Standstill

It occurs to me that I can keep writing my blog and then publish it later. Hopefully I can get internet access eventually.

Life right now is at a standstill as we wait for our response from the lender. It is taking forever to negotiate our loan for the house. It's been three weeks now since we left our dossier and each day we telephone they seem to have another hoop we must jump through.

We are in the gite now and life is glorious! The grounds of the chateau (a Norman chateau) are entirely enclosed and there is a horse riding and jumping school on the property. Our gite is lost in the woods about 2kms from the main entrance and we don't see or hear anyone. What a change from the busy bustle of a major hotel near the airport! As we drive to the main gate to leave the grounds we often see one or two small deer posed gracefully a few feet from the trail here and there. They are adorable! Yesterday when Little S kept asking me if we had "a beach" at the new house and I said "no" wondering why he'd ask such a silly thing, I realized he was saying biche which is the French word for deer and what we say when we see them, "look it's a biche!" We have a similar setting at the new house so yes maybe we do have "a biche" but sadly no beach. The gite is well equipped and very clean. Most gites I've stayed in are old and full of dusty nick nacks and chipped up dishes, but this one is freshly minimalist and the dishes are a gorgeous set from Villeroy-Bosh! My only complaint is that the area is humid and the laundry never dries here. How can I complain though because at last I can actually wash clothes and Charlotte can wear her cloth diapers once again, yay!


our kitchen sink at the new house, a shallow farm sink--charming but terribly impractical because it doesn't drain well

Each day at noon I go the new house to clean and this allows time to take stock of the place and think about where we will put our furniture and what to do with the awful kitchen. The kitchen is uninhabitable. It looks exactly like a kitchen in an abandoned tenement building in the Bronx, peeling lead paint on the walls, a cupboard off it's hinges, a dripping broken sink and a ton of dirt. It literally turns my stomach inside out to go in the kitchen. There is also a bathroom in the kitchen. The old woman who lived there before us only lived downstairs so there is a sort of laundry tub thing in one corner of the room where she bathed and there is an old, chipped bathroom sink which I spent a good hour cleaning just so we'd have a nice place for Little S to wash his hands. I'm not sure what we will do with the kitchen or with the uh, err bathroom. The good thing about living in France is that you get used to walking into an apartment or a house that has no kitchen, only maybe a sink, and accepting the fact that is you who will provide the appliances and the cupboards. In fact I have only lived in one apartment here that was fully equipped so it's a habit I'm accustomed to. The one minor problem is that we don't have any appliances since we either sold or left everything with Mssr. G in our old house. Last time we stopped by I sheepishly stole back my cast iron pots and I think maybe he thought I was being a cheapskate but I like them and well, they are mine after all. I still felt guilty though. So we have to buy a fridge unless they leave us theirs (hopefully!), and a washer, a stove, and maybe a dishwasher if we're feeling luxurious, and a few other small appliances like a toaster. I'd also like to have a dryer because if it really is this humid in this region I'll never get my sheets dry. Dryers are not very common in French homes you see. I'd be the oddball on the street--the eccentric American woman with her dryer, gasp.

We enrolled Little S in school yesterday. I was a little disappointed because I wanted him to go the Montessori school in our town. It's half English and I would have been so happy to have him learning 50 percent of the time in English. The school is kind of expensive though and we just can't squeeze it in to our tight budget so it's off to the public school. This is our first experience with French schools. They didn't give us much of an introduction to the school but just kept going on about how we musn't be late for pick ups and drop offs. What an extreme change from Mexico where the one morning I was late for dropping off Little S I realized that five minutes past nine was when the majority of the parents arrived to drop off their kids. I will have to be like a military mom now. I have to pick up and drop off my son four times in one day. He comes home for lunch at 12:00 and goes back at 1:30 and then there is a pick up at 4:30.

Little S seems to like his school by the look of it and they don't seem too concerned with his lack of talking or with the fact that the Mexican school seemed to think he might have developmental delays. They just seemed to think he'd be fine once he got integrated.

My other small complaint is the lack of an open space of grass for the kids to play, especially given that we're in a country setting. I'm going to be optimistic though for Little S and Seb's sake. Seb is delighted because for him French schools can do no wrong and it is here where we tend differ greatly. I'm not such a fan of the French public school system but we will see how it goes.