pretty well and thought I had it all figured out, until I had my daughter.

 Looking at her red scrunched-up face right after she was born, I knew that my life had changed forever. Of course, there were the usual sink-or-swim moments all new moms face, but my experience was compounded by cultural differences as well. American advice and my mommy heart told me to pick up my crying child, while my midwife advised against it.I'd proudly carry my smiley infant through Düsseldorf on my hip and face silent looks of disapproval because a baby is meant to be pushed around in a stroller. I chalked it up to the learning curve of being a new mom and asked my German mother-in-law for advice. (And like any mother-in-law worth her salt, she had advice. Tons of it. Wowza.)

We were assigned back to the U.S. for three years when my girl was 16 months old, and I finally was able to experience American motherhood first-hand. It was different, very different, but more on that in a later post, I'm sure. 

We arrived back in Germany around Rebecca's forth birthday and moved to a new city. Putting her in preschool, planning birthday parties, buying stuff I had become accustomed to, figuring out classroom politics, all of it was completely uncharted territory to me, and until I made some friends, I was going about it alone.

I often said, "I feel like they all have a secret handbook!" when I would be completely dumbfounded by how to go about something while the German moms just "knew". I floundered, hard, for a long time, as a working mom in Germany without an Oma or Opa nearby and without many other moms in my neighborhood. Honestly, I was sometimes too embarrassed to ask for help because it seemed to come naturally to everyone else.

We have now been back for just over three years, my girl is in first grade at a local public elementary school, and I feel like I have compiled a great list of tips for raising a kid here in Germany. Some of them are funny, some mundane. Some of them might be whiny, some truly appreciative of the German way of doing things. 

I have sat in a cafe' with so many other ex-pat moms and heard them ask the exact same questions I had. Luckily, now I actually had the answers, having learned them the hard way. I hope this blog makes the "hard way" obsolete, or at least less hard.

A lot of these tips are going to be about sourcing fun stuff, planning birthday parties here, and services I bet are listed in the German mommy handbook. (Oh yes, I still truly believe it exists) Hopefully, if this idea takes off, I will be able to get my other ex-pat friends on board (*cough* Andrea *cough*), because they are a wealth of information and my only sources, frankly.