Addenda
Three follow-ups to my earlier rant:
(1) Gretchen reminded me later that the playgroup that was advertised was looking specifically for girls born during the same month as Baby, which only made the "sorry, try your own part of town" that much more pathetic.
(2) Not long after moving back, I was driving around and it hit me that we live in the equivalent of Kleinbasel. That's the part of Basel that's on the other side of the Rhine. To many locals it's considered undesirable and unsafe, in part because there's a large immigrant population. We always thought it got a bad rap--many of the little neighborhoods could be quite charming, and while it may be unsafe by Basel standards, as an American I felt perfectly safe there any time of day or night. So here we are--in our version of Kleinbasel (with an admittedly higher crime rate, although much less than in DC).
(3) One of the things we were concerned about coming back to was the sort of über-parenting that's so prevalent in areas like ours. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what that means, but it's almost like competitive parenting: parents trying to outdo each other, having the most over-the-top parties, needing to get your child into the very best preschools, etc. For some reason this whole thing with the playgroup just smacks of the kind of attitude I was really hoping to avoid as a parent here...
(1) Gretchen reminded me later that the playgroup that was advertised was looking specifically for girls born during the same month as Baby, which only made the "sorry, try your own part of town" that much more pathetic.
(2) Not long after moving back, I was driving around and it hit me that we live in the equivalent of Kleinbasel. That's the part of Basel that's on the other side of the Rhine. To many locals it's considered undesirable and unsafe, in part because there's a large immigrant population. We always thought it got a bad rap--many of the little neighborhoods could be quite charming, and while it may be unsafe by Basel standards, as an American I felt perfectly safe there any time of day or night. So here we are--in our version of Kleinbasel (with an admittedly higher crime rate, although much less than in DC).
(3) One of the things we were concerned about coming back to was the sort of über-parenting that's so prevalent in areas like ours. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what that means, but it's almost like competitive parenting: parents trying to outdo each other, having the most over-the-top parties, needing to get your child into the very best preschools, etc. For some reason this whole thing with the playgroup just smacks of the kind of attitude I was really hoping to avoid as a parent here...
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