A few weeks ago, I said something about Daddy being an adult. Which prompted this exclamation from our 4½-year-old daughter: “C’est pas un adulte, papa!” (Daddy isn’t a grown-up!) We looked at each other. He shrugged. I grinned. And she added the punch line: “C’est un parent.” (He’s a parent.)

The other day, my daughter (currently 4½) and I were playing with her various plush animals. She handed me her dragon hand puppet, informing me that it was not a real dragon. Me: “It’s not?” Her: “No, look.” She dropped it. “See? It can’t fly.”

Our family is quite a bit international, or European at least: In addition to German (Mom) and French (Dad), there is D., the second husband of my widowed mother-in-law, who is from Turkey, and my divorced father’s partner A., who is from Lithuania. Yesterday, during a car ride, my daughter and I were playing a […]

Two nights ago, I read my 4-year-old daughter a new book from the Conni series (for the second time). Afterwards, she chose the same book for Daddy’s bedtime story. Whenever she chooses a German book for him, he tells the story by the images, which works well for this series. However, some details mentioned in […]

This afternoon, my daughter and I went to the playground with her friend E. and her mother. I had only found out recently that the mother is anglophone, and so of course I chatted her up on the subject. At some point, the girls came to see us. E. wanted something from her mother who […]

Last week, during the European Aquatics Championships in Berlin (BLN 2014), I tried to watch whatever race I could catch between coming home from work and bedtime. I don’t follow any swimmers in particular, so when a race came up where I didn’t know a single name, I said: “I don’t know anyone there, I’ll […]

My four-years-and-one-month-old daughter recently expressed the wish to learn reading. So naturally I pulled out all the stops, ordered a reading kit from Kinder lernen lesen and bought an alphabet poster. Last night, she “read” the first letter and proudly declared “A wie pomme!”

The other day, while on holidays in Germany, we were walking through a pedestrian shopping street in Flensburg, the northernmost city in Germany. I told Daddy: “Admire les jolies façades !” (Admire the nice façades!) Which he dutifully did. (They were nice.) My words prompted my 4-year-old daughter to add: “Regardez ce magnifique hélicoptère !” […]

When we’re in Germany, I have a tendency to raid bookshops, much to the delight of my 4-year-old daughter (she always finds something by herself there). The other day, after our second raid in three days, we passed the bookshop we’d just left a little earlier. My daughter: “Können wir da nochmal rein?” (Can we […]

We had house guests from the U.S. this weekend. One of their presents for our daughter were some shiny new state quarters from their home state to play with and practise counting. We explained to her that she couldn’t buy things with that money here, only in the “États-Unis”. When our friends prepared to leave […]