tla

It’s kind of an odd thing, that while the world at large is marking three years since all pandemic hell broke loose, we’re marking five years of having Andrew around. It goes without saying that Andrew is a much nicer thing to have around than a pandemic.

It took a little longer than we thought it would for him to make the transition into the “Integrationsgruppe” at the kindergarten, largely due to staff illness on their end but also due to the impending Christmas holidays. They moved him over at the end of January; by all accounts it went really well. The first time I took him in after the transition he got quite upset for a short time, and I had to give him a big hug outside until one of the staff came to help get him inside. But after that he never really gave us any trouble about the fact that we are going to the building on the other side of the road from where we used to. He did explain it to himself for a few days by declaring that “they’re closed”, but now he is fine with the change. It’s not clear to me that much is different for him day to day, but the grownups are considerably less worried about him, it seems like.

Meanwhile we continue with the speech therapy, which seems to be more or less working. He is still not good at talking, and he always did a lot of it, but there is a bit more sense every day, and a bit more content than just naming the things around him and saying what he wants. I still can’t begin to guess when he will be ready for a classroom (first grade will be in a year and a half, one way or another), but I suppose all we can do is wait and see.

I would still say that he is incredibly good-natured, and most everyone around him can see this. Some days are a lot harder work than others - I describe him as having the language / interests of a 2-3 year old and the problem solving skills of a 5 year old, at least - but he’s a happy kid, loves to play with his sister, is sweet and sensitive, and is always good for a snuggle. Let’s see what he makes of the year ahead.

It seems to be making news worldwide, how bad the current Covid wave is in Austria - it's less horrific in Vienna than anywhere else in the country (presumably because Vienna has maintained stronger restrictions, especially around the use of FFP2 masks and test/vax/recovered requirements starting at age 6 instead of 12) but it's still become bad here – you can't actually shut the city borders to all those infected people from the provinces, after all. 

Sophie had got through the entire pandemic totally unscathed until right before the autumn holiday was to begin. There was a positive case in her class reported first thing 21/10 (PCR tests here are generally handed in by 9am with the results reported overnight), so that on Thursday morning we got the news that ~all the girls would go into quarantine, since they had shared a changing room for 15-20 minutes during gym class, and that they would be allowed to test out on Monday at the earliest. So we postponed our holiday plans (we'd rented a holiday apartment in Steiermark to get out of the city for the week) and crossed our fingers for a quick resolution.

Friday morning I took Sophie for the recommended test at the 'Checkbox' down the road, where they took an antigen sample (negative) and a PCR sample at the same time. We made her do an LFT every day (negative) and then took a home PCR kit sample Monday morning which ought to have sprung her free. Not one hour later Mike had an email from the city starting with "In light of the positive test returned by you daughter..."

What?! Turns out that the PCR test from Friday morning had been evaluated, with as bare a positive as it is possible to have (cycle threshold value 39.4; this number doesn't go higher than 40 and higher -> less infected.) So as a result her brother was now in quarantine, and she wouldn't be allowed to test free until Monday the 1st.

And then the Monday morning test came back...negative. Mike immediately phoned the city hotline, trying to see if there was any chance we could get Friday's test overruled somehow; signs were promising but it needed the judgment of an epidemiologist and Tuesday was a public holiday. We made her do another PCR test on Tuesday anyway, which also came back negative, and finally after chasing them some more, we got the ruling on Wednesday evening that she was free to go (but that she wouldn't count as recovered.)

So we went for the four remaining days of our visit to the countryside, which was very relaxing though (maybe because) nothing was open so we did basically nothing but let the kids run around in the backyard of the place. We did find a cafe to eat in once, and a playground for them to play in for a while, but there was really just nothing else to do (and we were, as usual, exhausted anyway.) We returned Sunday the 31st; Monday and Tuesday were school holidays too, so Sophie's first day back at school was Wednesday the 3rd.

As soon as we got back, having seen that the FDA were in the middle of approving the vaccine for kids under 12 and the EMA were unlikely to do so until sometime around Christmas, I decided to start looking for one of these doctors I'd heard about who was willing to vaccinate underage kids with smaller doses of Pfizer. It was looking pretty hopeless, like every other parent in Vienna had beaten me to the punch and none of the doctors had any more capacity, and I was getting increasingly grumpy. But I sent a couple of mails with all my university titles, emphasizing that we needed to travel to the high-risk no-mitigation UK for Christmas and I wanted my daughter to be protected in time for this trip.

Thursday the 4th they had a class 'project day'; Friday the 5th we got notification of another positive test. Because of the project day and the fact that they hadn't stayed in their seats, the whole class (apart from recovered and the one vaccinated kid) was put (back) into quarantine. Just as everyone had turned in their liberation PCR samples on Tuesday the 9th, we got word of more positives in the class; since those kids had been in attendance on Friday, the quarantine was extended a day for everyone, test-free day would now be Wednesday 10th, with earliest return to class on Thursday 11th.

But, miracle of miracles, one of my emails had paid off - Sophie had an appointment exactly on Thursday the 11th to get the first vaccine dose! It meant missing the first couple of hours of school but that was fine with us. So she got the vaccine, went to school...

and on Friday the 12th we got notification of *another* positive test in the class. (This really shouldn't have happened, since everyone in attendance on Thursday should have tested on Wednesday morning and then again on Friday morning; we strongly suspect that this kid tested on Tuesday before the quarantine was extended, but didn't bother testing again on Wednesday like they were supposed to, and then had to do the next test on Thursday already, which was positive.)

So Sophie is back in quarantine (and yep, Saturday morning was another positive notification, from another kid who had been in attendance on Friday, so it's extended until next Wednesday again. At least this time we know already) until next Thursday at least, but it was a real stroke of luck that she managed to get the first vaccine dose on the one non-quarantine day she had last week. She's been testing negative ever since – of course we'll never know for sure, but it's entirely possible that she really did get infected in October and really did fight it off that quickly. I hear that happens sometimes, and she had had minor cold symptoms for a couple of weeks prior. In any case, the vaccine will soon make that irrelevant.

Around the beginning of last week, the city of Vienna announced that – due to parent demand – they would open a vaccination centre for 5-11 year old kids, despite the missing EMA approval; the vaccine wouldn't be recommended, but it would be allowed for any kids whose parents consented. The registration for this opened Saturday, and vaccination will begin tomorrow; they have a throughput of 200 kids per day (in order to allow time for thorough discussion with parents and kids) and by Saturday evening there were 5500 appointments booked. With demand through the roof like that, I hope they will find a way to increase the capacity. But Sophie is one of those 5500, with her second appointment booked for 3 December, and then we can be free of this endless quarantine cycle.

Just in time, no doubt, for the whole process to begin with Andrew. 🙄

When last I wrote, both of my kids were being constantly pathologised by Austrian educators, and in both cases (Gott sei Dank) they were coming to the end of their tenure at the respective institutions.

Sophie duly started in the bilingual class of the local public Gymnasium in September, and it is definitely a challenge. One of the big justifications we constantly heard for "it would overly tax Sophie to send her to Gymnasium and you have to consider that she may do better elsewhere" was that organisational skills are in high demand, and of course organisational skills are not exactly the forté of ADHD kids. But, since Gymnasium is essentially the only viable way to eventually get to university if you are educated in Vienna, this has to be challenged since it suggests a view that (at least in reasonable quarters) is unacceptable today, to wit, ADHD kids don't belong in higher education. (There is also a dark underbelly to all of this, which unfortunately we find ourselves implicitly participating in: middle class kids do, and working class kids don't, get regarded as belonging in Gymnasium and therefore higher education. I can be damn certain that if I were a less-educated Turkish immigrant, for example, I would not have been listened to as much as I was, would have lost these battles with the school, and Sophie would be going to a Mittelschule today and expected to start an apprenticeship at age 15.)

But one of the advantages of this being the bilingual class is that we actually have a (small) network of families either with a kid in Sophie's class or with kids already at the school, and so we were able to find out reassuring things in advance, such as who Sophie's Klassenvorstand (~homeroom teacher) would be and how good he was reputed to be. So far it seems all the rumours are true; mpk and I had a meeting with this teacher a couple of weeks ago, and – although he is certainly concerned about her – he doesn't treat it as a foregone conclusion that she is out of her depth. Quite the opposite actually; we were reassured that many kids need time to adjust, that since the bilingual class always has two teachers, there is an extra pair of hands to provide a bit of support for her (!! a school actually ACKNOWLEDGING that they might have resources to deal!!), and that "together we will manage." This basic decency and optimism is so utterly foreign to my experience of "teachers in Austria" that I am still sort of reeling, to be honest. To add to the astonishment, he is perfectly approachable by email, willing to give me the information I need to help her get organised, and even...thanked me...for my...support?! Crazy.

On the downside, we are still living in the age of the pandemic, and Sophie got sent into quarantine yesterday along with over half her class after a kid who attended on Wednesday had a positive test result. It meant that she had assignments to do remotely over Teams, and all the bad behaviour came out at home as we had to push her through doing this work. All we can do is hope that this will all pay off, she will get the hang of "big kids' school", the teacher(s) will remain supportive, and we might finally achieve some sense of lasting "normal".

(Gosh I thought the last one of these was about two weeks ago, not five! Guess I've been busy and tired.)

In comparison to Sophie, so far Andrew has always been our "easy" kid. Sure he gets rigid about things sometimes, and okay his talking is coming along even more slowly than hers did, but the hours-long tantrums and constant feeling of having to walk a tightrope to keep the kid from exploding are just not things we have to deal with. He's usually cheerful, he's getting there with the toilet training (albeit with more trouble & effort than his sister took), he demands a lot of attention from Mummy but what toddler doesn't? He's been attending a nursery (here "Kindergarten", since kindergarten is "Vorschule" which is usually just the final year of nursery but with a state curriculum to pay attention to) since he turned one, and while we haven't always been thrilled with their organisational abilities or communication styles, he has been happy there. In October or so they moved him suddenly from the toddler group (ages 1-3) to the family group (ages 2.5-6) because they were lacking the numbers to keep his group open, but as far as we knew this was going fine. (Of course, due to pandemic restrictions, we weren't ever allowed into the building so couldn't see much for ourselves.)

So imagine our alarm when a letter was thrust into Mike's hand in March or so, telling us that given our child's suspected developmental issues and possible hearing issues, we need to take these concerns to the pediatrician and report back their findings. What the f**k? we ask ourselves. What developmental issues – the speech thing? – and what hearing problems??

While it turns out that someone jumped the gun on giving us this letter – it was supposed to be handed to us during the course of a parent-teacher talk – the details turned out to be even more alarming and cognitively dissonant. The official documentation we were given took a very hard line on Andrew's apparent problems – that he doesn't speak or seem to hear the teacher, that he doesn't answer to his own name, that he is completely uninterested in group activities, that he doesn't make eye contact, that he makes strange out-of-context noises, and a bunch of other things that point straight to autism. Meanwhile the conversation with the teacher was about how much better he was doing since Christmas, how he has these difficulties with language but is happy and has been participating more since then too.

And yet, it is always the things written down that are taken seriously. I had been starting to worry about his language, to be honest; while he does talk quite a bit, it tends not to be very intelligible and really his language should be a lot more complex by now. Since he is in a bilingual environment, it became one of those things where nobody was worried until suddenly everyone was worried. But the rest of it smelled like tendentiously misinterpreted bullshit – was he uninterested in group activities because he's autistic or because he is still too young to understand what is going on? Are they saying he doesn't speak because he's hard to understand? Are his "strange out-of-context noises" perfectly intelligible if you recognise that he is playing his favourite game "tram doors closing"?

So we took him to the pediatrician, who referred him to a child neurology specialist, who was quite frankly unfriendly, didn't bother to understand me properly (in German) and mis-recorded facts, and essentially set the stage for "this child is obviously autistic." We were referred on from there to child psychologists, who did a full evaluation of him over a couple of weeks in late May and June. This is a pair of colleagues who were rather more sympathetic, but continue to be fairly determined to see autism there. I suppose anyone who has been through this lately with their own kids will be aware that, as I am learning, autism is such a squishy diagnosis that pretty much anything can be interpreted that way.

"He doesn't talk." "Yes he does." "He doesn't point out things in his environment." "Yes he does." "But he does it very repetitively."

"He doesn't make eye contact." "He makes eye contact with me all the time." "Well he should be making more eye contact with others."

The saving grace, for the time being, is that due to the need to avoid a bunch of inflexibly bureaucratic traps for the unwary (which I won't go into here) he does not, so far, have a diagnosis. In the end the unofficial psychiatric verdict was "It could be autism or it could just be a delay, we'll have to see."

Meanwhile the nursery decided that he was too problematic and disruptive for the family group, and have put him back into another toddler group, and he started having naps again and it's amazing how much that improved his behaviour. Of course we also found out that some of the nursery staff really believed that he doesn't talk at all (mostly by one member of staff being shocked when he spoke to me one day at pickup) so who even knows. We will move him to the public kindergarten in September – this was planned long before the drama started, but now I am even more glad to get away from the nursery – and we'll see what they make of him there.

Mostly I am just unbelievably fed up with the way the Austrian child rearing authorities want so badly to pathologise both my children, and remain firmly convinced that, were we in the US or the UK, he would have had speech therapy a year ago and no one would be even thinking about autism. But here, conformity is key, every divergence is a developmental problem, and still I can't get a referral for a goddamn speech pathologist.

So school is a dumpster fire this year (and this is the worst of all possible years for that to happen) but on the bright side, Sophie is ten! How on earth did that happen?! It couldn't be the usual sort of birthday in a pandemic year, but we made chocolate cupcakes together yesterday and she had one for breakfast this morning, and then her little brother stole the one she hadn't finished eating this evening. She also got to talk to her cousins on Skype, as well as a friend in Leiden that she doesn't get to see very often.

Meanwhile I got into the news myself today, about which I am still happily amazed.

Andrew is about 2.5 months away from his 2nd birthday. He's got a few words (even fewer that are recognisable by those who don't know them), but it's still about 95% babble. I seem to recall that Sophie was much the same at that age.

What is intriguing me now is how he seems to be on a completely different wavelength than one might expect, when it comes to trying to figure out the whole talking thing. There are many sounds - especially vowel sounds - that he can make just fine, but that usually don't come where you'd expect for the words he seems to be trying to say. So "essen" becomes "ess-eye", "shoes" is "geeth", "milk" is "gee-k" but I think "book" is also "gee-k". It's clear he's noticing that final -k consonant, but not noticing the final -n, and he conflates a bunch of initial consonants. He very clearly says "bye-bye", but a bath is a "maa".

Then again it's different if we aren't talking about nouns/verbs, but rather social signals - these are his two most recognisable sayings. After several months of taking his leave from people by saying "dye-dye", he did correct the initial consonant there, and he can very clearly say "uh oh dear" when a mess is made or when he drops something. It makes me think that he can map sounds to effects, but doesn't really yet have a good idea that sounds can also be mapped to objects in any sort of consistent manner.

None of this, however, can explain to me how he got it into his head that his sister's name is "No!"

I'm aware that, given the content of my posts, it would be easy to forget that there are actually two kids. Poor Andrew has had very short shrift here – especially bad, since the original purpose of DW posting was to chronicle the parenting.

Some of it is certainly second-child syndrome; the experiences of having a baby around, and watching it growing into a toddler, aren't new to us anymore so it doesn't seem like we have anything to say. But the main thing is, he's just so much easier. When Sophie was a newborn, screaming her little head off with acid reflux, I spent most of my time feeling like a failure as a parent and like nothing was ever going to get better. Andrew, on the other hand, has been something of a study in polar opposites. Where S was tiny, A is huge; where she had acid reflux and struggled to put on weight, he has stayed consistently at the top of the charts; where she didn't take to the breast at all, he was quite content there until I had to return to work travel when he was 7 months old. (Also, he had got some teeth and had decided that biting was a great way to signal that he was done drinking.) Where she was bloody-minded and unswervable of purpose even at 1 year old, he can quite often be distracted or redirected (although he does have enough persistence and determination that this doesn't always work) and when he becomes sad he is usually consolable.



He's now 18 months old and he's still huge, which accounts for most of the challenge we have with him. Sophie couldn't reach nearly so many things when she was his age, even if she was just as inquisitive. He has very few words ("uh-oh" and "oh dear" whenever anything goes on the floor, most especially when he wees there, "my?" when he wants something, "ba!" [bath, which is a Very Exciting Thing]) but can understand quite a bit; nonverbally, he has appointed himself Kitchen Bin Monitor and Refrigerator Door Opener. We have already started trying to get him used to the concept of the toilet; although it is still pretty rare that he uses it for its intended purpose, he's pretty happy to sit there as long as he's being entertained with a book or with the "Is It A Hat?" game, and I'm just trying to be optimistic in the meantime and hope that he'll get the hang of the thing as soon as he's ready, since it won't be some kind of Mystery Thing For Others until he's 3 or so.

The difficult part for me now is that he is extremely keen on Mummy. If I am sitting down doing nothing in particular then he's happy to wander around entertaining himself, but the minute I stand up or – OMG – ENTER THE KITCHEN, he is immediately insisting on being picked up so that he can Reach All The Things. If I sit down at my computer, of course he wants to type along; if I read a book, of course he wants to feel (and maybe taste) the pages; if I am looking at my phone, he wants to play with Siri. It means that I basically can't do anything except pay attention to him when we are at home together, and it can get very wearing at the weekends as a result.

We do have a routine for making tea, which I am no longer allowed to do without him being on my hip. He pushes the button to start the kettle; he opens and closes the refrigerator door to get out the milk and put it back again; he gives the tea a stir as the final stage. He is very interested in the tea itself and the fact that it will scald him does not deter him as much as it should. This afternoon I had unwisely forgotten that, just because something is on the kitchen counter, doesn't mean that my 18 month old can't reach it, and I had put my fresh mug of tea there. Next thing I knew there was a splash, a silence, and then a wail, as he realised that not only was the tea all over the floor, but also it was still hot and now on his feet. (At least he didn't drop my beloved cat mug and shatter it.)

When I went yesterday to the old school to delay the de-registration (pending outcome of string-pulling as in previous post), I saw the director of that school (i.e. the one who has consistently wanted what's best for Sophie) for the first time since February, and the difference between talking to her on the one hand, and talking to the director of either of the public schools we have dealt with on the other hand, was really like night and day.

The public system in Austria does have a fine reputation in general - Americans and British are more used to the public/state schools being the default if you don't have the money or don't live in the right place to send your kid to a private/independent school, but here (as in Switzerland) they are usually regarded as the first choice, and you only consider going private if your kid has some issue or another. But the corollary to that seems to be, in the public system, you are expected to not be a problem, and if you do (or your kid does) raise any kind of issue, then they don't have any incentive to accommodate you. Yesterday was a massive reminder of this: the director of the public school was polite (certainly much politer than the one where we began in 1st grade) but clearly wanted me to go away and stop being a problem. The director of the private school is sympathetic, felt terrible about the situation Sophie's in, and clearly wants what is best for our kid.

So that thing I said the other day about the single-point-of-failure? It's still true, and still worrisome, but vastly preferable to a situation where you have no idea if they're ever going to start caring about your kid in the first place.

Last night Mike & I hatched a backup plan of trying to make her current class work. This was helped a lot by re-reading the letter we got at the end of last semester from the new teacher, where this time we noticed that, although she remains very young, she apparently did an extra course on dealing with learning difficulties and one on giftedness. So we can, perhaps, suspend the comment about her having come through "the Austrian system where they don't equip teachers to deal with these things", until we see whether they did, after all.

The backup plan is to meet early on with both teacher and director and try to get some concessions from the outset. First we want to forestall the biggest academic problem from last year, which was the pages and pages of repetitive math homework that drove us all crazy. We have the school-psychological report, after all, with a very explicit recommendation that "too much repetition will be counterproductive for Sophie", that last year's teacher chose to disregard. We can at least try and make sure that this year's teacher doesn't. Second, we want to make sure they have a very close eye on the social situation, and I'm thinking of requesting of the hort director (who also seems to have immediately fallen in love with Sophie) that she spend the afternoons with the Regelklasse group that would include her best friend, rather than her own class group.

This morning I got word that the string-pulling effort had failed, and there is no way she can go into the bilingual class. When I called the old director to tell her we would be staying after all, and trying to make this work, and asking for the aforesaid meeting early next week, I could hear her smiling down the phone. (She also said something like "yes, I am back now" - the implication being that she wouldn't let more bad things happen.) It's good to know that Sophie has such an ally.

There are many things I really dislike about Austria, and the style of communication probably tops the list. Something along the lines of, you are constantly told that you're in the wrong, and you're expected to push back and say that no, the other person is in the wrong. Even worse for a socially awkward nerd like me (not to mention one whose spoken German skills lag far behind her written ones), it is universally agreed that this works best by telephone.

Which is all to say, after back-and-forth messages with the school and a certain amount of reading between the lines, yes, the school director's substitute did make the promises I understood her to have made, and the director herself was in fact taken by surprise by this, but there is nothing that can be done now that it is a done deal, as it were. This became clear yesterday afternoon, and after fretting over it all evening Mike and I were in agreement that there isn't any point in keeping Sophie at this school, under the circumstances.

We still have the problem that Viennese school officials don't seem to feel they need more than two days before the start of term to deal with assorted administrative issues - this in a city of nearly 2 million. In a way we were lucky that our own school admins were answering email, because no one else does. After a few phone calls to the school board office responsible for our district, I have ascertained that they can register her at the new school as soon as they have the de-registration document from the old one, but that they have nothing to do with class assignment within the school, and the school director will only be available starting on Thursday. I found an email address for the director, but of course my mails have gone unanswered, either because she is genuinely on holiday or because, this being Austria, things are only done by telephone. This means two things: first, that the earliest I can have any conversation at all about Sophie's compatibility with this school is Thursday, and second, that (in the absence of any real data, and given the general experience I have so far of constantly being told that things are impossible) I have to be paranoid about whether someone else would squeeze in before me if I am not there with the new registration first thing on Thursday morning. Adding this all up, it means that the situation is exactly as I feared - we have to make a decision in the absence of any (official) useful information, and will only find out after the fact whether the paranoia was really justified.

I explained the situation to Sophie this morning - that there is space in the new school, but we won't know until the end of the week whether there is space in the bilingual class (although the upstairs neighbour seems to think there is) - and asked her what she would prefer in the situation. She didn't much like to have to choose, but decided that on balance she should probably go to the new school anyway. I also wrote to the mother of another kid I know there, who is in the bilingual class a year above Sophie, and she had encouraging things to say about whether the English-speaking teacher in particular would be able to cope with Sophie.

Given all that, we sent in the de-registration request this morning. The director is very sorry to see us go, but the tone of her last mail is essentially that this is what she expected, given that she was unable to fix the mess that we found ourselves in, and she wishes her absence hadn't led to this. It is a pity since she really likes Sophie and seems to have been rooting for her all along, but as I said to Mike last night, it's not okay to have a single point of failure in terms of people who seem to actually be committed to what's best for our kid.

The city school board office is closed tomorrow (of course) and I can't pick up the de-registration form until Thursday morning anyway, so I guess that a bit under 36 hours from now, you will find me simultaneously pounding the pavement and picking up the phone, trying to get this whole mess over with.

Either 1.5 years old is way too early, or 2.5 years old is way too late.

Either it is a skill to be learned like any other, naturally and gradually, or it is an all-or-nothing change that has to be stuck to come hell or high water or else it will never stick.

Either he will get the idea soon enough as long as we practice sometimes, or any continued use of nappies whatsoever will damage the process.

Either he should wear training pants because he won't like the feeling of being wet, or he shouldn't wear training pants because they feel too much like nappies and so he'll keep having accidents in them.

Either he should be made to sit on the potty a certain amount of the time, or he should not be made to sit there at all if he doesn't want to.

In short: whatever we do is wrong.