{"id":4124,"date":"2013-01-18T16:56:15","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T16:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesojournseries.com\/bavaria\/?p=4124"},"modified":"2013-10-05T09:05:54","modified_gmt":"2013-10-05T09:05:54","slug":"king-max","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thesojournseries.com\/bavaria\/king-max\/","title":{"rendered":"King Max"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week packed full of snow, with journeys taking much longer than usual, and not much time for anything else.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A week where I am slightly jealous of things grinding to a halt in other countries, when there’s not much chance of that happening here!<\/p>\n

A week of getting used to a new addition too, something I am blaming entirely on my Sister and Brother in Law, as they were the ones who gave a rather lifelike ceramic (guinea) piggy bank to The Five Year Old for Christmas.\u00a0\u00a0 So attached was he to this “ginky-bank” that he took to carrying it around at every given opportunity.\u00a0 \u00a0 As soon as he woke up in the morning, he would come downstairs with “Ginky” tucked dangerously under one arm.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At meal times Ginky was plonked on the table, and “force-fed” lettuce leaves donated conveniently from his own plate, and at bed times his owner secreted him around the house in places he thought Ginky might be warm and comfortable, but could at times have signalled his demise.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How poor old Ginky hasn’t ended up smashed to smithereens, is beyond me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And all the while, this fawning over Ginky had me feeling terribly guilty.\u00a0\u00a0 Guilty that this Expat life doesn’t always make allowances for things such as pets, something we always always had as children.<\/p>\n

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The Five Year Old’s main request to Father Christmas was actually for a turtle which led to much (secret) research on behalf of his parents.\u00a0\u00a0 As turtles live for such a long time, I had asked Mr R. whether he thought we could transport it somewhere else if and when we move on, and thinking aloud more than anything else, I asked him whether he thought there was such a thing as a turtle passport.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He said he didn’t think so as all their passport pictures would look the same…\u00a0\u00a0 And then I found out how truly hard they can be to look after, and that idea went out of the window.<\/p>\n

As I watched my son take such good care of this ceramic creature (under no pretence that it will probably be me doing all the hard work with a real animal), I still pondered whether we should get a real one, as surely learning how to care for something responsibly is good in a life lesson kind of way? \u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, if it was all part of a master plan on his part to guilt his parents into letting him have a pet, he did a pretty good job.\u00a0\u00a0 When I watched him spend a couple of hours fashioning Ginky a house out of a rice-cooker box, his work was done.\u00a0 He had succeeded in pushing his mother over that pet-buying cliff.<\/p>\n

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And so let me introduce you to King Max, our tiny baby hamster.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Coincidentally he is very similar in colour to Ginky, but he’s a lot more lively! \u00a0 His house is a positive palace compared to that of my own hamster of the eighties, and he dines on a vast selection of food (I only remember mine being given sunflower seeds circa 1985!) his current favourite being banana chips.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He adores his wheel and the odd change of scenery when his palace is being cleaned by the maid (I just knew that was going to happen).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And Ginky?\u00a0\u00a0 He now lives a much less precarious but satisfactory life on a book shelf in the Five Year Old’s room, where he might be fed with a coin or two from time to time, and with the odd sojourn to his summer (rice cooker) house to look forward to…<\/p>\n

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Well, at least that’s the first Expat Parenting Dilema of 2013 out of the way anyway!<\/p>\n

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