Our Global Family blog series is about celebrating the differences and the similarities in the way we live our lives and parent our children throughout the globe. It’s a safe place to tell our stories and give us the privilege of gaining a small but hopefully informative glimpse into the lives of some awesome families. To find out a little bit more, read the introductory post on the Global Family blog series here. Otherwise, with no further ado, I introduce you to Neele-Charlyn (my Sweet African Family life on Instagram) and her beautiful family who reside in Northern Germany.
So Neele-Charlyn, tell me a little bit about yourself
I’m Neele, I’m 26 years old and Italian. I live together with my Nigerian (Igbo) husband, 34 years old and our daughter, Chinaraekene who is 6 years old. We live in Northern Germany. Chinaraekene is our first child (on both sides). My husband has been loyal to me for almost 9 years now. It was love at first sight. Our daughter is our pride, she is very intelligent, but she can also be seriously stubborn, just like her mom. This year she is attending the first class of school.
Chinaraekene has had to endure a lot in the last 6 years in terms of operations. But she always stayed strong and never lost her beautiful smile. She is totally a daddy’s child. She likes to ride bikes with him, make a lot of jokes with him and she like to eat Fufu too much and don’t even deal with.
I love to cook African and exotic foods. I love to sing and to dance African style. More than anything else, our highest priority is our own family.
My family consists of
My Nigerian husband 34 years, our 6-year-old daughter, myself and our little rabbit Dooley who is 3 years old.
We are living in
Itzehoe in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein (Kreis Steinburg)
Our weekdays
Are planned sometimes already before it even starts. We are structured, mostly because our daughter is visiting the kindergarten. Sometime we read a book before sleeping or we sing for her. But it’s important to us that Chinaraekene has enough sleep and an early sleep between 7/8 o’clock.
In the mornings our daugter is awake by 7am, washes herself, brushes her teeth and dresses for kindergarten. She stays there from 8 am to 12, midday. At the kindergarten they make morning lunch. After 12 o’clock her Daddy or I pick her and go home, then we eat midday lunch.
After that she gets a bit time to calm down and rest. From there we do our day plan, either going out, travelling somewhere or anything else. Around 5/6 PM we use to make our evening meal. To me a structured week is very important as a mom.
On weekends we tend to
Stay up! Our daughter can go a bit late to bed and wait for daddy to come back for work which can be 11 PM . We used to go out a lot on the weekends, cycling or just family things together. Enjoying the time with daddy or mommy doing her hair. On weekends she has permission to watch a movie or series (only 1 hour)
I’d describe my parenting style as
Putting a high priority on respect from the kid to her mommy. I call myself a good mommy, because I know and hear from others, that Chinaraekene is well mannered. Our daughter is very well educated. She is cheerful and very open. I am sometimes very strict, but very affectionate to our daughter. In itself, I am very relaxed. I am a mommy who comes to the same height of the kid eyes in discussions or normal talking. Our daughter gets a lot of freedom and lots of love.
The best thing about where we live is
That our city has lot of nature and forest places. But it’s only that one thing.
If I had to recommend one place to visit in my town, it would be
Deckmann-Kuhle, Scgwaddn Dorn. Or the city park in Hamburg.
If I won the lottery I would
Travel first to America to operate my blind eye. Then I would like to build our dream house, complete with a swimming pool. I’d save a lot of money for our daughter and my husband. Building our house in Nigeria, at the village where my husband comes from. But that house will be so big, that everybody from our African family can live there.
