A Pretty How Town

Back to what we know

2011-11-14T03:26:00.008-06:00

Life has certainly changed in the past six months. I'm not exactly where I imagined I'd be. I thought I'd be sipping Chinese tea in my modest 15th story apartment complex in Shanghai, taking art classes with expats, homeschooling my kids. Life though decided to have me rethink everything from top to bottom. I guess you could say that I am not even the same person I was six months ago (which in retrospect isn't necessarily a bad thing).

My biggest changes are in my professional life and in my diet. I work now which probably explains the lack of blog posts. I'm back in the working world and it feels good. And I have a new way of eating which just sort of evolved over the Spring and Summer. I'm gluten-free and dairy free and I'm eating about 75 percent raw. My diet is sort of my new hobby.

My kids are thriving in regular old public school and we live in France again. That's about it. I'll share some photos soon.

2011-07-04T15:33:00.006-05:00

Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. ~A.A. Milne

I don't really know what to say here right now which is why I've been gone for a while, thinking. I am on a journey, a vision quest whatever you want to call it. I'm trying to balance a plate of dishes on the end of a stick, all the while spinning around myself. I know I'm being mysterious but there isn't much else to say. I'm still here but not there is all I wanted to say.

Yeah just give me a sec would you?

2011-03-12T15:27:00.002-06:00

I came across this vacation picture of our cat from a year and a half ago and it made me smile.

School update

2011-03-09T15:34:00.009-06:00

Well here comes my little break from the blog. Posting will be on the lite side as we delve into our new life over there. And just when I need to blog too--so much to share. Go figure.

Someone mentioned to me that I hadn't talked much about our homeschooling lately and this is true, probably because we haven't done much of anything different yet other than having the kids home. Right now we're unschooling and trying out little bits and pieces of Waldorf style homeschooling. We really do much of what we've always done,--story time, painting, nature walks and raiding the recycling bin armed with duct tape, glue and string. The only difference being that we do it pretty much full time now and whenever we want. It kind of makes me dread the scheduled version I've created for Fall of next year. I really think unschooling works and I trust it but I'm not alone to decide and I have to respect Seb's say in things. It's been hard enough trying to make him see the benefits of waiting for Fall for S to start reading again. Maybe over time he'll see. A few years back I thought the whole concept of unschooling was completely daft. I mean who lets their kids do NOTHING all day? Now of course I get how it works.

Actually we do a lot in a given day and we've learned lots of new things like mini bookmaking and S is really in to portrait sketches now--no idea why! He never drew people all through maternelle and up until last year. The psychologue who saw him each week at school thought this was a big sign of something wrong Now it seems he ONLY draws people. Of course he only draws people from the story of Narnia, these sort of medieval people with weapons, and then he tapes them all over the walls of our house.

One of the funnest things we've started doing is knitting. I've taught Little S finger knitting and even though it took a few weeks of trying and stopping and trying again he finally got it all on his own in one of those divine "spurt-leap" moments that John Holt talks about so often in his books. It was like suddenly it just clicked in a split second. I'm doing real knitting now which I learned by watching videos and I really enjoy it too. I hope to teach S next year and he's really eager to learn. He's very cute with his knitting and walks around with the yarn everywhere he goes. We try to do handcrafts in the afternoon a little each day to prepare for next year when we'll follow the Waldorf homeschool curriculum I've chosen. We also do a lot of wet on wet watercolor painting which is really relaxing. I have a hard time getting them to use one or two colors but they're learning. Color and paints have always been a staple in our house so it's almost impossible to backtrack and say "okay today it's just YELLOW" but we're getting there. We have a set story time after lunch where they sit around and I read to them from the internet (mainlesson.com is a great resource for this). I sometimes forget about it but they don't. They hound me chanting story time! story time! at exactly one-thirty. I'm surprised they like it so much. After story time we break out the block crayons and they get to draw their perception of the story. I push Little S to do MLB style drawings because I know this will help jumpstart him when we start lesson in the Fall. He does beautiful borders and he even reminded me that people in the moyen age did borders on their pages and books. If you know Little S he is completely obsessed with the moyen age so I'm not surprised he found a connection.

The rest of our afternoon is devoted to being outside, usually a good ninety minutes to two hours of playing, exploring and walking. We've invented some games that we regularly play and we bike a lot. It's a good rhythm.

In a few days we'll pack up the paints and supplies and haul them downstairs. I imagine we'll have to buy more supplies while we wait for our things to be shipped to China. See this is how I end up with so many art supplies--all the moves!

A finished house

2011-03-03T04:02:00.022-06:00

We still haven't left. Yep still here. We have visa issues,...one of us is American, one is Mexican, and two are French. It's a good recipe for disaster if you're asking a third party to do your paperwork for you. We should leave in another week or so.

I wanted to share a few photos of our Paris house, finished. Unfortunately I didn't get very many pictures of the whole project. Our finished bedroom came together just as the new renter was moving his things in and we didn't get any photos, but it turned out very nice and looked a lot like my inspiration photo (below) which should give you an idea at least of what it would have looked like. I didn't get to do the rust colored wall I wanted to do because the new renter wanted it left all white. I almost went ahead and did it anyway so I could have the satisfaction of seeing it but there wasn't time. It just doesn't look good white--too bachelor pad-ish.

I'm not sure when we'll see the house again. It's in the hands of an agent so that if this renter leaves the agency will simply find someone else and we won't be involved. One day I'll get pictures and maybe I can run in and paint the walls so I can see what it would look like.

I was really happy with the house at the end. It was such a personal space, so much of us inside. The amount of work we did to that place in two years was insane and I just wish we could have enjoyed it a bit longer, especially as over budgeted as we were. Oh well, time to move forward and maybe start a new project in a few years and sell that one. For the next three years at least we'll be enjoying not renovating. I'm not even sure if that's possible but we'll give it a try. Maybe in China our passion will turn to other things like cooking or eating or good health! I know homeschooling will be a big interest and I'm planning on taking some design classes to pursue that a bit more. Lots to look forward to in this next phase of life !

I finished stripping the last door frame just before we handed over the keys, I will use the heat gun on anyone who paints over these doors!!

inside Charlotte's room--apparently the new renters teenage daughters fought between them to have this bedroom but seb and I have always preferred the results of the other room, S's room, which is much nicer with it's big beams and high ceilings...we always felt charlotte was getting the worst of the two rooms but apparently not!

floors sanded...

and at last lasured , check!

Almost gone

2011-02-14T09:47:00.013-06:00

Well here we are just a few short weeks away before we leave. Both houses are officially rented, "whew" . It's such a relief to tie up all the loose ends. These last few weeks with finishing up our Paris house has been exhausting. We were a little surprised that the first person to see the house wanted it and wanted it fast. They were a couple who dropped in right before Christmas and honestly I thought they hated the house by all the husband's snarky comments, but it turns out I was wrong. He's egocentric as they come, a professional sport instructor in a very snooty sport. I got the bad energy vibe off of him, flashing red lights, sirens-- the works, but Seb was too nervous to listen to me. He just wants the house rented as soon as possible so we wouldn't be stuck, which I could understand but I still think it might have been wise to choose the person better so as not to be stuck worse a lot later. I relented against my better judgement, or should I say against feminine instinct--usally a very bad idea. So they're in the house and there isn't much else to say. I hope they just stay quiet, pay the rent and don't wreck the house. So far they're doing one of the three. Complaining seems to be a sport that the new renter also teaches. We have to replace the basement's back door and put in an electronic gate before April *rolling eyes* He told us all this after we signed the rental agreement papers which I thought already showed a lot of underhandedness. When we buy and renovate these old houses I never dream that one day we will rent them. Renting out an old place is just trouble because honestly he can pick the house apart every month if he really wants to. There are a lot of problems in a hundred year old house and he just didn't seem like the type to overlook squeeky door hinges and rooms with "character." My alarm bells we're going off for a reason.

The house looked really nice when we were finished and it was very hard not to feel like we were making a big mistake. I had light switches that worked everywhere and TWO bathrooms. My bedroom extension was completely finished with a modern shower and sink. It was a dream house! After two years of major MAJOR sacrifices and the worst marriage strain imaginable it was incredibly hard to just walk away last week and say "okay let's go, ASIA yay!" I guess maybe it's all the extra baggage of a mature adult that makes adventuring tough. It's the desire for security and nice things. I'm just going to muddle through it though and let the house and all that go. There damn well better be adventure on the horizon or I'm going to be really pissed off. And the light switches better work in our Shanghai apartment!

The Fisherman's house is only rented for a few months to someone we have close ties to. This is giving us time to come back to France this summer. After that we can evaluate things and decide if we want to rent it for a full three year bail or continue to rent it off season. I'm looking forward to summer break already. I think a French Alpine vacation will definitely be in high order after a few months in Asia adapting to expat life.

We haven't done much in the way of preparing our leaving with all the keys being passed and last minute painting (Mister Ego made us paint the living room a third time). I still have a list a mile long to cross off. I'm not even sure that I'll get through it in time. As I said before this is the difficult part of the moving, the details, the stress the waiting in line before the ride. It really bites.

This week I met an American on my street in TLB. She's really nice and I think we'll become friends. She's about my mom's age. I look forward to getting to know her better this summer. She's one of these really interesting international ladies, citizen of the world types that you can talk with for hours.

I'll do a picture post soon with photos of the finished Paris house. As if destiny wanted me to not dwell on it too much my camera battery died on my last visit to the house and I'd brought the wrong Canon charger. I could only take a few pictures.

I better run. I've got a few things to check off my list. brb!

Midpoint

2011-02-03T16:12:00.005-06:00

It was a fun week with La Chandeleur and our Imbolc celebration. The two are essentially the same holiday/festival. We made candles for Imbolc and then on la chadeleur we decorated our morning pancake table with all the candles in the house. This was our second year celebrating Imbolc as a family. The kids were very excited that it meant Mrs. Thaw might come soon and clean up. They'd open the door and say "she's here, look I saw her and it is getting warmer see!"

We always do crêpes each year this time with our neighbors, usually at a gouter with about ten or twelve kids. It's always me the non French one who reminds the moms what day it is and plans everything. This is one of those old French traditions I feel is slipping away. I'm pushing to keep it alive and well. Who doesn't love making and eating crêpes!

I like this time of year. I always get a little low around Thanksgiving and then perk back up right around this time. I think that's what these midpoint winter celebration were all about. Everyone needs a good dose of hope this time of year.

Oh and Happy Chinese New Year! little S has his rabbit on the table there just a coincidence really. I almost forgot about it. I think I'll be mentioning this a lot earlier next year.

Where we are

2011-01-24T04:03:00.014-06:00

I'm still here! Life is flowing nicely and we're building a calm routine (as I say this the kids are in the middle of a screaming match!) I'm reading through lots of homeschool curriculum materials and trying to plan our school year. My hope is to start first year in the Fall with Little S. I hope Seb agrees. For now it's just a matter of building rhythms. I'm really liking our life now. Everything feels like it just works better.

People are very curious when they hear the kids aren't in school. Of course it's just until we move so I don't mention homeschool. It's mostly when we're in shops, "and why aren't these little people in school?" I say "well we live in another country and it's vacation time." And I try to leave it at that but there are always questions! I try to avoid all question and stay very vague. It helps that the kids speak english. It's funny because I feel like we're doing something wrong like I'm guilty of something. Public school felt so wrong to me but there is shame in homeschool which feels so right to me. I don't get it. It seems all backwards.

One of the biggest changes I've noticed is a gentle nature which is starting to emerge from Little S. He was starting to get angry and resentful. He was cynical and always grumpy after school. He was angry and aggressive at home. At school we knew he was very timid and never spoke. We figured these outbursts at home were his outlet for all the teasing and prodding he got at school. He wasn't like this until he started school, never mean. Now there is a shimmer of another person. A small light. He still gets angry, curses and has fits but it's slowly disappearing. I've also changed. I don't blink when he has a fit. I just dust the furniture around him, yawn and go on. It really does work better if you don't react. *

For now we're baking and painting. We listen to music and do crafts. The tv is off (and by tv I mean the dvds because we've never really let them watch regular broadcast tv). I have a few neighbors and we've seen them and their kids. They're nice and we have some kid contact which is good, something they've missed. My only complaint is that our lives have become so different that it becomes hard to integrate with others. Our neighbors for example, the mom who parked the kids in the bedroom with a Disney movie on the entire time we were there. I felt precious time slipping away as I sat there talking to my neighbor, her giant tv blaring in the background over our own conversation. I couldn't think to even talk. I don't want to alienate ourselves but at the same time I figure what's the point?

No worries because we have some friends visiting next month during the vacation and we have a whole new group of people to meet. They don't see 200 people a day anymore, but was there any benefit in that. I'm not so sure.

Right now we're doing wet watercolor painting, baking cookies and playing a lot outdoors. Life is good.

* (as I've in the ast the Parenting Passageways blog in my sidebar is really helpful for gentle parenting advice--I've learned so much from it)

Adventure quest

2011-01-13T10:26:00.002-06:00

It feels so strange to be back in our old house, strange but somehow right. It's a warm place and welcoming, at least to us. Apparently our renter told everyone he hated our house. I don't think he loved the house very much though so I don't think it loved him back!

Christmas was hectic and I'm happy the move is over. We leave in February and have a few months to relax and do almost nothing before we go. I haven't started homeschooling yet and may not until September of this year. It will be hard to convince Seb of this but I'd really like to start fresh and get a little closer to the seven year change for Little S. Anyway for now it's at least two months of unschooling and it's going really well. I see lots of changes in our boy. He's so much calmer and more focused.

I'm really excited about all of our changes. The kids were my biggest worry about leaving but I feel secure about them now that we're homeschooling and I can just look ahead to what we have in store for us, --lots of adventures.

So long

2010-12-17T08:29:00.005-06:00

It's the last day of school for Little S today and it also represents the beginning of our move next week and the change from public school to home school. I haven't packed much or seperated much--too overwhelming I guess. I'm feeling very lazy as the holidays approach. Or maybe it's a form of denial.

It's hard saying goodbye to friends and I'm terrible at it. My neighbors get teary eyed and I don't know what to say. I've moved around my whole life. It's second nature to me. There is something in me that doesn't get too attached to people, or that won't let me fall in to that trap I suppose. I'd much rather shrug and say à bientôt! than speculate about when we'll possibly next see each other. It's my little defense armour but of course deep down inside there is a twinge of regret about not being here anymore.

It's much harder saying goodbye to their kids. They'll grow up and change and I'll miss that. A small group of Little S's friends are at our house so often it feels like they're part of our family. It's hard to just say so long to them.

I'll be signing off until after the New Year. We have a few months in Th*n*n before we leave and we'll be transferring life there for a little while. Until then Happy Holidays and have a pleasant New Year!

In a nutshell

2010-12-09T14:25:00.014-06:00

"...lots going on so this is just the bits all scattered in one post as they pop in my head"

We've had a lot of snow and it's been really pretty. I'm really enjoying the views of our backyard. We do have a gorgeous piece of property which I love. I'm going to miss my trees.

I bought a new sewing machine to replace my Mexican one which although it adapted to our current okay with a transformer, it had bobbin issues and needed a tune up. Taking it to the repair shop with the transformer seemed daunting. I just decided to buy a new low budget one and will be giving this other one to my sister to take back home next time. Now I just want to attack sewing projects but we have the move coming...dread!

My neighbors (ie local girlfriends) strongarmed me into having a Christmas party this coming Saturday. I'm not so sure it's such a good idea. The adult part sounds fun to me but thirteen unsupervised kids tearing through my house scares me a bit. It's too late to back out but I did consider using gastro as an excuse once or twice.

Little S's bully is at it again and now has stolen his new hat. I'm really mad because this kid is a terror and bullies all the little ones at his school but especially S. He's stolen lots of things from S over the past few months including his entire Dreamworks card collection. This was a really nice ski hat I bought in the alps and gave to S to wear recently because it's been so cold so he stole MY favorite ski hat, little f*cker. Why are 12 year olds stealing hats from six year olds on the playground anyway? Who's watching what's going on? Tomorrow I think I'm going in to see the directeur and I'm going to ask him that very same question. SO, so, soooooo happy to be done with public school in one week and "Jordan" The Terror.

I'm really into all my Steiner books right now and currently reading John Holt, on my second book now, but usually divided between two or three books at a time. It's great reading and I can't get enough of it. I just wish I could get Seb to read some of this so I'd have someone to discuss it with. He doesn't have time but I think it's important, especially the Steiner because it's important to understand the why. I'm trying to concentrate on building my knowledge of Waldorf/Steiner schools and not so much focusing on homeschooling right now. It occurs to me I'm actually doing my teacher training that I'd wanted to do this year. I can see from the readings that I would be a wonderful Waldorf school teacher and I would love every second of it. I guess I get my wish as far as being a Steiner school teacher but I hope the homeschooling aspect of it works out. Loving the pedagogy and teaching a homeschool version of it may be two different things. I also feel like I don't know near enough about Steiner to insert this into my home without it feeling stiff. It's very vast and I want to know it all before I start, but it's practically impossible because Steiner runs deep let me tell you!

Seb has been gone for the last eight days but he comes back tomorrow. The things we get used to. I don't know why we're always apart. I'll be happy to see him back home for a bit.

We move our things out of the house in 12 days. That seems impossible to imagine. After that we're living out of suitcases. Kind of adventurous so I don't mind but it is kind of nuts. I was explaining to Charlotte why we couldn't put a Christmas tree up and then I just gave up. We went to the store and I bought a few decorations which we hung on the doorknobs. Voila! ummm ....Christmas, yes. I say that but it's hard for me to let go of the holidays this year. I know it's important to let go of all that sometimes and I'm trying. I just hope I won't have a meltdown at mil's.

I ordered all the kids gifts off of Etsy. I found some wonderful things! I encourage everyone to buy handmade next holiday. I'm so excited to see their gifts because they're really special. I tried to order for my family too but had some logistical problems with address changes and international credit card orders-- anyway I was happy to at least do most of my shopping this way.

The picture at the top of this post is of some snowflakes we made and then painted using Steiner wet-on-wet painting which I love btw. They're really pretty like stained glass in the daylight. I cut them out and the kids paint them although S is starting to get the hang of cutting them out. I'll try to post an atelier about them but I bet I won't have time. So very quickly I'll say: watercolor papers, paints, scissors (scrapbooking scissors are fun too!)--snowflakes-- just follow pdf instructions found easily on internet and then, drop flakes in a waterbath for a few minutes, and then watercolor using primaries only (RBY). Let dry on a radiator and be careful because they're fragile.

Hopefully I'll get a few more posts in before we tranfer ourselves to Th*n*n at the end of December. We're spending winter break in the alps before we leave! yippee!

Games

2010-12-06T03:37:00.007-06:00

My kids are really strange lately. The past nights Little S has been playing with his sister and they'd made a fake fire on the floor and I'd hear him say "you put the bear meat on the fire and I'll go get some squirrels" He had stuffed animals in a bag he was carrying around and he'd just whip them out and plop them on the fire and Charlotte was turning them over and around sort of browning them. I said what are you playing and he said "me I'm the hunter and I bring home the food." He was using a sword as a gun but weilding it like a hunting gun slung around his shouler with a string attached which I found funny. Today Charlotte was playing with her doll and I started to put him away and arrange the little hat she'd put on him and she said "no mom don't! he's all dressed for the trip to the cemetery today--he's happy to go."

I wonder where they get these games? We don't watch t.v. so I guess it must be The Little House on the Prairie episodes we've been occasionally watching on internet. They're really fascinated with Pa and how he comes home with dead animals every once in a while. And the cemetery thing is just plain creepy. I don't think she's even at an age to understand that people die or even that cemeteries are places to go visit. Very weird.

Free time

2010-11-30T10:39:00.006-06:00

Too good to be true is all there is to say about our new renters. I'm learning, I'm learning. Anyway luckily we have our insurance because they do in depth financial background checks and the new renters kept giving us the runaround. We heard it all, ... "my e-mail is broken" and "we accidentally exchanged telephones my wife and I, oops" and even "my sister is pregnant and I missed all your messages in all the excitement!" and then two week more of excuses of reasons why they didn't have all the documents ready. Finally Seb just got firm and said "tomorrow is the deadline, sorry but that's it." And of course they haven't called us back since which is quite nice of them considering they asked us to hold the house for them and stop showing it. I should have known with their going from their small place up to ours, that the big step up in rent made no sense. And they had a lot to say about their finances, --too much really. They talked about how they wanted to buy a bigger car and maybe even a second one and about how they were doing really well, --money money money, that I should have known and I guess I kind of did. So our new rule is no more people from the village and we're definitely using the agency because two weeks of telephone tag and their phone calls about coming over to take a second look at this or that was very annoying.

The agency on the other hand isn't all butter and cream. They called me this morning and said "can we show the house in twenty minutes or so" and I looked around at all the tools and laundry scattered on the floor, the makeshift bed for Charlotte and my dingy coffee cup rings on the desk and said, "umm, I need more time--it's a little sudden" and the women got all huffy. "They're here from London TODAY and they need to see the house because it's exactly what they're looking for." I sighed and proposed the afternoon, and she sighed harder and said "they'd really like to see it before lunch," but I stayed firm. Finally we made a three o'clock appointment and of course they never showed. At four the agent called. They'd changed their mind but she had someone else who'd like to see the house Friday at maybe two. I told her fine and she said "of course I'll have to confirm it with the client but I'll let you know." I think if we have to go through this until the first of the year I'll lose my head. We have so much work going in in the house and because we have two small kids it takes HOURS to pick up the mess and make the house presentable.

We move in about three and a half weeks and I'm so ready to get that over with. The stress is building up and weighing on our family like a great stone around our necks and I just want it done. I'd love to be just enjoying Christmas but it's nearly impossible with all the planning for the move, the plane tickets, where the kids will stay, seb's new job contracts, homeschooling, pet passports. Today a mom friend of mine came up and asked me if I wanted to make wreaths with her and a few other moms on Monday and I just stared off in space and muttered something. I'm not even sure what I said because it just struck me as absurd. I suddenly realized that everyone else's life is going in slow motion and mine is whizzing and whirling like a tornado but I can't really even explain this to anyone. It's all very Alice in Wonderland and I thought as I drove my car away from her "How odd that people have time to do craft projects." I want my free time back and it's all I can think about.

*we move our things in three weeks but we're in France a little longer...

The sting

2010-11-17T16:22:00.010-06:00

My daughter turned three this past week. I know I don't write much about her lately but she is quite a handful. A lovely handful, yes but very, very spirited.

Let me back up a bit...

I love astrology and I've read up on it constantly throughout my life so at one point during our many ivf trials and tribulations I thought "if this works out and I get pregnant I'll have LEO child,....oh dear" (Oh dear is absolutely right, and eek and aiye! & oh my...) The thought dangled in my mind for a few days and then of course as luck would have it I wasn't pregnant after all and there was no Leo child, "one blessing at least!" I said to myself. I know leos well and they aren't always easy for me. Maybe you don't have any Leos in your life and you don't have this problem but I have my fair share and trust me they aren't easy. For example I have a little cousin with a big blonde head like a little lioness, a typical Leo, and I remember her always saying to my aunt "hey you're not the boss 'round me!" and then crossing her arms in a haughty huff. She was only three and she ruled the home. My husband is a Leo and my cat is a Leo and I love both of them to death but both are impossibly self-centered and pig headed and sometime I can't believe how much so, but then I remind myself why by muttering "King of the Jungle" and stifling a yawn and Seb can usually laugh about how he's acting. He gives me a look of "oh sorry was I just doing that selfish epicenter of the world thing?" and I just shake my head yes. So like I said a Leo child was something I was quite happy to skip over as I calculated due dates for both of my children.

But wait,

no one ever told me about the Scorpio child...

which is worse.

Last week she turned three and today I watched out of the corner of my eye a little event that probably best sums up the nature of a Scorpio child. Her brother was teasing her, tugging on a toy or her napkin or something at the table and suddenly I saw this arm haul back and a spoon FLYING across the room, thud! As she threw it she screamed like a javelin thrower and I noticed the spoon narrowly missing S's ear in all the commotion. Of course I stopped my kitchen work and went straight in to work things out and as I looked into her eyes they were little peircing slits of viper poison. It was quite a sight in a three year old and yet nothing new really. The fierce glare is something I get a lot of as she goes through her challenging twos and threes, and heck I've even seen it in her baby years a few time.

So the last laugh is on me I guess. Who knew there was something worse than a lion's ego? When I say for example that she isn't adjusting at school I don't mean she's sad about going. No she's mad about it and she lets the whole building know it. She throws herself down on the ground legs and arms flailing in all direction and wails, "no, no, no, no!!" When I told her teacher, la directrice that she'd not be coming back I do think she'd breathed a sigh of relief. I can't say I didn't blame her.

I fight a lot of battles with her, --pyjamas, toothbrush, how to pee and what toilet to use (little potty or big), what she eats, seat belts, scarves and jackets. It's a daily struggle and her will is so strong she will fight to exhaustion over every single point. I usually give in first because I can't keep fighting. It feels like breaking a wild horse. It takes so much energy I can't do it every minute of the day.

I do love her and I get more kisses and affection from her than any mother can want or wish for; --intense, passionate motherly obsessional LOVE; --choking hugs, my face smothered in kisses and arms wrapped at my waist nearly 20 times a day. She adores me and needs me and lets me know so often I never need to question it. It's no wonder she breastfed so long. I'm surprised she ever stopped.

When I think about homeschooling her I do get kind of antsy about it. She may not be the type of personality to even be home-schooled, who knows. Her spirit seems to be liberated when she's in a group. She loves people and I think enjoys the hierarchy of traditional school--loved her teacher so much I think she did regret leaving for that reason alone because she talks about her often.

This isn't a rant about my child by any means. I adore her. She's wonderful, affectionate and sweet. I do wish I could learn to calm her temper and direct her strong will a little more. I'm learning and trust me I get a lot of advice about it, most bad. The blog The Parenting Passageway (in my sidebar) has really helped in the past six months and I can't believe I didn't know about it sooner. It's a goldmine of parenting wisdom, really incredible and not preachy at all but sound and intellectual. I've learned so much from it and really changed parenting styles because of it. Check it out.

Meanwhile go ahead and laugh as you picture the Leo dad confronting the Scorpio daughter. If you're an astrology buff I don't need to tell you who wins those battles.

(disclaimer--I am very fond of Leos and don't really feel as harsh about them as it sounds in this post. In fact in some weird way they fall into my life on a regular basis as predictable as autumns rain. I seem to attract/be attracted to them and I suppose my life would be dull without them. Shanghai anyone?)

The house tour

2010-11-16T07:07:00.011-06:00

Whew!

I'm a bit tired so you'll have to excuse my little blog absences lately. I haven't had a moment to do much of anything what with all the painting of bathrooms and packing of books. There have also been school woes because Little S's teacher has been out sick and they've had no replacement for the last three days. Each morning we go, he isn't there, and we come back home. Each and every time. The problem is I also take our neighbor's girl to school, a little pistol of a thing, and I have her for the day too because her mother works. I don't mind having my own kids home but having someone else's child is somehow very tiring and puts a huge crimp in my day. She's gotten in to everything in the past few days! A while ago I went in and found that she'd filled Charlotte's play kitchen sink with water from the bathroom, yes and SPILLED it all over the place. Yesterday she had charlotte's hair accessories strewn everywhere and I keep finding broken barrettes and clips all through the house. She just one of those kids that gets in to stuff. I pray that the teacher shows up on Thursday. I am beginning to feel like a seriously underpaid nanny.

Our house it seems is rented which is good news. I'm relieved that it's over so fast. I didn't want to suffer through visits and have to clean every single minute. The person is actually the local woman who came by a few weeks back. It turns out despite appearances to the contrary, their living in a tiny apartment, they have the money to upgrade to a house in the country. We don't really care because we'll have insurance against non-payers and they will have to prove their income to the insurance company so there isn't any worry of them lying to us. It all has to be on paper. They're a really nice Muslim family of three with their own business which we think they plan to manage from the house. No problems for us--the house actually makes a nice business locale too.

My only issue was decorating because on her visit to the house she made a few comments about repainting and finishing the woodworking, namely something about a vert-pistache which made my scrunch my mouth up in shock. Remember that the entire house was vert-pistache when we moved in--horrid! I know she likes to paint and add color, probably part of the Tunisian culture--a colorful country, and also I see the array of curtains in her apartment from the street--blue, purple, yellow etc., so it's obvious to me she'll want a color palette in the house that looks like a crayola box. I had told Seb I'd prefer a couple who'd not change the house too much, I mean if we had a choice, but he's right I guess we can always repaint *sigh* and we can't really impose our tastes on them as long as they're paying our mortgage (or at least 75 percent of our mortgage). I had to be firm about her not finishing any wood work though. She wants to redo the wood on the inside of the downstairs doors because she said it looks unfinished. I explained it was a retro "look," something seen in many decorating magazines and but she seemed confused. But my friends that is a non-negotiable and I told her "I'm sorry we'll have to ask you not to touch the doors and put it in the contract." I've spent over a week of my life on those doors and I really like them. I don't want them touched. In short I think she isn't much into the old house aspect or the decorating aspect of our house at all, but they really needed a house and there isn't anything available in our little town so they're stuck with us. I'm happy with them though. They seem careful and serious and they don't have teenage boys, my big fear for my house because all my neighbors have teenage boys. I could just imagine them all becoming friends and "hanging out" at our house all the time when the parents were out, duuuuuude. No thanks.

We still have a lot of little things to patch up and fix--lots of last minute work to do as you can see in the pictures (click on the grid to enlarge them). The house though pleases me very much and I'm really sad that we can't enjoy the fruits of our labour for very long. It's too bad we can't take the place with us and just travel around with it. Someone I met today told me they'd viewed the house when it was for sale and had found it to be uninhabitable, but that they'd always loved the garden and the exterior so they'd seriously considered buying it. I said "well we've done a lot of work inside" and she looked curious and flat out asked me if she could come by for coffee one day to see it. I said "yes" because I want to see the shock in her face at how much it's changed. It's a sort of addiction and an affirmation that maybe we haven't been so nuts these past few years and we did make something out of nothing.

Okay well if you'll excuse me I have a three year old's birthday party to plan for tomorrow. Three! unbelievable.

Half a year of maternelle

2010-11-09T02:00:00.013-06:00

I dread making the call to the directrice at Charlotte's school that she won't be coming back. It's been about four days now of calling in sick. I'm going to have to tell them soon. I'm still not sure what I'll tell them either. They're very nice so I don't want to say anything negative, but then again I don't want to have to fabricate lies. *

Yesterday both kids were home "sick" so it was a taste of what the future will bring. I let them play happily in the house in pyjamas building things. We read a few books and enjoyed the rainy day inside the house. As the day wore on I began to have phone calls, "was S okay?" "would I be able to take L to school tomorrow morning for sure" "could we make the schedule for the pick ups and drop off and the lunch schedule tomorrow," all different mothers who depend on us for ride shares and scheduling. I wonder what will happen when we aren't here anymore? Who will they turn to to help manage their busy lives. For one day I got to experience the feeling of freedom from worrying about scheduling our life around school and it was very liberating.

I'm slowly ordering the books we'll need for next year. I won't have the library at my disposal and no way to order materials in China. That part worries me but then I say whatever, it will force me to be more creative. I'm worried about not having enough nature around us and the nagging feeling that the parks are the hands off type. But then I say, it's okay we'll figure it out, we'll make do as long as there are trees we'll be okay. But still I worry about that a lot because I'm not much of a city person and this is a very big city. I want them to be outside as much as possible. It's the basis for my whole curriculum with them. Outside, outside, outside. If we're trapped inside with books the center of everything will fall apart. I plan on using Steiner and Charlotte Mason which recommends two hours outside in the late fall and winter months and six hours outside the rest of the year. I'm hoping we'll be able to make this work in a concrete jungle somehow.

Explorer Robert Scott wrote this in his last pages of his diary-- a letter to his wife. He talked about his son:

"I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up, but it is a satisfaction to know that he will be safe with you....make the boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. They encourage it in some schools. I know you will keep him in the open air."

I think about that when I have doubts about homeschooling. Little S has two fifteen minute sessions of recreation per day at his school. It isn't near enough. Charlotte has about thirty minutes a day. Both have their outdoor time on a concrete courtyard. The last few times S played at his best friend's house he was bored because L wanted to play video games the whole time. This is a boy who always built forts in the garden with him and now he's glued to a television screen nearly every time we visit them.

At home maybe we can't recreate a forest school but we can try to get closer to it.

* I called charlotte's school and they were really understanding about me taking her out. I said she wasn't adjusting well and it was probably best for her. I did get a short speech about the time it takes for adaptation but I stayed firm and said said "yes maybe you're right but it's best for us now if she just stays home." And so just like that she was out. They'll give me certificate that says she's been enrolled in a French school because if she ever needs to enroll in a French school again apparently she needs this paper. Just like in the military she has her discharge papers!

Two houses

2010-11-08T03:30:00.009-06:00

We spent a wonderful long weekend in Th*n*n hanging out at our house and tying up a few loose ends. It just feels like home when we're there in a way I can't really express. We both feel really relaxed in that house and we really just want to kick back and put a tool belt on and finish the house. The desire is strong to stay and just dive into projects that we end up doing just that the whole time we're there. The house is on the market for rent btw. I hope we find someone. My attempts at getting someone to work on the house for free rent has been a bust so far.

Here in the Paris 'burbs our house is nearly done and we've had a few visits, all very positive! The agents last week were so enthusiastic we felt really motivated to finish the last few splatters of paint we have to do. They loved all the decorating and told us they had a few clients in mind who would love the house. I felt really good because honestly the first agent who came through the house a few months back in the cheap polyester suit was really negative, almost mean. She said we should leave the house very generic because clients will want to put their own stamp on the house. She wrinkled her nose at my rustic/modern doors and said not everyone likes a red kitchen. Poo on her! The new agents were sleek and stylish, square glasses and Chanel purses. I was really nervous after the first agent had been so critical but at the same time I was curious what they'd think. They just seemed so different from her. It ended up that they loved everything and they even told me I should get paid to decorate which made Seb have to down some serious humble soup. Oh and guess which agency we're going with?

We have lots of work to do over the next eight weeks. We're back in the fire pit and we're leaving at Christmas. How insane is that? All the kids presents have to fit our suitcases. It's going to be a minimalist holiday which is just fine by me because that's become my new motto anyway--less is more.

Halloween candy

2010-11-02T06:55:00.006-06:00

We had our first Halloween in France this year can you believe it? A bit of background, in fact Halloween isn't really celebrated in Europe, my big lament from time to time, but most times no big deal. I'd pretty much tossed it aside and enjoyed the November first aspect of All Saints Day (a day off in France) Also the kids in France are on vacation the week before and a few days after Halloween and traditionally they go to their grandparents (nearly all kids do this because the parents don't want to take time off for a family vacation in November, no ski and no sun!) And so since most grandparents are anti Halloween because it's garishness interferes with a very religious holiday the kids don't have much opportunity to get dressed up and go out. It's been really played down in recent years in France but apparently in the 80's and 90's it was very popular, or so people tell me.

This is our first year staying at home for the November break and our neighbors with kids organize a "betise or bon-bons" sortie so I was really looking forward to it. Each year they go around and pass notes to all the neighbors. If the neighbors want to give out treats they put the note on their door and the kids ring the bell. The kids all gather at the same hour and hit all the houses together which I think is a great idea and really safe. About twelve kids dressed up as witches and ghosts and we went to about fifteen houses where the people were really enthusiastic and some even dressed up! The kids had a TON of candy and got to experience a very American Halloween like I remember when I was a kid.

Now what to do with all the candy, hmmm?

Country walks

2010-10-29T02:50:00.005-05:00

We've been out walking nearly every day of this little school break. It's been wonderful to have the time to explore with the kids, peeking under rocks and mushrooms, climbing on hills, collecting treasures. Yesterday we walked for nearly four hours, cut through a farmer's field and came out practically at our front door. The kids were so excited to find a secret path leading right to our house, but I was a little nervous about getting caught trespassing on mister grumpy farmer's property. I just kept humming "This land is your land" in my head and keeping my head low.

As I was walkin', I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing
Now that side was made for you and me.

I hope we aren't crazy for leaving behind our little slice of paradise. I'll be on a quest when we get to Shanghai to find the best park in the city. One where you can walk on the grass and sit under a tree, I would hope. If I remember correctly this was the most difficult part of expat life in Mexico for me.

Opportunity knocks

2010-10-27T02:05:00.004-05:00

If anyone knows anyone interested in doing six months worth of projects in exchange for rent on the Fisherman's House contact me.

The house as you know if you read my blog is on Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) in the alps near some of the best skiing in the world (Morzine-Avoriaz). You really don’t need a car because there’s a train station in town taking you anywhere in France you want to go. Also In town, five minutes walking distance there all the shops you’d need on a daily basis. I rarely use a car when we stay there. Geneva is thirty five minutes away by car or bus and Lausanne is just across the lake in a 20 minute boat taxi. There’s very basic furniture in the house and everything you need to live well plus all the tools and materials necessary for the projects. If you want to do some long term travel this is a great opportunity.

The projects are pretty varied and they don’t really involve a lot of labour or heavy lifting, but they do require a certain amount of skill. For example one project is laying floor boards in an upstairs room so the person would need to have some carpentry skills but other projects just involve painting. We’d ask that the person do one project per month, each project probably taking about a week of work, sometimes less. If you’re a couple though you’ll be able to go through the projects fairly fast and have a ton of time left over for travel or job hunting. And this is a great opportunity for someone retired.

Contact me at misschrisc (a t) gmail (d o t) com if you’re interested. I can send you the project list and lots of other details I don't really want to share on the blog. We’re pretty open to working out something, so even if you don’t have all the skills needed for all the projects we can work it out so you could do other projects that suit your skill level or speciality.

Prattle

2010-10-22T08:05:00.011-05:00

Still waiting on Seb to come back and let me just say it's loooong this time. It's been two weeks now and we have another to go. I really feel like I'm the single mom with no family around. Yes this is me whining! I want my husband back. He actually is pretty handy to have around.

In all my spare non couple time I've been reading up on ready made homeschool curriculums and this seems like the sanest route for me--especially with all the changes of us moving to a new home and country. I don't really have time to design a curriculum and I think I just need something "microwavable" for at least the first year even if I'm not necessarily the microwavable, type of educator. I'm looking at three different Waldorf inspired curriculums--Oak Meadow, Christopherus and another one designed by a homeschool Waldorf mom who seems really together in her video presentations. The problem is I can't decide! I'm awful with making choices. I can spend six hours just trying to choose a winter coat so choices just confuse me. I'm a knit picker and they only give you teeny samples of the curricula on the various sites. My big fear is to pay all that money for something (they aren't cheap) and end up with a curriculum whose secret agenda is religious or worse still Americentric, and be stuck skipping over huge passages or tearing out my hair trying to make them work.

I'm really eager to get started and I'm hoping Seb continues to agree and approves of the method I choose. I don't think I'll be as academically strict as he likes but I think these methods will work for me and our kids and to me that's what's important. I'm on my second John Holt book since Seb left for China and I've read enough about Waldorf-Steiner to make me feel like this is definitely the right choice. In fact I'm so in to my readings it's gotten so as soon as I walk in Charlottes's school I groan a little more each time. I can see all the problems jumping out at me in big bold letters. All the while though I have to pretend that this is the right choice for her sake because she's still crying each time I take her and I can't be anything but cheery and positive. Today she had another substitute teacher though and I was ready to just say never mind and take her home but I left her crying on the floor because the school was closing its doors and I felt pressured to leave and not be the indulgent parent. Then when she came home she told me she was in Mme. Lanne's class (another teacher) and she wasn't scared. So as far as I can see they divided the class yet again and put her off into another group for the day and I'm not even sure why! Poor thing. When I see the Oak Meadow curriculum for preschool it makes me think why don't I just take her out now and invest a few hours a day in playing games with her and going on nature walks instead of sending her off to the Land of Chaos. I may end up doing that after the vacation if Seb will agree but I'm not sure if he will.

As for Little S he is zipping through the CP (first grade) global reading method like gangbusters and it's also got me worried. He isn't necessarily understanding much of it though and they just keep going and going. One mom told me "they go too slow! they should be halfway through the book by Christmas shouldn't they! I think they must be bored" I didn't know what to say. "Actually the book is crap and full of "prattle" and I'd like to throw it out the window" but instead I said, "well I'm glad they're going slow for some of the kids who aren't raedy to move on yet."

For me it's too much too fast. It's the pail analogy--he's being filled and filled and I think his pail is overflowing. He just seems saturated with information and you can sense the urgency of the system to get him reading and writing and on his way. In December and January we'll empty the pail, dry things out and in February I will try to light the spark, but maybe the pail will need to be emptied a little more before it can light. I won' t start his Grade One program until at least February and we'll continue it through the Summer at a very casual pace. I can't wait.

More ramblings about HS

2010-10-15T07:24:00.011-05:00

I've been thinking of nothing lately but of getting the kids out of school and getting them in a program of my own. I won't criticize the school and go on and on about their shortcomings. It's like a bad blind date--the guy is nice enough but it just isn't working out. You just want to get out of there without hurting anybody's feelings. I feel like that about the kid's school. No hard feelings just show me the door please, PLEASE. (I will mention that Charlotte is now on her third teacher--and it's only been two months--Go Ed. Nt'l for placing a teacher 7 months pregnant in the class! I've actually considered taking her out until we leave.)

There's a lot of behind the scenes on this I haven't blogged about so I guess it sounds a little out of left field to suddenly get on the homeschooling wagon but it's a combination of several things--mostly a thought I had waaaay before children came into my life that I would homeschool them someday. I'm not sure why. I guess it was mostly based on my own bad relationship with school. Like a lot of things in my life (my 45rpm collection!) I let all those homeschooling thoughts go with the wind with my move to France. After all how could I home school in another language? IMPOSSIBLE! Well at least I used to think that and yet now it's bothering me less and less which should be scary in itself.

So yes here it is all back again. Homeschooling. How did it come up again.

First it was Little S's learning problems and the psst in my ear from his moyenne section teacher that some kids are just different and won't thrive in a traditional French school. In other words, "run for the hills! you're funneling down a drain" She told us this off the clock of course and admitted that her own son was in an alternative school because he doesn't fit into regular school and she recognized S as being a bit like her son..

Second was my application to the Rudolph Steiner school for teacher training, --I got an interview in May but we decided to go to China so I left it lying. AGONY! I really, really wanted to try to do this but life gave us a crossroad and I chose the safest path I guess which was to not stay and try to browbeat a committee into accepting my application. (by the way Steiner is Waldorf to you 'mericans--Steiner was the founding father of the school's philosophy) In preparation I've been studying Steiner (Waldorf) methods for over a year on my own and really loving it--even learning about it for the pure pleasure of it and not for my entrance interview. I have had a complete change of attitude about the way children learn and think. It's how I should have been taught as a child.

Then some other things got peppered into the mix. My interest in doing art with the kids over the past few years has lead me to lots of homeschooling blogs and this is where I learned about project based learning, which I realized was basically what we do in our free time anyway. I was already pretty much homeschooling go figure. The kids do projects all the time. Right now I have a cardboard Narnia city being built in my dining room. Okay here I am doing it. Cool.

The whole HS thing really got pushed though when I started researching schools in Shanghai and I realized that there weren't any that fit what we wanted or needed for S who is more or less a special needs kid. Alternative schools? Chinese education tends to be really strict so even the alternative schools are a bit rigid like people who just won't relax even when they finally can. My mom is like this when I try to massage her head during our little beauty seminars--she just can't relax. I'll say "come on, relax mom!" and she'll say "I am!" but you know she isn't and she never can or will. So the one singular Montessori labeled school was out just based on the description alone which sounded vaguely masochistic. I'm not such a huge fan of Montessori anyway. It seems too reliant on materials that most of the schools hardly ever use and IMHO there isn't a huge pedagogy behind it other than the pretty classrooms. Yes Little S loved the rabbits at his Montessori school in Mexico but it was a very big price to pay to pet rabbits.

So this is how I've come to making our secular curriculum based on Steiner, Charlotte Mason (for Seb and meeting the requirement of the Ed. Nt'l of France) and Project Based Learning, but leaning heavily towards Steiner for the moment. I really like my curriculum and I hope Seb gives it an approval so I can start gathering materials for it but of course it can change again, again and it probably will. The cool part is that if it does change I don't have to get it approved by any committee or board I can just do it. Well I guess Seb has to approve it but he has a vested interest in the results so he's easy to win over.

I have just added a mother-lode of work onto myself before we leave if we do decide to do this and I'm slightly freaked out about the lack of ME time I have to admit but it's kind of exciting at the same time.

The price

2010-10-14T02:47:00.010-05:00

We've been getting lots of interest in our house lately, three people in the last two weeks have come up to me and asked about the house. It kind of freaks me out mostly because the idea that we're leaving starts burning in my brain and suddenly I see the person in front of me IN my house and ME where will I be? Well, I guess I know I'll be somewhere but you know it's just odd to talk to a mom I've never met on the sidewalk about such things and see how much gossip travels because they know so much about me.

So what I do is I usually just tell them that we'll be using an agency and they can contact them when the time is right but then each time they PRESS and PRESS to come and see the house, just to get an idea, like yesterday. I finally had to invite the woman for coffee because she just wasn't going to give it up. She seemed nice and she has said hello to me a lot and always smiles so I didn't mind inviting her but my problem is talking about money because to be honest I don't think she can pay what we're asking. It's not that I'm sitting in judgement or anything but I know the market of the village as well as most real estate agents and I know her current house near the school--a sort of apartment, and mine is probably going to be on the rental market at a third more than hers. I feel like it's going to be a waste of time. It's also my third go in a few weeks at people asking me about the house so I know that the price is a conversation stopper. Our house seems small and unfinished from the outside because we haven't finished painting the gates yet and the front garden still need tilling and replanting,--slated for next month but looking pretty run down today. It definitely doesn't look tip top yet and we still have tools all about so it has an air of distress about it. And so lots of people are intrigued by the idea of taking on a stubbly old house and maybe getting some compensation for doing a little fixing up. And when I finally come to the uncomfortable part of saying the price they flutter and fan their face and say "well I'll have to think about it."

I suppose I'll see if she's interested or not next week over coffee. She already mentioned that her husband is a handy guy and that they'd like to avoid agency fees if at all possible so I'm prepared for the face fanning ahead of time.

And just for the record nobody can talk me out of using an agency this time. I wouldn't even rent to my own brother without an agent involved. Fool me once!

Time is flying

2010-10-11T06:21:00.016-05:00

I can't really believe that the kids only have about two months of school left before we leave. It seems like time is flying by again. I realized this as things have come up like school pictures, would they even be ready in time before we leave? and parent-éleve elections and donations to the caisse d'´école where we won't even be here for any of the class field trips. It just seems strange because our community is so centered around school and here we are leaving behind all that--the schooling too and entering a sort of no-mans land--exciting and scary at the same time.

Seb seems to be really warming up to my homeschooling idea. We even decided that the kids won't start school in 2011 and at least until the end of February they'll be home. I'm a little daunted by the whole thing and worried that they'll be bored, that they'll fight, that they'll overwhelm me. I think I'm mostly afraid because I know Seb wants to start a school curriculum at home and I had no intention of doing it like that. He told me he wants us to create a little school with set hours. I feel like it's doomed to fail! I think I need to sell him some more on my unschooling idea but I'll have to do it in small doses. He had such a strict upbringing!! Even during their last visit my in-laws hounded Little S about getting a peek at his homework. It was his birthday and they had his books out on the table. When he visits them they spend lots of time tutoring him on the abc's and his numbers. I can't say their method doesn't work because Seb is definitely well-educated but Seb is also a workaholic who takes no pleasure in anything outside of what his duty is. I have a hard time getting him to relax and do nothing with me and the kids.

Fortunately all along Seb has had my little voice in his ear and now he sees things firsthand. Homeschool was so abstract before but now he sees how laxidasical the teacher at S's school is about his relationship with the kids and the effect it has on his son. We had a small conference with S's teacher last week and he just seemed bored. He worked into the conversation three times how he was overworked and how he wasn't getting paid for doing the overtime for after school study groups and for the conference we were in with him. I think he's a nice teacher and I hate criticizing the school so I won't go too much in detail but many of his responses, his general attitude about a bullying incident and Little S's general attitude since he changed schools has even the most skeptical, Seb, changing his mind about public school.

I'm reading Holt's How Children Fail right now. I've only read excerpts from his books but I finally ordered two of them for my library. I'll probably be talking a lot about this in the next few months, sorry in advance!

By the way here is a l i n k to an interesting emission on TF2 about homeschooling in France. And then another I found on a local savoyarde tv news channel. Very interesting to see homeschool families here in France.

Six

2010-10-07T03:49:00.004-05:00

Little S turned six over the past weekend. He had a small party with his grandparents and then on Wednesday we had a party for him and and six friends. I did both parties by myself and I’m partied out!

He’s changing physically. Suddenly his legs seem to be getting really long. I looked at him stretched out in the bed last night and we talked and I couldn't’t believe his legs were so far down the bed. I seem to have this perpetual image of him as a two year old with this stocky little body, climbing over him to read a bedtime story and his legs were never in the way. Now they’re in the way. How did this happen? I told him what I was thinking and he said to me “where were my legs before?” and I pointed to really high on the bed and he said “I was tout petit!” and I said “yes you were.”

He’s very taken by anything having to do with knights and castles and he spends hours constructing cities and lining up his armour and telling me all the technical terms for parts of the castle. He knows all the nooks and crannies and has names for parts I never knew had names! As soon as he walks into the house he goes into his deguisment box and gets into his chevalier clothes which we’ve made by cutting up old clothes and attaching belts and whatnot. Strangely enough he refused to dress up for his own party—go figure. He’s unpredictable like that. Like for example he went to school for a whole week wearing a red cape we’d made out of a satin skirt. I had to ask him to take it off at the gate to the school but he made me promise to bring it each day after school and he’d put it on right away as soon as he saw me. Then suddenly he just didn’t need it anymore.

When he isn’t playing with his knights and castles he draws. We do a lot of family drawing at the dining room table before dinner (highly recommended!) and he can easily spend two hours cutting paper, painting and making a drawing stack. I am keeping a book of some of his best work and I’m amazed at how much there is. I don’t feel like he’s particularly talented, not much more than any other kid, but he’s so invested in drawing. It’s how he spend all of his free time outside of the knights and castles construction. Of course his drawing are mostly along that theme, knights and castles, but he also enjoys watching me draw and trying to draw exactly what I’ve drawn. He also likes to draw parts of the house, windows and lamps and whatnot. I’m happy that he’s picked this up from me (and that I picked it up from Danny Gregory) It’s a great tool for helping you see better and it’s fun to look back at them.

As I write this I realize his interests are pretty narrow and he probably needs to get outside on his bike more. We’ve just had such strange weather. It’s been raining for nearly a month straight. It’s also hard to write about him because he has so many problems at school right now and since school occupies so much of the week there isn’t much else to write. If I start writing about his school it will turn into another sort of post and probably evolve in to a rant so I’ll leave it for another time.

So there it is from Little Man to Bigger Little Man who already has hair on his legs. Where has the time gone?

Body parts

2010-09-27T02:38:00.010-05:00

A few weeks ago we did a really nice kid art atelier I thought I’d share.

Here’s the supplies list:
Kraft paper , butchers paper, or any extra large sheets of paper you can find
brown or black acrylic paint + a few bright colors
Permanent marker

The spirit of the atelier was the painter Joan Miró, bright colors and overlapped images. The kids laid down on the floor and traced each other’s body outlines with a sharpie. You have to use big enough paper for them to fit inside and you have to encourage them to try to squish themselves in the frame of the paper while getting them to make a nice shape. It’s good to do a little practice session beforehand and talk about what nice shapes they can make—what looks good etc.

Each child then takes their own image and paints it in various bright colors which you can get them to mix. We usually encourage the kids to mix their own colors in the ateliers and it’s starting to pay off. Sometimes they’ll say things now like “hey look at my blue isn’t it pretty?” We originally started with just getting them to add at least a squirt of white or black to play with the tones but now they can pretty much mix their own colors from the primaries which I think is a really useful tool in life. Some kids resist mixing and some love it. I'd say don't push it and just let them have fun.

Finally when the paint is dry ask them to outline their image again with brown or black paint to make it bolder because the original marker drawing will be a little faded out.. It looks a bit like a police body outline when they’re finished, kind of creepy but fascinating.

If you like them you can mod podge them onto a hard surface, --wood or canvas works. You can overlap two or more of the the images to create a fabulous art piece of multiple kids images. My neighbor liked hers so much she’s framing it for her living room. They were pretty cool with both her kids overlapped, kind of like a moment frozen in time but maybe not as cheesy as plaster hand prints.

I still have to mount ours but first I have to get Little S to trace Charlotte because she was napping during the atelier.

Decluttering

2010-09-20T01:54:00.012-05:00

(sorry but my blog is undergoing some construction--no time to fix it so you'll have to excuse all the ugliness until I can clean up around here)

I spent the weekend organising and yet our house is still a mess. I'm sure it will be this way until we move in December. My project is to to reduce the number of boxes we have in the basement down to half, --mostly things from our Mexico move never opened. The good news is that I found so many boxes of art supplies it made my week last week! Every time we took apart a room to renovate I'd box them up and then lose them in the basement somewhere so I'd end up buying new stuff and starting over again. It was like Christmas finding and organising all those boxes and the kids loved digging into it all. I think there's at least one more box somewhere.

I've been emptying the kids rooms too in preparation for the move. There are a lot of baby things that we don't need anymore¨*sniffle* so that really cuts out the clutter. I've reread some books recently too that really inspired me to ruthlessly declutter--Clear You Clutter With Feng Shui and Amanda Blake Soule's book The Creative Family, (great book by the way). I like what she says about looking at toys for your kids --"do the toys around you evoke a feeling of beauty?" I noticed oddly enough as I separated things from Charlotte's room that most of the toys that didn't inspire me or evoke a sense of beauty were actually gifts or hand me downs. I do usually buy inspired things like wood toys, books or art supplies for the kids, but it's the "everyone else" factor that gets in the way. It's all well meant and I love the family for the act of buying the gifts for the kids but there's a feeling of responsibility with a gift to keep it even if I don't like it or need it. I certainly felt that as I wondered what to do with the things I'd put aside. All this has me inspired to try to make more gifts for the children that we know and offer them art supplies or special books or well thought out wood toys for their gifts. (by the way for the friends reading this blog I'm not talking about YOU--your gifts were kept!)

The other thing I did was replace all the plastic bins with baskets and what a world of difference that made. The room felt so much better. It was suddenly lighter and airier. I think kids need to be surrounded by beauty to appreciate life and I'm dedicated to getting our whole home in that same order (even if I have a looooong way to go). The little people spaces are a good start though.

I'll post the finished room when I get the last details done and get the new bedding.

Homeschoolin'

2010-09-18T16:45:00.010-05:00

My internet has been really snarky and I can never figure out what to do to get it back if Seb's not here so no blogging for two whole weeks. No wifi here just a wire strung across the doorway that Charlotte always trips over. It works for us most of the time though but it went wacko when Seb left.

Husband is back from China for a few weeks and we're trying to get some jobs done in the house. I have to get back to painting the inside of the house again but I just haven't had much energy lately. I'm still getting used to the single mom schedule which really BITES I have to say. The no adult to talk to part is really tough. No matter how much you love your kids at the end of the day you do need someone else to bounce off big people ideas with. I haven't even had the internet for that thankyouverymuch. Okay end of ::rant::

Seb and I have been busy catching up on it all though and our big debate lately is homeschooling. I don't talk about it much here but basically I have always wanted to homeschool the kids since birth but Seb has never wanted me to. I know homeschool is a controversial subject in the US but in France it's taboo to even talk about it. I've only brought it up once in a group of moms and it was as if I'd mentioned incest or bigamy. I was really surprised by the reactions and I quickly bailed out of the discussion with a sort of " yeah you know I'm not sure how I feel about it..." and I left it at that. I think it's all so new in France. After that though I understood Seb's attitude. It's just unheard of to do such a thing here.

Now that we're moving to China though he's considering the homeschooling route a little bit more. He absolutely agrees that Little S is drowning in the public school system. One week into the school year and we already have a note from the teacher for S to join a study support group after school or at lunch and to start with the psych. I pretty much expected it. He's in a big class this year with thirty kids and it's just impossible for him to focus with his learning problems. At the same time what are his learning problems? We still don't know and we may never know so it makes it even harder to get him help.

I'm doing some reading on what I can do for him and how to manage things. I'm more of the unschooling mindset, (John Holt) and Seb being rigid and well, French..., wants him to follow a routine with a little bell and a CNED book. Maybe we can meet in the middle. Or maybe we'll find a great little alternative school in Shanghai after all. You can see I'm a little terrified of the whole thing. I suppose because if it doesn't work I'll have Big S breathing down my neck saying "I TOLD YOU SO!" At the same time I think I can do better than the public school system where three years later he still can't correctly write his name and he needs after school help after a seven hour day.

I'm off to bed to sleep on the whole issue...again.

It's rentrée time

2010-09-06T06:47:00.011-05:00

a really pretty pre-fall morning, rentrée 2010

not yet aware that the parents don't stay the whole time

Last week as everyone in France knows it was La Rentrée which is a big BIG deal here because not only do the kids start school but all of the families come back from vacation and there's a huge electric buzz in the air. It's a festive time but it's a little stressful all at the same time, hard to explain really unless you experience it living here. It involves a lot of long winded conversations with even the most casual acquaintances always starting with "how was your vacation?" and then "wellllll..." yet at the same time you know, you're in a really big hurry every minute of every day preparing for La Rentrée and getting the school supply list going so you dash and run and try to plan to see people for coffee to catch up because "who has time!!"

little S's class, CP

For us it was a big year because Little S started CP (like first grade in the US) and Charlotte started her first year of Maternelle in Petite Section. Little S was stressed because he'd been told all the rules of the playground at the end the school year last year and he was sure they were going to be ripping his childhood to shreds "on a meme pas le doit de jouer a cache-cache!" I'm not sure how true that is that they can't play hide and seek but he seemed really bothered by the transition. I felt it too when I had to buy him red ballpoint pens and rulers. "Wow he's not even six yet..." When he got to school he was relaxed because of course he saw all his friends and they all looked a little scared too so it was okay after that. He still says he hates school though and I have a hard time biting my tongue not to say "me too!!" Charlotte was a bit more tricky of course since it's her first time in school. She cried for three hours straight her first day. Then her second day she cried for three more hours! "c'est normale--c'est l'adaptation," but it is hard to walk away when they're crying like that. She only goes for half days so I think she'll adjust. The morning goes by so fast and I think they'll make it fun for her.

in the courtyard at school, that's his teacher in the background, the stocky man in the beige coat

The two schools are about five minutes apart by car and the race to get the two at lunch is comical. I barely have time to say a word to Charlotte's teacher and woosh we're off running, keys in hand to get Little S who is basically standing on the sidewalk waiting for us--pushed out the door by his school! I guess you just develop a rhythm but for now I'm all off kilter trying to remember who goes where at what time and how to time it all.

worried, this was before we went inside his school--and charlotte with her dou-dou, Dixie

Seb left for China yesterday, another sort of rentrée and his first weeks at his new job should tell us a lot so I was kind of happy to have him go to see firsthand what the company is like. If it's crazy disorganized he'll just resign and we won't take the chance. We'll just stay in France. I think it should be okay though. I mean I hope so because we're pretty excited to go but at least we have a four month safety net just in case.

Where the heart is

2010-08-31T03:12:00.016-05:00

We're back from our little exursion to TLB to get the fisherman's house back. It was definitely another saga to add to my yearbook of criminals and con artists. I had thought the book was finished but apparently not. We keep adding pages!

The renter Mssr. G left the keys with his illustrious daughter (the mini conne artiste) who now lives up the street. She smiled sweetly and handed them over saying her father was travelling but he'd be back in a week to talk to us about everything. Okay whatever at least we had the keys! We walked into the house to find a huge mess, dirty sink, dirty floors--everything filthy. There were cupboards full of food and so much junk that we thought he hadn't moved yet. There were old, stained mattresses and a horrible cigarette-smelling sofa set. He'd moved but he'd just left the mess for us to clean up. I got emotionnal and started crying. I think it was the combination of coming home, seeing Marcel's house with new renters and him gone, and facing another big mess in our lives. Seb took me to the port and we had a drink which is definitely what I needed.

We spent a week cleaning and discovering what he'd broken. We would have kept the caution check if we'd been smart enough to actually deposit it. He broke two interior door frames prying open doors because of forgotten keys and he'd apparently left open some skylight windows because there were water stains all over the new wood floors in one bedroom and no floor in another bedroom's mezzanine because he'd taken out the warped floor but never replaced it. Our new mattress left in the house and covered in plastic had been used and was stained too but I think they were just water stains from the deluge---I mean I hope they were (there were condoms in my bedside table). I'd left the bed in a boarded off bedroom for us to use if we came back in the summer. (The original deal was that we'd come back and get the house for two weeks in the summer--never really worked out though)

The worst was the living room floor which is ruined and will have to be resanded. It was a brand new walnut floor just finished the day we walked out the door, we had just sealed it the night before we left, but now there are so many scratches, cigarette burns and wine stains that there's no hope but to start over. The terrace had grease stains on the new boards from where he'd used a fryer outside and everything I left in the house was gone or broken-- iron, ironing board, vaccuum cleaner, food steamer. It was a hard lesson to learn but we will never be so naieve again.

When he finally came back a week later he started screaming at US which was odd but I think relatively common psychopathic behavior. I asked Seb to please be calm and rational but it's true that we were exhausted from cleaning up his mess so it was hard not to scream back and launch into his game. We didn't say much, just said we were disappointed by his lack of gratitude. He started shouting and said some nasty things about us living in Paris with our fancy life (if he only really knew!) and Seb just let him go off. He stormed off and a few days later sent us a bunch of threats by text message. One was just a string of obscenities. We immediately changed all the locks on the house.

The neighbors got on well with him and we didn't air our problems with him very openly because we weren't sure who his friends were. A few neighbors were worried about him because he'd had a difficult year but we know now that most of his stories are fabricated for sympathy or gaining time or money. He always has a story. We have a stack of letters and emails to prove it. In one of his text messages he said we'd never be able to come to TLB because our reputation would be ruined and he'd be doing the publicité. I was really curious what he could say about us. I guess we'll find out next time we go back...or not!

Right before we left we found something really shocking. There was a cable going through our unfinished bedroom outside onto our roof. It lead to the skylight window of our neighbor the dragon lady. He'd been stealing electricity from her house! Seb remembered that he'd mentioned once being friends with a renter in the upstairs apartment and the girl was having dragon lady problems. Evidently he'd convinced the girl to share electricity with him since the dragon lady pays the utility bills for all her little rental apartments. We didn't have time to deal with the problem. We definitely can't call the dragon lady to sort it out. She's a loose cannon and you never know what she'll come back with. We don't want to try to sort it out with EDF because who knows if they'd believe it. We just hoped he'd come back on the roof and pull it out himself. Next month we'll have to do something about it.

In the end we spent one week cleaning and then two weeks vacationing in TLB. Seb crammed in lots of traveling during the extra weeks so we could spend more time together and he came and went from Geneva instead of Paris's airport. We fell back in love with our house and all I could think about was moving back, --eventually one day. To me the house there is home and you can't really argue with that feeling of where your heart feels you need to be. But it was a little bittersweet like seeing an old lover you can't have. The flame was burning strong but there wasn't much we could do about it but lock up and think about who will rent the house next.

(here's the houseblog for The Fisherman's House because I no longer link it here)

The renter

2010-08-03T04:18:00.011-05:00

The fallout shelter version of the third bedroom is done (did I mention that we were adding on a bedroom? maybe not) and by that I mean we have a lot of finishing work to do but it's all closed up and has four walls and tiled floors. This project was a far-off-in-the-near-future project but we moved it up on our to do list in order to rent the house more correctly. Hopefully the rental will pay the loan we took out for it. On paper it does work out nicely but it's a little like borrowing from Peter...so it's frightening. I'll post pictures when the tools are out.

And the next order of business is to go and collect the keys in TLB and rent that house. Our renter has turned in to a right psycho in the last few weeks, scary. He wants to leave at the end of August even though you know he hasn't paid us rent in about seven months but hey who cares you know leave when it's convenient for YOU by all means. When we wrote him about doing the état des lieux visit and collecting the keys he freaked and sent us four e-mails, 9:10, 9:20, 9:45 etc., angry and full of all kinds of threats and obscenities and stories. Apparently from what we can muster from all his babble in his emails he feels he was housesitting for us for three years and we were supposed to pay him to work in the house each month, get this.... so he could be able to pay his (measly) rent. Ahhh, but we left him with NO INCOME because we never gave him any jobs. WhaH? This is nuts. We never promised him any work and on top of that he was living in a French region where carpenters like him make more salary than anywhere in Europe and they're in top demand. His final mail said "demmerdez-vous pour les clefs!!" In other words f*ck off find your own way to get your house back"

When Seb called and very calmly asked him "uh hey what's going on?" he just screamed at him and called him awful names, then he hung up. We've been too nice to him. We've never bugged him for late rent or ever asked him for proof of insurance or anything. The trouble is we aren't sure what to do now. We can be arrested if we go on the property before he's officially left but he won't tell us if or when he's leaving and apparently he's gone off on vacation! If you read this and you aren't French you have to understand French law which is completely lopsided and gives renters all rights even if they pay no rent for years and years. I never really knew most of these laws until now and they're really shocking. People actually make a lifestyle out of living rent free in France and this is why it requires so much paperwork to rent anything. Now I get it.

Finally he sent us another e-mail saying he was intending to sue us for some rare paintings that were damaged in a house flood a year ago, and we just scratched our heads. The rare painting part had me laughing out loud but the word flood stuck in my head. What flood? There was a flood? Holy crap.

It's a very good thing we're staying a few extra months. I think we'll need that time to straighten out another mess.

whew!

2010-07-29T04:14:00.003-05:00

On Monday Seb and I both looked at each other and said "we can't do this anymore!" and we decided to take all the pressure off the move and leave in December instead. It was a really hard decision for a lot of reasons but as soon as we said it we knew it was the right one.

So he'll still be leaving in September without us (the hard part) and we'll join him after Christmas. The kids will start school here and I'll manage the rest of the work in both houses and try to get both rented by the time we leave.

Suddenly life just got muuuuuuch easier.

Dead critters

2010-07-26T02:39:00.016-05:00

We had a great weekend with Seb's 40th birthday pretty much taking over all our free time but it was fun and we needed to take a few moments to celebrate. We were in the middle of transferring the downstairs kitchen upstairs and we got as far as moving the stove and fridge and connecting the electricty but the water still wasn't connected and our dishes and food were still in a downstairs cupboard, impossible to move because it's nearly cemented to the wall. I spent a lot of time running up and down the steps fetching everything under the sun and washing up. We were also smack in the middle of finishing up our bathroom with that sink partially installed but still leaking so it was definitely a trippy weekend--probably not the best weekend to have guests. Poor guests, but at least someone else got to witness first hand the madness of what our life has been for the past six months. It was sort of like visiting day at the refugee camp.

I always talk about my great neighbors and there are only one or two left hanging about because this is the big vacation time on France. The few that are here have been fabulous and were really helpful and if it weren't for them I think I would have keeled over dead weeks ago. They brought food over and babysat almost the whole weekend and they really boosted my morale which was a bit low when I looked around and saw what a wreck my house was...again.

My neighbor's husband found the source of the ranky smell that was floating through our house all week--a dead tomcat just on the border of our property. The kids were facinated. Little S is curious about anything dead now anyway since the mouse we found a few months ago. He asked me last night "what's inside of the cat that stinks so bad?" and then he asked "what eats the cat?" and then just on and on questions. I remember with the mouse he'd asked after we'd found it "comment on fabrique une souris maman? (how do you make a mouse?)" which is a fun question to answer. I love all these little questions. We left the mouse in a matchbox for a day or so and I'd pretty much forgotten about it until I went to light the candles for our dinner on the small terrace and stuck my fingers in the box without looking. Aaaagh!

A few days later the fur on the mouse was moving and when I opened the box I thought for a second "wow, he's still alive, how..." but then I realized that nature was taking its course even in the little matchbox. I decided not to show little S and we finally buried the mouse at the end of the garden.

That's all my dead animal stories for today.

Excuse me I have to go now and take apart the Playmobil hospital in Little S's room and pack it in a plastic box and I'm really dreading it. It takes about six hours and three glasses of wine to put it together again. It's HUGE and has no instructions because it was a gift from a neighbor, just a little photo from the box that I squinted over for days when I first put it together. I hate moving. Have I mentioned that before?

Hopefully I'll get the time to take some photos of the house in the next few days to show what we've done. We've done a lot. Meanwhile, au boulot!

Onward

2010-07-20T02:25:00.005-05:00

Crazy weekend, we did so much and then looked back and said « what did we actually do ? » because it didnt look like much. Seb started on the living room and he did a lot of electricity and plumbing jobs so that’s probably why it isn’t looking like much because it’s all stuff you dont see. I did more painting, hallway detailing and started the little washroom and the stairwell.

On Sunday I escaped to do a little thrifting and make a donation of three bags of toys at the same time. I bought the mirror I’ve had my eye on for about three months, finally had the motivation to ask about the price and was surprised when the guy said ten euros ! It’s a really heavy mirror too, 1930’s revival (probably mid eighties production). I also got an old metal alarm clock but like the mirror it’s a reproduction. I’d been looking for one for a while though and they’re hard to find, (especially for one euro !). Later in the day we went out to get some plumbing parts for the house at the diy store and I found some some chairs for the terrace. We actually have two terraces, one big off the kitchen and a small one off the living room each getting diferent sun at different times of the day. We kept having to steal chairs from the one terrace to use on the other and it was getting annoying to keep hauling them around. I think Seb is tired of giving me his speech of « you shouldn’t buy that because we’re leaving you know …» It doesn’t work because I have this nesting vibe that I can’t turn off even if we’re moving halfway around the world.

The mason started building our bedroom extension on Saturday and we were really impressed to see how much he got done. The bedroom will be enormous ! It threw me ino a funk though and I had a hard time on Saturday night, pms meltdown or something, because seeing that bedroom being built made me really frustrated. I’ve been waiting so long to have it and now it will be for someone else, boo-hoo poor me huh . I got over it on Sunday and I guess the shopping helped. A little retail therapy can work wonders. Like I said before though, not having a home yet in China is giving me nothing to focus on but this house and that makes it hard because this house will be gone soon , cue viscious circle.

I think I was also frustrated because of the rental negotiations we've been going through lately. We offered our house to rent to a young English couple recently we found through a friend of a friend and we agreed to entertain the idea of letting them have the place for nine months to a year, in other words a meublée (although really let’s face it I’m only leaving three things in the house so it’s only a meublée on paper). But, they were stalling,-- mainly on the price, which was kind of annoying because the price we proposed was way below market, friendly negotiation and all that. The house is all new on the inside and includes a gardener two times a month so the price was more than fair. Anyway it all reached a stalemate because of the price and I began to rethink the word of mouth type thing like you know « hey I have a friend with a dumpy house you can probably rent in France for a few hundred euros… » When I flat out asked the friend’s budget I went white because it was obvious all the talks were a waste of time. They're more likely to find a 30 sq meter studio for their price if they’re lucky. People have all these romantic notions of bohemian Paris I guess. Five hundred euros doesn’t get much even in the ‘burbs.

So I just looked at the new bedroom the other day and got all deflated because it’s going to be such a great house and hopefully we’ll find good tenants but these just weren’t the ones. The agent is going to start showing the house in late September and I’m hoping it will rent fast and to someone serious and careful. I keep thinking of my neighbor, the Kool-Aid* mom to the ados, and the day I went to her house to pick up little S. When she answered the door there was a gooey nutella sandwich glued to the door. She chuckled, rolled her eyes and left it there, « oh those boys ! » and all I can think of is my door …my pretty new door. Nooo !

Hallways

2010-07-16T02:16:00.008-05:00

I'm trying to write regularly each day because I know soon there will be a giant hole in my blogging as I struggle to get blogger unblocked in China. It's not just my blog I worry about, it's all the blogs I read on a weekly basis. There are plenty of bloggers in China so it's just a technical tweek but we won't be settled for a little while so I'll be blogging from the hotel and I know Google is blocked there. I think in that case I'll blog from Flickr for a few months.

Yesterday we had the mason here getting ready to lay the tile in our bathroom and apparently it will all be finished by tuesday, yay! Since we had to tear out our basement shower over a week ago we have been washing up in buckets outside so I'm really eager to get my bath. It's been two years now of dodgy bathroom-ness and I feel long overdue for the luxury of a real bathroom. The mason is great but my only problem is that he's always got these ideas. I chose a really modern tile for the bath and not only does he want to lay it in a staggered brick pattern, ugh, he has all these wild ideas like making little tiled boxes on the floor for hiding the pipes. I'm not sure what he's saying half the time. I just systematically negate all his ideas and I think it makes him mad but I'm not paying him to design the bathroom. He's nice and I think it bugs him not to contribute but I'm really afraid he's going to just go off and create something when I'm not looking. I just want him to lay the tile straight and not make a fuss. I want the bathroom to look sleek.

I've finished the hallway and I'm really proud of how it looks even if it is a boring white. I didn't feel like investing in the paint or taking the trouble mix it myself. The other day I glanced down at my color palette for the house and all my notes and threw it in the garbage. It was a sad moment but at the same time I guess I'll have our apartment to decorate and a new color palette to think about.

I bought a recuperated chandelier from the late 70's at a brocante, very mod looking, for lighting the hallway. The estate agent seemed to think the renters will want to do their own lighting and said they had the right to take it down and store it. She kind of crinkled her nose at it sitting on the floor so I thought maybe it wasn't in everyone's taste. And then I could just picture it sitting haphazardly on a shelf in the basement so I told Seb we'd leave the lights we already hung but this baby goes in storage. I've been bugging him to hang it so I'm disappointed. I really wanted to see the completed look but that will have to wait. I hate bare light bulbs so for now I'll put the Ikea melodi which looks nice at night all lit up and will at least make the atmosphere cosy. I really doubt the renters will take the time to change it.

Hallways in houses are really important to me. I love the formal entry way of our house even if many people have suggested we knock out the walls. We looked at a lot of 19th century houses like ours when we were house hunting and those with knocked down walls in the entryway were sad. It was as if the houses had lost all their charm. I like the pomp and circumstance of entering a mysterious hall with doors going different directions, the anticipation of where the rest of the house might lead you. My entryway decorating file is HUGE. There's so much you can do in that small inviting space.

I don't keep track of the sources for photos. Sorry for the copyright infringement.

Faith in something bigger

2010-07-15T02:19:00.018-05:00

When I look at the long list of things we need to do to finish the house I get this void that opens up between my neck and my stomach and I lose my breath for a few minutes. Over the years I've learned to cope with anxiety a lot better and I can usually trick my mind out of worrying by pushing the things to the back of my mind. It's a game and I know how to play it.

When others see my list and the house they make comments like "there's no way you can finish all that in one month" or "you're crazy" or "the poor kids!" It's true it's a lot of things to tackle in such a short time. Even the real estate agent who was really positive when she first saw the house has begun to have her doubts now that's she's come back a few times. The other day she shook my hand like she was offering me a dead salmon and flashed her capped smile, "we'll be in touch after the work is done" I asked her if it was okay to show the house you know, on speculation now. "no, no we never do that...it scares people too much."

I think we'll finish in time somehow. I'm not sure why but in spite of the anxiety, a big attack after the agent left, I am able to believe we can get this all done. It's true on paper it doesn't all add up. There's only a month left and in all that there's also a birthday party, things to sort, a moving company for three days and kids to take of, people to say goodbye to and vet visits for the cat, oh and the trip for a few days to Haute Savoie for our working vacation.

I think whenever you're in an impossible situation like this the best thing to do is to work as hard as you possibly can all the way up to the end. If you do this, a divine sort of energy will manifest and make sure it all gets done. It's almost kinetic, like the energy of all your work makes it appear and takes over the last few details. I've done this before and it always works. The last few things always get finished somehow. Looking back later you say "how did that happen? how did we do all that?" It's really a combination of faith and hard work. Besides there's not much else we can do so we might as well believe we'll finish it all, right?

Trust

2010-07-12T10:05:00.003-05:00

I'm still, STILL painting! I'm on the hallway now and soon a second run on Charlotte's room. Her room has so many angles. It's a drywallers nightmare and it's one of the the rooms we decided to do ourselves with our new drywalling skills,--a little foolish but after a lot of second and third takes we're almost done with it and it's starting to look nice. I would call it my least favorite room in the house though because of all the angles.

We had some shocking news dropped in our laps the other day. Well shocking for us at least. We got a text message from the renter of our house in Th*n*n saying "leaving the house end of august" Splat just like that. He reached the end of his three year bail earlier this month and was supposed to be renewing his lease for one more year. We were preparing the papers for the new lease to drop off and sign in a few weeks and we were supposed to be waiting until next summer vacation to think about doing the work we need to do there. Not any more!

The problem is he hasn't paid rent in over six months so I was kind of dubious about renting to him again but Seb felt it was just easier and gave us less to think about. He's *promised* to pay the rent and catch up on his old rent with work in the house. Our rent is so low I can’t believe he can’t pay it. I think he just doesn’t want to inconvenience himself and I think he’s one of those people who gets a charge out of floating through life rent free because it gives them a sense of power, or maybe not power but, I don’t know really…disconnection with the rest of the chumps who think they have to pay for things. It’s just a type of personality I’ve seen in the past. Usually it’s someone very egotistical and in his case it’s definitely the case. Call it women’s instinct if you like but I have never felt that he was on the up and up with us. His stories never match up.

So we’ll probably be spending our vacation in Th*n*n. The jobs to finish the house are a series of little things (compared to here!)--installing railings, varnishing floors and some drywall work in our bedroom. We have a few windows to install to close up our old work rooms and some painting jobs to do. In order to rent the house in September before we leave we'll have to go cram all this in. I suppose we can do it.

Once he's gone and from here on out we're only renting that house seasonally. In France you can rent to students from September to May and then rent your house seasonally as a vacation home from June to August. This way we can have the house for us a little in the summer maybe and there's no risk of getting a squatter for three years. For the students the parents serve as the backers so the rent usually gets paid on time by the parents in most cases, or so we’ve heard.

I've had this happen a few times over the last months and I'm trying hard to not lose my ability to trust because I know it's not a healthy way to go through life, but really how do you manage when this happens a lot? I just sold my new flat screen tv to a neighbor for a really great price, 300 euros which is less than half of what we paid five months ago and she told me after two months of saying she'd take it, "oh I'll have to find a way to make payments because money's tight is that okay?" I said um okay I'd see. I trusted her to take the tv and told a lot of really eager buyers they couldn't have it so that she could and now she's saying "let me pay you in three installments. Can you give me until December? I'll put the money in your bank account by Christmas" Then I see on face-book she writes "just spent two hundred euros in the sales, whew I'm nuts!" which made me think hm-mm, there's the trust thing again. I'm supposed to take her the tv in a few days but I'm really bugged by this trust issue lately and I think I might just cancel everything and keep the tv or sell it to someone else. It makes me feel miserly though. On one side I really want to believe in people but this sort of thing bugs me and I feel like it keeps backfiring on me and we get burned.

Otherwise, the kids are really enjoying the nice summer weather and I’ll have to sit down and write a post about their little quirks,--especially Charlotte’s refusal to wear clothes and the way she looks parading around our entire yard, big belly sticking out, screaming every time you come near her with underwear. It's really funny.

Summer!

2010-07-07T01:36:00.005-05:00

It's the end of the year and our neighbors are slowly starting to leave for their month long vacations which brings home the fact that soon we'll be leaving too ....for good! We haven't really planned a vacation this year since there's just so much going on (a major peeve about international moves--they eat up your entire summer!) We'll try very hard to squeeze in a last minute week somewhere but it isn't going to be easy. I hope we can do it. There's just so much to do.

We have a little inflatable pool on the terrace, actually pretty big, attracting lots of neighbor kids attention. I've invited some kids over on Thursday for a very last hurrah for Little S (must.stop.inviting.kids) and that will be it. It's just so hard to think of cutting him off from his friends but he's at an age where if you leave them alone for five seconds they do some pretty awful things--dirt clods in the window (they were meant for the side of the house mom!--as if THAT were okay) making a medevial pot dinner out of foraged bamboo shoots and things from the kitchen (they used an entire box of powdered chocolate and half a bag of flour--fun cleaning that up) and writing on the newly painted bedroom wall, (they blamed charlotte but there was a very detailed chateau in the picture, yeah right) Normally S is a good kid but in a mixer he's sometimes a demon child and I don't know why. Is it the other kids? Some of these things seem really out of character for him. I guess the addition of another kid brings out some need to be somebody else. People always tell him he's timid and he should talk more so I think that bugs him. Lately though he's been really testing the limits.

So the Kool-Aid mom is tired and yes I actually fell asleep last night fully dressed for at least the third time in a month so this is definitely the last invite. I'm kidded out.

Nostalgie

2010-07-02T01:17:00.010-05:00

It's the last day of the school year for my little guy and his last day of maternal (kindergarten) *sniff* Next year it's off to the big school. Lots of changes for someone so little. He seems to be handling things okay though. He's used to change I guess.

We had a fabulous going away-end of school year party for him on Wednesday in our backyard--pretty much the same party we had last year. About 25 kids came with their moms and even some dads showed up this time. It was a big barbecue and everyone brought a dish of some kind, tons of great food. Since we don't have the front gate on the house yet some kids just drifted in from the neighborhood which was funny. It was to the point where I was afraid we'd get a fine for not having a permit or something,--so many cars lined up on the street! We made sure to have a giant water balloon fight--which was probably why we had so many strays show up---they saw us filling them in the driveway. I filled over a hundred balloons and they were gone in minutes. Like last year we put a little baby pool at the bottom of our giant slide and then we watered down the slide so it was really slippery. Great fun but really, really exhausting to organize everything. I love party planning though. If we weren't so saturated with the move and the renovations I'd have been more relaxed about it all.

The real estate agent came and estimated the house. She liked what we've done with everything and said it should rent fairly fast especially because now because it's the renting season when everyone looks for a place. The sign goes up next week. Yep, It feels real now. Once the house is rented there's no turning back for three years. Butterflies! The weird part is that we don't have a place to live in Shanghai yet. I don't think we'll have time to go visit again before we leave either. We just have our preferences registered with a few agencies. Oh well, I think in some kook way that there's a place meant for us so if we can't go find the rental right now I don't want to push it. We'll find something the week we arrive. More butterflies!

Seb has his 40th birthday this month and I can't organise anything. I gave it a go but it just got so overwhelming that I gave up. My in-laws won't come and I didn't feel like begging,--no energy--but I did feel like they wanted to be enticed to come. I'm tired of paying their hotel each time they come so I think it's best for everyone if we just let it go. I feel awful but I think his going to Shanghai is a big present anyway. I mean what more could a change of life birthday offer? I'm not sure what to do so last minute though. The movers come the week after his birthday so I think if we try to do something we're just going to be stressed thinking of that the whole time.

Today I organised a picnic because it's my cantine day anyway. Once a week I take three kids plus mine and feed them lunch and the other moms take them the other days. It's worked out well and it gives me time to do plaster and paint on the days I don't have to go get Little S. Because it's the last day of school today though I'm taking three other kids out with us,--eight kids! I just couldn't think of S's other little friends stuck inside on the last day. The cantine at his school is really loud and the kids all hate it (which is why we started the cantine club). It should be fun. I'm taking them to a little river in the park by the school. They're all excited.

I think I found a job too. I won't jinx it but if it works out I'll start in September. I should know more in the next few weeks. I hope it works out. I've already signed up for classes and I don't want to cancel them so the job has to work around my schedule. Fingers crossed.

Is sucks

2010-06-23T02:27:00.007-05:00

Last night I was really, really tired and I just fell exhausted in my bed. I'd painted doors most of the morning. The three panel doors in our house are a bitch to paint and they take three coats. I'm on the third of seven doors. The job seems...not wait IS endless. I only have to do one side. I'm leaving the other side rustic like I talked about in a post way back when renovating was my part time job instead of my FT overtime job. It looks good that way plus saves time and lord knows I need it. In the afternoon I'd promised to babysit for my neighbors new baby and I stayed at her house until after six, partly because I think I didn't want to go back home and face Hell House.

Okay well Hell House is starting to come together but still it's not exactly a haven of comfort and respite.

Tomorrow the movers come to evaluate our things, just an evaluation, and later in the day the real estate agent comes to tell us how much we can rent the house for. It's starting to feel like the end of things here. The mover coming doesn't freak me out but the estate agent does. I would give anything not to have to rent my house and just the idea of having her poke around evaluating things and the idea of people coming to see my house in a few weeks is so weird. Seb can very easily think about the money in a case like this but I have a hard time doing it. The other day my neighbors were over and they started joking that they'd have to approve our new tenants too so they'd be sure and get along with them. I felt awful. It never occurred to me until then that the new renters would not only have my house but also have my little circle of friends.

The disconnecting part is hard. I know once you're gone and over on the other side everything gets pushed back in your mind but for now it's right there pulsing in my throat.

Little S's teacher wrote in his evaluation that he would need an aide next year in cp (first grade) and I was really surprised and upset. She knows we're leaving and I think this is just her fears showing but it really threw me for a loop. She's never said that in the past or she's always just said "we'll see how he does" but now this is her telling us that without help he'll fail next year. I like his teacher but she is a bit small minded and you can hear the shock in her voice when we talk to her about S's new school. She thinks we're taking him down a river with a bunch of rice paddies on each side. His new school seems really nice and just as normal as his school here. I can't help but be worried though after reading that. After all we've been through with him this year--two psychiatrists, a school psychologist, a play therapist and an orthophonist evaluation and no real problems to pinpoint I was hoping for the best for next year. The bottom line is that I just don't want him to be unhappy. Of course that's why her note scares me because I don't want him to feel inferior to everyone else. I don't really care about his level as long as he's happy at school and home.

We aren't upset about leaving so I hope the tone of these posts don't sound depressed or overly anxious. I just wanted to write down all these feelings and the start of our big adventure even if it is SUCKS (as Seb says--I still laugh when he says that and he still says it--one of his cute errors of speech like "open me the door"). No we're really excited about leaving. The thing is there is no joy yet because we're so bogged down with details. The joy comes when we get on the plane with the cat (another worry!) and the kids. That's when we can start looking forward. For now looking forward is just another annoying detail in the long, long list.

I think I have some doors to paint and some plaster to mix. I'd better get back to work. Sorry if I owe you phone calls or e mails or whatnot. Life should eventually return to normal.

Free fall

2010-06-21T01:38:00.026-05:00

The weekend is gone already and we spent another Saturday and Sunday buried in little projects. Our list is never ending!

Seb was gone all last week to Shanghai to do some apartment hunting and to sort of start his new job. He also looked around and found the school for the kids, the French school. It's so hard to think of the kids changing schools (S's teacher got all teary-eyed the other day) but we're thinking if they must it's best to let them stay in the same language and culture. I'm turned off by all the other schools mainly because of the price. The American-English schools cost a small fortune. Even though the company is paying in our case I just can't imagine paying what they're asking at these schools! I'm also afraid of the large classes and the potential for spoiled brats in these overpriced school.

The housing is easy. We picked an apartment complex in the suburbs that has just about everything,--sport club, sauna, basketball courts, a few playgrounds and even a small grocery store. We're in the 'burbs but there's a metro line right around the corner and of course taxis are cheap so it's easy to get around without a car. We really had no choice but to be in the burbs since Seb works in the industrial zone in the southeast part of the city and the kids have their schools there too. What a lifestyle change though. I always said I'd never live in an apartment and I believe this is in my blog somewhere too from around the time we lived in Lyon's suburbs. I'm trying to be really cautious this time so we don't get stuck in a noisy, cold, smelly, moldy place. The Lyon apartment was really noisy.

It's hard to do a housing search by internet and not get to see things in person except through your husband. I think there could be a giant banana factory on the ground floor and Seb would say "uh, yeah it was pretty nice." He doesn't say much. I guess he just doesn't have the female gene where you notice everything like a radar detector going off "beep-beep-beep Noise Potential--beep-beep Potential Child Hazard!" He just tells me everything looks nice but doesn't say much else. He did tell me how many tvs are in the apartment though. He was all excited because one apartment had a tv in the bathroom. Great. (although I have to admit that the tub is my favorite place and popping in a movie during a bath sounds like a great idea--yeah like that's gonna happen with kids in the house).

We didn't make a decision yet except for the complex itself. We're still waiting for something on a high floor but not too high. Seb has vertigo and he refused to even step near the terrace when the estate agent took him to see something on the 14th floor. He said floor seven or lower and I said floor three or higher so we'll have to wait until something opens up or else I'll be having apéro alone every night enjoying my terrific view by myself.

When Seb left from home last Saturday evening he left from a our neighborhood block party in the center of town. These little Répas Quartier are popular in France in small villages during the spring and summer. He was trying to be Multiplicity Man and do all the possible things he could before leaving for China so he actually left directly from the dinner in his taxi, only staying about thirty minutes to chat with the neighbors over a glass of wine. I stayed on with the kids and about forty minutes after he left I was just sitting down to a big plate of pasta salad with fresh melon and mint when I got a call from Seb. "Uh, I think I forgot the credit card." "Oh my god when does your plane leave!?" "Umm in a little over an hour. Do you think you could bring it to me?" I didn't really have a choice. I threw down my plate, left Little S with my neighbor, took Charlotte and DASHED. The credit card was on the table next to the map I'd bought for him (that he basically grunted at and threw aside) and I threw it in my bag and made for the fastest airport run ever. I hate night driving because I can't see very well and I had just had two glasses of wine at the party. Talk about stress! Seb was waiting outside the terminal and I have no idea how I found him in all the chaos of Roissy but I did somehow and he rushed off for his plane. I went back to the party and got Little S and we made off for home with Charlotte SCREAMING because she'd missed the party or wanted a drink...or was tired. I'm still not sure. This was the theme of the whole week.

On Tuesday night I squeezed in a soireé fille with my neighbors and we had a great time laughing, drinking and eating. We reduced the group to just four (secretly) and it was so much more fun than with the group of ten that we usually have. It was my turn to be host but people kept cancelling so I gave up and said I'd do it next month (not sure how with all we have going on!) Then my neighbor offered to be host with just our small close knit group but no more because she has a new baby and the group of all ten can get pretty loud. I'm going to miss my monthly soireés. It's to the point where we've all shared enough in the past two years that we have funny stories to share like my famous salad chute when I was with my neighbor at the Fete de le LO --made her pee her pants because she laughed so hard. And we know all the town gossip so there's a lot of stories to rehash like the dad who divorced and then remarried in the village last year. He has one kid by the first marriage in S's class and another by the new wife in the same class who's mentally handicapped and hyperactive. PLUS the new wife got pregnant and had a baby a few months ago. Who needs daytime dramas when you have small town France?

We're making a lot of progress on the house and that's another thing I did last week non stop--painting! It's gotten so Charlotte sees the paint pot and screams "no more painting mom....NOOOO" I feel pretty much the same way. All I do is fill holes with plaster and paint. I still have all the door frames to strip, nearly all the interior doors to paint, all the exterior iron to paint, the living room and the bathroom to fill and repaint and partially drywall and about ten million other small projects not to mention landscaping which is at least a three weekend project because seb tilled all the front yard six weeks ago but never planted any grass. We also have the third bedroom to build and we have just ten weeks left (minus a week where we have to go to China to secure the apartment and schools). We also have to sort and pack and cancel cell phone contracts and whatnot. Oh yes and find a renter for the house. Just typing that overwhelms me.

It's the same feeling as doing a free fall jump. All the anxiety of it makes me want to turn around and say STOP...NO...I can't freaking do this!! but then you know you DO do it and you feel all the excitement and exhilaration afterwards. Right now we're standing on the ledge and it's looking a little nuts. I just want to get to the other part. Oh and get past all the goodbyes. I hate the goodbyes.

Finishing projects

2010-06-09T09:13:00.007-05:00

There's so much going on that thinking of blogging just overwhelms me. I can't even imagine where to begin! I figured I'd better just jump in and write though. Here's some of what's going on...

The dining room is finally officially in the done bin this week and now we're working on finishing all the details in the kitchen. The whole house is coming together really well but we're exhausted. We feel like we're in some kind of reality tv show racing against the clock. The pressure is nuts. Every single day of the week we paint and sand and fill holes and supervise jobs. It looks like it will be like this until the day we leave.

We're excited about leaving and we have to do another checkout visit before we leave in August. I'm not sure how we'll squeeze it in but the kids aren't enrolled in any schools and we have no place to live. Somehow this doesn't worry me much.

I'm sad to leave our little village life and the friends we've made. I don't talk much about this but this is the first time in France I've had this kind of support group and this many French female friends. I sometimes feel like I'm making a big mistake but the 'adventure is worthwhile in itself ' phrase keeps popping in my head cheering me on. After all three years is nothing much in the grand scheme of life.

I'm really going to miss my big backyard and I'm going to be jealous of whoever rents my house and gets to sit in my garden. We'll be living in an apartment in China. I wish we could take pieces of our life here with us.

I won't miss all the stairs in my house. It will be nice to live all on one floor.

I won't have a car because nobody really drives in Shanghai. We'll use public transportation for three whole years. It's the first time since I got my license that I won't have a car. I think these past few months have been a good primer for being carless.

And that's about all I have time for now!

Home again

2010-05-21T02:42:00.004-05:00

Finally back from our three weeks in the US! I have three plump suitcases sitting in the dining room, partially dug though with lots of goodies (mostly books). It was a nice visit but pretty quick even if it was three weeks, and it was pretty exhausting too. I've got the travel alone with two small kids down pat but I'm still reeling from the stress of it all. You get lots of help traveling with a baby in a stroller* but as soon as that baby hits two and can walk nobody helps you with anything. And age two is the worst for travel because of the escape factor. I think I grew eyes in the back of my head on this trip. But we made it okay both ways somehow.

While I was away we decided that we'll be going to China. Seb hasn't found another job here and he has a good job waiting for him there with the opportunity to learn a new language. Even if I'm skeptical about it all (because of Mexico and the ruptured contract) I have to admit it is exciting. Our biggest worry is Little S but I think he'll have to be changing schools, public to private, here anyway. At least we have a little fund money in the expat contract to find him a good school there and if it all goes badly then I'll consider homeschooling.

We are super busy finishing the house so we can rent it out by the end of Summer. It's starting to look really nice--yet another finished house we'll be leaving! I know how that feels so maybe I'll be a little more prepared this time for the emotional wave of handing over the keys to a home you've put all of your sweat and tears into. Like last time lots of people are asking us about renting our house on the cheap. We have offers to housesit for three years (free), one year offers, and people wanting to stuff families of five in the house (my neighbor whose boys are always catching things on fire and their house is wrecked--eek!). It's hard to say no because it's people we know who live in the village but our goal is to finish the house and rent it correctly through an agency for the market price. We can't risk everything on someone not paying the rent this time and we can't reduce the rent this time either. We want a big security deposit too because our renter in Th*n*n has really wrecked our wood floors in the three years he's been there. They'll have to be stripped when he leaves. You don't know this until you do this once because you go in very doe eyed. We've learned the hard way to cash the security deposit check right away.

I'm busy but I hope I'll be able to keep up the blogging. I took a three week break and it was nice not to think about the computer. Sometimes it's nice just to step away.

*now you can only bring one suitcase per person on most airlines so bringing a stroller counts as a piece of baggage--I had to leave the stroller with Seb at check in

Paint and whatnot

2010-04-22T08:02:00.013-05:00

I haven't shared many progress pictures on the house lately mostly because of the mess and the fact that it's not very attractive to take pictures with tools and paint cans lying around. So here's some sharing.

This is the kitchen, almost move in ready. I finally painted the red accent wall, but of course most of it will be blocked by pretty stainless steel appliances. Painting with red is really challenging. One sneeze and you have to start over, (for those of us who don't use masking tape that is). And the coats of paint you have to do to make it all even, ...ouch.

The radiator is sitting right in the middle of the kitchen and everyone comments on it but we're actually putting an island at the end of it so it just looks misplaced for now. It's funny though because it's the first thing everyone says when they come in, "why is that there!?"

I'm not sure if I'll paint the radiator or not. I kind of like it the way it is. We recuperated three of these radiators from a plumber we know and they'd all been painted peach except this one. I'm a little tired of scraping off paint.

(see those tools--what did I tell you, messy messy)

And still more rustica, the back of the kitchen door with all the paint off. I'll still take off more so it isn't quite so shabby and then I'll wax it. The new trim around the door will have to be tinted though. I'm leaving all the interiors of the doors in the downstairs part of the house like this au natural. The parts going out the hallway will be white.

The dining room is off the kitchen, and this is the gray I mixed for it. It's a little darker than what you see in the photos here. It was really easy to mix up 20 litres and a lot cheaper. I think I might try to mix more paint colors for some of the other rooms because it was lots of fun getting just what I wanted.

I finally got the latex paint off of the fireplace. It was painted light green (to match the mauve carpet they'd installed no doubt). I still have to polish it and make it purty. You can't really see in this photo but there's a lot of grey in the veins of the marble, super pretty. My fingers accepted my apology for all the scraping but they're still waiting for an apology from the p.o.'s for painting over marble. What kind of idjit does that?

We also finally got the floors sanded and they're really nice, --a red pine not yellow like upstairs! The wood almost looks like oak in color. Of course mauve carpet would be MUCH prettier in this room *cough*cough*

I'll try to keep up on the progress photos. I know it's fun to see the changes.

Jets

2010-04-22T00:44:00.012-05:00

"Hey Mom look it's a really big plane!"
"No honey it's just a little commuter plane" He's been saying this for days now so I barely look up when he says it. Yesterday though he was right! I looked up and saw a jet and we began to see a few more and then the streaks of planes headed to the South started decorating the sky.

And today for the first morning in days I've heard the planes taking off from Roissy. We live near the airport so it was silent the past week which was really odd. That noise was a welcome sound!

Our plane is rescheduled for next week and I'm taking Little S out of school for the week of the ascension. I was a little stressed with the booking because I had to decide my dates quickly while I was on the telephone with the airlines, a really tired booking agent. I kept having to say "umm hold on a sec" while I studied the calendar and requested return dates on really full flights. S's teacher won't be happy because that's nearly two weeks of missed school but one of the days of the ascension week is yet another field trip to a chateau (you've seen one, you've seen them all) and then the day before they'll be preparing for it. The rest of the week is a "pont" and it's a week all rearranged and goofy anyway.

I had a little tiff with Little S's teacher the day before vacation about taking him out for the week. She said we needed to think more about him and his need to be attached to the school and his friends (in other words stop being selfish twits) I didn't feel like I could ever explain to her how hard it is not seeing your family for two freaking years, and not having them see your children grow up. I didn't try to explain and just took her wrath, let her get all her anger out. But I got really annoyed when she said "can't you go in the summer next time?" as if money were falling from the sky at our feet for the three tickets in July each year. I told her it was really expensive and she just sighed really loud and said "next year it's serious and you won't be able to take him out of school on a whim." Next year he starts first grade. And the year after he has to start trade school so he can serve the greater good of the people. Bad citizen mommy, oh dear.

Seb was angry about her attitude and he said "oh I wish I could have been there." We're both really fed up with the school's obsession with Little S's personality problems. I haven't blogged much about this but we've seen lots of different specialists on our own lately and they all say he's fine, just maybe intimidated by school and large groups. The school keeps pushing us to find a problem though and we've reached a point where we just want to say "he's normal just not THE norm" It's a square peg kid. I appreciate their concern but they're starting to give him a complex because the teacher talks to us about his problems right in front of him. He's seeing a school psychologist and a sort of play therapist, two different people each week at school and even though we did sign off on it, now we're thinking they're just going in circles chasing their tails. Each few months they come up with a conflicting report and most of it's jargon to say "poor lost kid who has to translate everything from English to French" and they keep suggesting we eliminate the English to help his French which I don't agree with.

So you can imagine that the trip to the US and the week (plural now) is not going to go ever well.

The waiting

2010-04-19T01:36:00.005-05:00

I've changed my ticket once already and we're still stuck waiting to see what happens. If we can't leave tomorrow for our trip to the US I'm pretty sure we'll have to cancel because they keep rebooking me five days later and at the end there isn't much vacation time left. Hopefully we'll at least get to reuse our tickets this summer. We booked using sky miles so I'll have to read the really fine print on that.

At least we aren't stuck somewhere on vacation indefinitely. Ummm, I guess.

Wallpaper clause

2010-04-12T02:22:00.014-05:00

Painting is so relaxing and mediatative and it's the perfect activity for anyone at the crossroads of anything in their life. But then standing back you look at the wall and say to yourself "I love this room that color is perfect!" knowing full well you're probably painting it for someone else. There in a nutshell was my weekend, --lots of "ahhh!" "oohhhh".... "agh!"

The decision isn't made just yet and there is always the posibility that other things will come up. Seb is still job hunting as he has been for the last six months but pickings are slim and there isn't much out there. It's not that I'm against going, it's just the international move groan issue. It's paperwork, sad goodbyes, language, internet issues, new schools, moving companies, boxes and all that scratched furniture. And it's all the lost time. It's an entire summer of preparing and then six month of settling. Afterwards it's exciting though I have to admit.

So we're waiting but meanwhile sort of preparing for the move just in case. It takes about two months for contract negotiations so that buys us time to think things over. Meanwhile I'm not buying another car just yet and bummming rides right and left which is awful, and as soon as summer comes Seb has to give back his company car so we'll both be carless which will be funny. Kind of like life has decided things for us. In the not buying a car issue people around us have figured out that our faux checkout visit was for real and so now everyone around us knows we might be leaving. I only said "psst" to one person in the village, the person who usually takes S to school in the mornings, and within two days I had the wife of our carpenter asking me what we'd decided. Within another week people started asking us about renting the house. Welcome to small town life! I have since told everyone that we've decided no because it was annoying to have people surveying our property for potential renters. Anyway we already talked to a real estate agent who told us we'd rent the house easily and for a lot more money than we even thought so no more renting to people we know--huge mistake we won't make again!

Of course like I said we have to finish the house.

The question is would you finish the house the way you had it in your head or would you leave it all white and generic? I was really disappointed with all this news because I wanted to finish the damn house and paint it. In France paint is three times the price it is in the US and England. I wanted to paint and finish the kitchen like I have it in my plans (Ikea kitchen by the way so not super expensive) but then I know that somone who rents can just repaint or *gasp* wallpaper *shudder* right over my pretty mid-century red-orange wall. Oh well, I dove in and painted it anyway.

I keep having flashbacks to when my mil moved in to their house a few years ago and said they hated the ugly peach vinyl wallpaper. While we were in Mexico they told us they'd changed it and we were thinking "good they finally updated it" but then when we finally saw it, it was replaced with this loverly dark blue vinyl wallpaper with a flower basket border at the top. And they were standing there all proud saying "oh thank go we got rid of that awful peach!" When I was painting yesterday the visions of that wallpaper kept floating back in my mind.

Is it possible to put a no wallpaper clause in a renters contract? This is the one thing that will keep me up at night worrying if we leave.

(btw our renter in the other house painted huge black chinese letters all over the kitchen walls--no idea why--yes I know the irony of it, anyway he also has a buddha altar and he installed candle holders in the wall, screwed in sconces right over the cat dish...I thought about that too when I was painting yesterday with my expensive French paint)

Decisions

2010-04-07T02:58:00.006-05:00

I've been hiding out lately and I suppose I have a good reason for it. When I said in my last post that my head was in Asia I wasn't kidding. We went on that trip for a check out visit and sort of laughed and said "hey free vacation for us!," but then when we came back Seb's boss offered him a really good benefits package to go so now we have to decide for real if we want to go, oops. I really hadn't thought about going for real. I like our life here aside from all the chaos of renovating (and the hell year). I don't feel ready to rip everything apart again.

But then another part of me says "go! travel! see the world!" (while you can). I hate that part of me.

And then Seb is in the middle of a company which has been bought out so if he says no to Asia he has to go back in the big pond and we'll likely have to move again since he'll certainly change jobs. At least if we go to China we'll be able to hold on to our house and we can just rent it for a few years.

But then again we'll have to finish it....completely.

*sigh*

The hamster wheel

2010-03-26T03:13:00.014-06:00

Whew! our return week has turned out to be a busy one so I haven't had any time to blog about China or even upload my photos. We still have all our suitcases lying about. My in-laws were here to drop off the kids and they stayed a few extra days. It's always hard having visitors when you yourself have just gotten back from a trip. What can we say though because they did really help us out by watching the kids.

On Tuesday morning as I was getting Little S shuttled out the door for his school field trip to a this really pretty chateau in the Oise (French kids are SO spoiled) I got a "where are you!!?" phone call from a mom, or maybe I should say a "Where WERE you!?" phone call because apparently the rendez-vous for the field trip was thirty minutes before school started and they left without Little S. Of course typical small town style everyone knew about the early meeting time because it was discussed ad nauseum the week before in front of the school while we were in China, so poor us we were completely out of the loop. What's funny is that someone actually did call me to remind me about the picnic lunch but then didn't bother to tell me about the early leave time. It seemed typically French to me to worry about the food and not the most important thing! Anyway everyone said "tant pis" and "oh well," even the teacher who I called on the bus, but I did the American mom thing which was to jump in the car with the two kids and drive the two hours to the chateau (really it was 1 hour 15 minutes--everyone was dramatic about the length of time it would take--it wasn't going to deter me though). The look on Little S's teacher's face when I showed up was priceless! She stuttered "but how....what...." I didn't see the big deal about it. I didn't want him to miss his class field trip but it seemed to everyone to be so crazy. I'm still not sure why. I ended up staying the rest of the day with Charlotte and it was a fun family day. I had lots of little babysitters keeping an eye on Charlotte. She was delighted!

On Wednesday we all had to go to the American Consulate in Paris to renew Little S's expired passport. Children have to renew their passports every five years and I guess I should have thought of it on his birthday but I didn't. I hate leaving passport stuff to the last minute. There's also a new rule now that both parents need to be physically present to renew a child's passport so Seb had to come too. The American Consulate in Paris is so efficient that we were out of the building one hour after we checked in. Everyone is so nice and friendly. I hope they get the passport processed in the time they said because we leave in three weeks for the U.S!

I'll get around to uploading my pictures soon. My head is still in Asia and it's been tough readjusting to French life. At the same time my six euro bottle of bordeaux tasted pretty good this week. I guess I'm a little stuck in my gastronomic ways. I really missed French food by the end of the week.

(this is the chateau we visited but it's not my photo -- found here on flickr)

My excursion

2010-03-22T02:26:00.004-06:00

We're back from our Shanghai trip. What? you say, we didn't even know you left! Okay it's not something I wanted to post on the blog sorry. But I'm back now.

We had a fabulous time and I love, love LOVE the city. It wasn't anything like what I expected. It was so incredibly cosmopolitan, modern, lively and surprisingly it feels like the center of where it's at today, especially with the World Expo coming in a few months. The skyline is like something out of Star Wars! AMAZING. I think I took a thousand pictures and that was just on my SLR camera. I just wanted to take huge bites out of the city and savor every second.

I'm going to prepare you to be bored with China stories for the next few weeks. I won't be able to help myself.

By the way Blogger is blocked in China so I couldn't check my blog or anyone elses for that matter. I didn't have much internet time anyway but it was kind of shocking to realize that my daily fix of reading was censored. I'm not sure why Blogger in particular is blocked because many other sites aren't like Flickr and Twitter, odd.

Little people

2010-03-12T01:24:00.001-06:00

Design finds

2010-03-09T03:07:00.012-06:00

Some eye candy from my trip last week...

We stayed at the Novotel near the train station in Annecy for the night. They've done the hotel in mid century and it's definitely drool worthy. I really liked these chairs they have in the lobby. I'm not sure what they are short of crawling underneath and looking (I considered it). They're also a shade of green that I have a weakness for. Those lights under the stairs are wonderful too. This gave me an idea for our other house (the day it's no longer rented).

This play area was also in the lobby. I love this modular furniture for kids. It's beautiful and the table was perfect for building blocks like Kapla because in the middle it has a hole with a net for arranging the blocks when the kids are done playing. Little S spent a good hour there playing.

A pretty cool bookshelf. Seb and I are bookshelf crazy. We both saw this at the same time and both said "ohhhh, wow"

Some library lights from the Résonances store in Annecy. I'm not sure if they sell these or not, didn't have time to ask, but they're all over the store. It seems they don't sell home lighting products anymore and the theme of the stores has changed. Boo-hoo.

A nice bath setup in the Résonances store. The towel rack is really interesting. It's sold in the store but I think it would be pretty easy to make one. I think I might just give it a try this summer. The beaches near the lakes are full of pretty driftwood this size.

A small break

2010-03-08T02:26:00.005-06:00

Seb had a business trip and since it was vacation time for Little S we all piled in the car and hung out in Haute Savoie for two days while papa worked. He had a client to see in Annecy and then we took a detour to see our house in Th*n*n by the "other" lake the next day.

We popped in the old house which was really weird. We chose some tile for the kitchen and worked out a trade with the renter that he'd install a few things in exchange for the rent he can't seem to pay. He's going to be leaving at the end of July and we'll be renting the house for another three year term. I can't wait to clean out the house and open all the doors and windows. Mssr. G is a hoarder and the house is packed with smelly old furniture. One day a few years back I admired a mirror he'd adopted and he said "oh well when I leave this house I'll probably just leave you all the furniture!" I hope he doesn't live up to his promise. We want the house empty of everything except the few things we left inside.

The good news is we get to spend the month of August by the lake. I can't wait!

Mother hen

2010-03-03T03:17:00.020-06:00

Véronique - You know you're a good mom but you really need to let them go a bit.

me - mmmmm, ::inserting mental earplugs::

Véronique - they need to breathe, we all say you're a good mom but you're always with them, it's not normal to be with them all the time. Let go!

me - I like to be with them. I think it's a luxury to be able to be with them.

Véronique - yes but it's bad for them, think of them. What about the Centre de Loisirs? You need to sign them up next vacation.

me - ::defensive:: It seems like a dumping ground for kids to me. You know, like I don't want to deal with them. I mean it's all the kids who parents work so the kids must be I don't know, antsy.
(note: S's teacher last year put a bug in our ear and told us not to send him to the Centre because it was full of bullys and a shy kid like him would have a hard time)

Véronique - I send Lola there! She loves it! All of your mom friends feel this way I'm just the only one who's willing to tell you. We all think you're a good mom just too clingy.

me: ::wondering who the we is::

......................................................

Later I talked with Seb.

me - I think it's cultural. In the US I would not be seen as a clingy mom. I'd be seen as the cool hippy mom who paints outside on the terrace with her kids instead of dumping them off at daycare. They think I'm weird because I breastfed Charlotte for so long.

Seb - I told you not to mention homeschooling or you'd be crucified.

me - I mentioned it to Manue because I thought she'd be interested and she was complaining all the time about all the bad private schools her son had been through. I just said maybe she'd look into it because I was.

Seb - small villages talk a lot.

me - okay but the point is do they really think their parenting is heaps better than mine? Do they even read books? Is she a psychiatrist?

......................................................

It is cultural. One mom I know has just given birth and she's on a year long maternity leave. Over coffee each week she has gone on and on to all of us about how she still doesn't have a part time nounou. She already has the daycare center two days a week as soon as possible but that isn't enough. All the sympathy she gets for her plight has me laughing. I just smirk to myself and say "that's so European." I wouldn't dream of lecturing about her choice though. It's just her thing to need more time alone I guess.

It's crazy the schedule of a preschooler here. A typical friend of Little S goes to school each day at 7:00am and stays at the garderie until 8:30am. At 4:30 the school day ends but they go back to the garderie until 6:30. At 6:30 a babysitter or relative might come by to pick them up to fill in the gap until the parent's get home at 8:00. On Wednesdays they go to the Centre de Loisirs (Community Center) 7:30 - 6:30 where they do keep busy but the Centre is run by 20 something year olds and from what I've heard isn't all that well supervised with lots of mixed ages. At vacation time the kids go there if the parents don't take a vacation. Even the kids whose parents don't work put their kids in two or three activities during the week and give them time at the Centre during vacations. French kids aren't allowed to be bored!

Kids here it seems are encouraged to be on their own and anything close to babying or mothering like beastfeeding too long is really looked down on. I'm sure part of my mother hen image comes from this. My kids aren't in activities, community centers and I do lots of things on my own with them. We walk in the forest, paint, make our own games up with the neighbor kids. I do it my way. They do it their way. Vive la différence.

(one funny observation I have is why American kids who are coddled so much and encouraged to stay a kid are so independent from their parents at a young age. French kids are so much more timid about the world at large and more attached to their parents way into adulthood. I wonder why? Seb and I have always wondered about this even before we had kids).

Cancellations

2010-02-26T03:11:00.010-06:00

Just when I bragged about being ready to jump on airplanes our trip has been postponed. Ohhh I'm really frustrated and disappointed. Unfortunately Seb has this horrid secretary who's really incompetent and nosy and she lost some papers she was supposed to send off for my visa. His papers are ready but mine are not and we didn't find this out until yesterday, two days before we leave. She's also been wondering aloud to anyone who will listen why I get to go to Shanghai and passing around my personal information for anyone who wants to have a looksee. Grrr.

So we're going in a couple of weeks but I'll have to take Little S out of school to go stay with the in-laws and they weren't thrilled about the last minute change of plans, (which I understand). We tried to plan this all around school vacations so that's the most frustrating part of not being able to go now and his teacher probably won't be happy about him missing school since he's so far behind. I'm dreading telling her especially since I have to take him out again in May for our US trip. Oh well, life is different for us what can I say.

So next week, hmmm. No big plans because I thought I'd be gone. My car should arrive at the dealership next Friday but that doesn't mean I'll be able to get it right away. I'll be stranded in the house doing lots of little diy projects and finishing up my cv. It went from being a fun and exciting travel week to a boring utilitarian week full of obligations. Poo.

We finally had to open the crates for our artwork since the basement flooding was getting me worried. The question is what's worse dust or humidity? I started getting worried that they might get moldy and to be honest I was really eager to see everything again because I'd pretty much forgotten what was in there. I bought three painting while I was in Mexico, you know kind of considered them my going away presents (along with my dishes and pottery) and I no sooner bought them then I had to have them packed. I basically chose this one the last week, asked Seb to pick it up, left for our flight to Florida and then the movers packed it the following week when I wasn't there. Two years later I finally get to see it again. It's as tall as me and I love it but there aren't a whole lot of places to hang it except the hallway. It had to be hung right away so the kids don't run into it with their toys or Seb doesn't accidentally drill though it (which I could definitely see happening!)

My other paintings are also modern but more Mexican. I really wish I'd bought a few more. I definitely would have if we'd stayed longer.

Back to the sketchbook

2010-02-23T06:20:00.008-06:00

I've really been trying to get back to drawing but then I'd keep pushing it back in my head and forget about it. I finally realized that it was a supply problem and a light problem and also a subject matter problem. For supplies it was pens so I went out and bought some Pilot pens (V5 and V10 Tecpoints) and just let go of the attachment I have to FC pens because I can't find them anywhere near me. I fixed the light in my bedroom and rigged an extension cord to the bed table and finally I gave up on my obligation to draw different interesting stuff and just started drawing an obsessive amount of chairs. I really love drawing furniture.

I hate drawing shoes. I suck at shoes. I HAD to draw a shoe for a card I was making and it drove me nuts. I drew seven shoes and none looked right. I kept asking myself why I'd decided to make a shoe card and got two other people involved. Too late to bail out especially since it was my idea. I muddled through it though!

Little S it turns out LOVES drawing shoes. He drew hundreds of shoes for days. I've got STACKS of shoe drawings.

My point is that yes you can take a long break from drawing and get back to it and it's fine. I'm picking up my level again--it's taken a few weeks. I´m learning to let go of my drawing rules and just let myself go with it. And I think my other point is to draw what you like to draw because like Little S I'm on a drawing kick and my sketchbook is full of nothing but chairs. Go figure.

Thrifty finds

2010-02-22T08:06:00.012-06:00

I promised a post about Exciting Thrift Finds! did I not?

Okay so I'm looking for some lamps for my house because it seems we've had a lamp run and all the lamps in our house have recently died tragic deaths, fallen off of ladders and been dismanteled by curious toddlers. Did I find any lamps last week though? No of course not because that's what I was LOOKING for (you'll never find the thing you go for--thrifting rule number one), but I did find lots of other fun things, mostly pottery which is no big surprise, and a totally awesome breakfast table which I love, love love.

Me! okay dork alert here's my new favorite necklace find--love that it weighs about nine tons--two euros

my totally awesome breakfast table in pine or ash, not sure--hard to get back far enough to take a good photo of its shape but it's sort of surfboard shaped, l o v e r l y but I'll have to keep it covered in plastic 99 percent of the time, *sigh* fifty euros

is it a stein? is it a pitcher? it's a steiny-pitcher (it's marked Germany on the bottom)

oversized coffee cups for petit déj--marked on the bottom from Sarreguermines--why can't I find two more!!?

A few more of my finds are on my Flickr stream. And yes these were found over three visits so I'm not THAT much of an addict, (well three visits in ten days but remember I am usually stranded at home so I have to condense my shopping).

Do you go thrifting? Where do you go? What do you usually look for?

Travels

2010-02-18T02:24:00.014-06:00

It seems like I have no time to blog lately!! Agh! Each time I think about sitting down I know I'll end up spending thirty minutes writing and it just seems so overwhelming that I don't do it and then look my blog ends up dead and I write nothing. But it's my blogiversary this month, five years! yay!! and so I figured I should take more time to write because I really enjoy having my archives and looking back on what I've done these past years. My kid's lives are in these pages and it's incredible to be able to look back and see them so small and me so unsure or scared or amazed or whatever I was feeling at the time.

I'm really busy lately and hey you'd think a poor mamie in a flowered petticoat without a car would have nothing to do all day but look at seed catalogs, but I've been busy planning trips. In a few weeks I'm traveling with Seb to Shanghai for a week so take THAT miss mamie flowercoat. We're leaving the kids with the in-laws and heading off child free for a week. When I told Little S he looked really disappointed and said "but you just had a weekend en amoureux!! not again!" because he was thinking about last month when we left him for three days to celebrate our anniversary. I'm not feeling the least bit guilty though. Seb has clients to see during the day and I have the city to explore and then at night we can have dinner together. I'm really excited to see China and be in a totally different world for a bit.

I've also planned a trip home to see the family in Florida in Spring. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I got everything booked, whew. I think I hold my breath between visits and somehow having a date set for a visit makes me relaxed. It's much harder now to plan visits with two kids and that always weighs heavy in the back of my mind.

I finally got out to do some thrifting the other day even though it was with kids and my neighbor. It was fun for me but my neighbor was in very uncomfortable territory so it was kind of funny. It isn't really her passion to go thrifting and it was painfully obvious she wanted to leave. I don't think she's going to be my new thrifting buddy. I've been itching to go a lot more because I'm getting rid of all the old furniture in the house. It's really not so much wanting to change out of superstition but from a desire to change the stale energy in the house. The table in the dining room for example has been in the same spot for YEARS I'm certain, probably fifty years. I still use it and I didn't even move it from that spot. Yeah maybe I cleaned it but it's still there rotting in the same spot where someone else ate there a lot longer than we have. I want to shake things up and change all that stale energy. Besides I feel my taste has really changed over the past two years so I'd like to make a fresh start and modernize the old house a bit. I'm still putting old pieces in our house but at least I've chosen them myself and put them in new places.

I'll share my thrifted finds in another post when I have time to upload photos.

Down to business

2010-02-09T01:36:00.018-06:00

Life has been speedy lately which is why I haven't had much time to blog. You know sometimes life just gets like that. I'd like to keep track of what's going on so even if I don't have time I still want to write it all on my blog even if it's scattered. I'm sorry if this makes no sense sometimes or it's boring.

Little S is seeing a kid psychiatrist in Paris and we've only had one session. She's really good and she's great with children. He opened right up to her which really surprised us because he's Clint Eastwood in front of most adults, strong and silent. He's never open with someone like that. I haven't written much about what's going on but a school psychologist suggested her and yes he does seem to have a problem but we aren't sure what it is yet so the search continues. I'm still hunting around for a private school and next month I'm visiting two of them, both Steiner schools. I like Steiner and I've been trying to read through his works for the past year now, emphasis on trying because some of it's heavy and my brain is a bit mushy after two kids. When we first started looking that's what I focused on, finding a Steiner school, that or a school based on Reggio Emilia which would be my number one choice. The only Steiner school near us is 45 minutes away and in Paris that can mean three hours if you hit a traffic jam, but I'm interested in seeing the school anyway just to compare it to others. It's one of the few that goes all the way through lycée.

I'm also job hunting, or I guess career hunting. I found a training I like that I've been thinking about for a while now. It keeps popping back up in my thoughts and in things I read. It's basically falling in my lap screaming "do this!". I've been trying to start other things but nothing feels right except this. This feels really right but the program sounds really difficult and I'm not sure if I'd get accepted. Right now it's all still in the planning stage so I won't talk too much about it because I'm superstitious like that.

I'm looking for a car too which is a little difficult because I haven't got a car to go see cars. Seb usually gets home late so we only have the weekend to look. I'm also waiting on the insurance money. I got a really good deal on my old car when I bought it and I lost a lot in the insurance adjustment. It seems prices have gone up since then which is really frustrating because I have less to work with. I'm eager to get wheels again though. I feel like an old mamie in a flowered housecoat who stays in with her cat all day. A funny thing is I have it in my head that I'll get a black car and I'm really set on that. I think it's my secret desire to be a spy and combat car theives. Either that or I'll be Knight Rider and have a car that can't be stolen!

The big news is that our window company is going out of business. The owner called us yesterday at 7am asking for money. We've left him over seventeen messages and he just suddenly decides to call us back out of the blue. Seb got angry and asked why he'd never called us until now and the guy said "listen I don't have any installers because my guys are being investigated for three different robberies so I've fired them..." Seb told him about our car being stolen and he acted surprised. I have no idea why he felt the need to tell us about his guys but I don't trust him. I'm pretty sure he was involved somehow in our theft because the car was obviously at the company warehouse for a while. Seb hung up and called the main branch of the window company who told us not to give them any money because they were no longer associated with them and the business is going under fast which is why he probably called us for money. He's desperate. We called the gendarmerie and told them "hey you know those guys we told you stole our car? Well you have a few files on them already (and if you'd done your job you'd probably know that!)" They said it was too late and that our case was already closed. Then we went to the police and filed a complaint against the window company and told them the whole story. The police were very nice and took our information starting from the beginning. The were really angry on our behalf for the way the gendarmerie treated our case. Evidently there's a big rivalry between the police and the gendarmerie. The police think the gendarmerie is completely incompetent, surprise, surprise. What a bunch of bumbling idiots. They'd told us after three visits that we were being pests and there were much more important cases for them than our stolen car. I'd always wondered why French people make fun of the gendarmerie and act so sarcastic with them. Each time we've called or talked to someone they seem really young, 20 years old or so, and they always have bad vocabulary. I remember one sympathetic gendarme girl telling Seb "mais putain oui, ça pue de la merde votre histoire la, franchement putain!" or roughly "yep that sounds like they're guilty, wow" but sprinkled with a truckdriver's vocabulary and not very evolved. They seem to be run by a bunch of teenagers, or at least in our precinct they are. The police were much sharper and now I have an official complaint filed against the company.

I feel a like I let the wolf play in the sheeps pen. I can't believe I was naieve enough to leave these con artists in my house alone at least a dozen times. One of the guys had such a sweet face and apparently he's the one who has the huge rap sheet. I really resent the idea that I can't trust anyone at face value anymore. I hate that feeling.

More renovation

2010-02-01T03:35:00.007-06:00

Today it's snowing and one of the good things about not having a car is that I don't have to drive in the sludge when the weather's bad. Don't get me wrong though. I'm dying to get a car because while it's nice to live in the countryside when you don't have a car it's a little scary. I have become a shut in.

The theives also stole Charlotte's snazzy Maclaren stroller so we're really stuck. I'm going to get all June Cleaver on you and remind everyone to save all your receipts for baby items. I didn't save the Maclaren receipt because I thought I'd probably just keep it in the basement for eternity for whenever we might have visiting kids, but now I'm not going to get reimbursed for it. Ditto the car seats. We're out over 500 euros in baby gear, agh.

Okay I know it's pretty lame not saving receipts for high ticket items but we move so much that I got lazy.

In totally unrelated blurbs, we got some good news a few weeks ago. The renter in our other house is leaving in July and we're getting the house back for the month of August. We get to spend a month in our old house! We'll be renting it again, possibly as a seasonal rental but most likely for a longer bail. We can also increase the rent by almost double. That may sound radical but he was renting it for peanuts so he'd accept the place "as is" and hopefully finish off some work. He never really did much work, oh well and he hasn't been great about paying the rent on time but he has been a pretty reliable guy about keeping care of the house and that was really important to us.

In August we'll finish up the work (more renovating, sigh, but at least it's a change of projects) and we'll get it ready for some new tenants. Hopefully I can detach myself from my love of the house. That part's hard and I'm a little scared I'll get completely obsessed with moving back there. I probably will but what a pleasure to see my house by the lake again!

Time out

2010-01-29T02:49:00.005-06:00

The weekend's finally here!! (even if it is raining)

I've been looking forward to this for over two weeks now. It's our ten year wedding anniversary and we've loaned out the kids to my in-laws for three days. We're single and carefree again. It feels wonderful.

A house without kids stays miraculously CLEAN. And you can go out to the garbage as much as you want without explaining to a small crying person that you'll be right back and then barring them from going out by closing the door really fast in their face. Two year olds are little prison wardens. My shackles are free for a few days :P

But to be honest the house is really quiet and it's kind of creepy. Also there's the missing right arm thing. "Where did I leave that?"

We're headed to Paris for some city action. I've been wanting to visit the antiques in St. Ouen just for fun, a little window shopping (or licking as the French say). And we'll probably try to have lunch somewhere and let go of the guilt about not working on the house for a full day and not chasing the kids around. Oh and tonight it's fancy shmancy night in the city.

Observing

2010-01-25T03:36:00.006-06:00

We spent the weekend working in the mezzanine, building some closets under the slant of the roof and setting up our office desk. It looks like a big mess so there aren't many pics I feel like sharing but hopefully soon. The closets will give us a place to stash our stuff and help us organize our papers, HUGE priority because we keep losing things.

Before I forget I wanted to share a drawing story. Last week S had his little girlfriend over to play and she loves drawing. I know at the mom's night out I go to I talked to her mom and she said she might like to do our atelier on Wednesday because she adores drawing and she's very talented for her age. So when Lola came over both kids sat down to draw and I was kind of listening in nearby while I cleaned the table. S went over and got his Playmobil ambulance and started drawing it with markers, looking up and down, doing all the details. He even drew the nubs of the tires. Lola was intrigued so she started observing him and then she started trying to draw the ambulance the same way by looking but she got frustrated really fast and stopped. She crumpled the paper and started again but still couldn't quite get it and crumpled another piece in a fit. Meanwhile S was busy adding stripes and other details and this was driving her nuts. Finally she threw a huge fit, "can you come and draw this for me Christine!" I came over and sat beside her but of course I ignored what she'd said. I wasn't going to draw it for her. I'd noticed that while she was trying to do what S was doing she'd not spent much time observing the truck, she just wanted it to sort of happen. Since "trucks" aren't in her drawing repetoire she couldn't do one and she didn't realize that by looking at this one she could draw it.

I worked with her and finally she did a pretty basic version of it but it was like pulling teeth to get her to slow down and take time to look. Her patience was really stretched. I realized then and there that there is a big unlearning process for observation drawing. She needed to learn to let go of her desire to reproduce stock images just like everyone. She's only five but she already has the little file in her head for drawing and she had the need for approval that goes with it.

It's never too late to start unlearning. Last time she came over she grabbed a bird off my bookshelf and drew it with no prompting, just picked it up and sat down. When her mom came over to pick her up she looked at the bird drawing Lola had done which was actually really good, and then she turned to me and said "see she's such a little artist. She doesn't get it from me though. I can't draw anything!"

Here's a good link which explains why this kind of drawing is so important for everyone.

Nothing major

2010-01-22T02:46:00.006-06:00

No major accidents. This week has been pretty calm. whew.

In other news,

Well, Charlotte we can say has offically stopped breastfeeding. I think the last time was just around New Years Day. Right before this in November she went through a period where she cried and screamed and she was constantly clinging to me. She fed about sixteen times a day. I was at my wits end. I swore she'd never want to stop and I got a little depressed to be perfectly honest, really depressed. I think they get clingy when they sense it's the end (even if it's them who decides to stop). But now suddenly she's stopped asking and I've stopped offering. We're both sort of okay with that. It's always sad to let go but a lot of it's hormonal. I'm really pleased with getting so far when the beginning was so AWFUL, two years and two months! Go "low supply" me (and take that Miss Mexico Doctor who told me I had no milk!)

I've been really lazy with art journaling but I just haven't had time to draw at night and we don't have a light in the bedroom (don't ask). I've been getting back into photography lately. I just did a photo session for a pregnant friend and she loved it so much that we did a second session with her and the kids. I had a million ideas so it was really fun for me. The photos I did of her were very arty and avant garde. The kids ones were a bit more fun, laughing and poking fun of their mom. It was really challenging working with all that -- big belly mama, bad lighting and two kids. The pictures came out good though and she's shown them to everyone. I wish I could share them here but they're so personal. Anyway, now I have two or three people who've asked me to do sessions with their kids. I'm really excited because I love these kind of projects and my kids are bored with all my photo sessions. Fresh blood! Yay!

We hired our neighbor. Remember I said a while back "clearly one doesn't hire the neighbor" ? Well it was stupid to say that because he's the nicest person I've ever met and I think from what I've seen he's an amazing craftsman. I was just worried because we've had such horrible luck with workmen and you know if he's a neighbor it's kind of sticky. Hopefully he's our good luck charm.

Little S's room is almost finished and we're getting him some new furniture. I've found him an awesome mid century teak bed and I'm redoing his 1950's nightstand in the same tone. It's a little stylish for a kid's bedroom but I like it. I want to paint his accent wall in black (chalkboard paint!) but Seb is my roadblock, "you can't paint a kid's room BLACK!" He has to concede. It's going to look great and anyway it's only one wall.

Before I forget I have to share a link to a new favorite blog, with lots of fabulous ideas for mid century modern fans. I'm slowly becoming a huge fan of this style and it's pretty easy to collect nice pieces thrifting which is what I love to do.

Education privée

2010-01-18T07:10:00.017-06:00

I have lots of pictures to share of Little S's room and all the hard work I've put into the paint and woodwork. He still hasn't fully moved back in but he will soon, just as soon asI paint a few pieces of furniture and put together his new bookshelf.

Meanwhile on top of all of this renovating business and cleansing the house I'm starting to look around at private schools for Little S. The public school is okay and he loves his class, but even S's teacher admitted to us that a child like him needs more individual attention than the public system can offer him. It's fine now while he's still in kindergarten but next year when he starts elementary school she's told us he'll likely fall behind unless he gets help. So I'm just sort of window shopping in the private sector, but in all likelihood he'll start CP next year in the public school with the rest of his friends and we'll see how it goes.

On Saturday the Montessori school, practically in our backyard, had an open house in the morning and I visited just for the heck of it. I figured if I start work in the Fall we can afford it and even though it would be nearly half my measely salary it would be worth it. I think I'd probably built this school up into something else, probably because Little S's school in Mexico was so chic and gorgeous and the directrice was a dynamic pistol really passionate about her school. She sold Montessori like street vendors in Mexico sell rare trinkets. In fifteen minutes we were convinced there was no way he couldn't go there! We enrolled him right away after the first meeting.

Saturday was an entirely different story. The school was freezing, so cold I had to keep my winter hat and coat on. There was no coffee or snacks and in my mind I'd already said to myself "I can't drink too much coffee or I'll have to pee! oh well at least I can check out the toilets when I pee" But there was no coffee or water or anything. Okay maybe not entirely necessary but an important welcome gesture if you ask me. I was the last to walk in and there were about a dozen cold parents sitting in a circle, huddled around a table of materials. They were staring at their shoes, clearing their throats and listening to a low-talking director drone on and on and ON about the problems with public schools. Every once in a while he'd pick up a very worn out Montessori cube and explain it to the parents in minute detail, but who could hear because he was mumbling so much? And then for no reason he'd start talking about something completely different. The plants in the schoool were all dead or in the process of dying a slow death, frozen no doubt and the desks were all worn with broken or missing parts. Most of the furniture was mismatched, cheap plastic and the walls were plastered in tattered, half hung posters from years gone by. There was a huge, nasty television in every room with video tapes stacked nearby (groan) and in one room the mess was so bad that there was an overflowing garbage sac on the floor, papers spilling out, that we actually had to daintily step around to go into the classrom. "Voila c'est notre petit école!" the director kept saying sticking his chest out. The whole school was like this though, "a petit mess".

It was one of those moments in my life where I said "I can do better than this." You know those moments where you see someone doing something you love and doing it badly. I said to myself "I'd love to have this school. I could do this so much with it." I left the school with some badly photocopied papers (first impressions people) and a big question mark over my head. All the other parents stayed behind to ask more questions, apparently interested (bigger question mark), but I was eager to leave.

a typical Montessori classroom found randomly on the internet--lots of light, plants, wood furniture, clean...and most likely WARM. This is what I'd had built up in my head but it wasn't at all like this...

Later I told my neighbor about it. She has her son in a private school nearby and she said "oh yeah they're all like that. Dimi's school too." It didn't seem to bother her. I think for the amount of money you pay they could at least clean and organize the schools. For me the learning environment should be really nice. I always reorganized the classrooms I worked in, took old things off the walls and tried to clean up. It motivated ME as a teacher. In Montessori one of the main principles is that the school is beautiful, --they're often filled with plants and usually have nice, wood furniture to help the kids learn to love and respect the learning environment. The kids in a Montessori school even help raise and care for the plants and I believe they clean the help clean the classroom too. It certainly wasn't the case in this school. All I could think of was poor Little S if he had to go here. He'd end up like those plants!

I'm curious to see some of the other private schools in the area. I wonder if they're all such a mess like my neighbor says. If that's the case then no thanks. I'd rather home school.

Changing energy

2010-01-15T02:52:00.014-06:00

Last Friday I painted for six hours straight, nearly all day long, and then with ceiling paint plastered in my bangs I got a call from Seb. "They don't want to fix your car. There's some kind of problem with water in the engine or something." My heart sunk. I was really down. I love my car, or maybe I should say loved my car. The car looked like it was in good shape when I saw it after the police found it but in fact they did something to the motor or maybe it was the putting out of the fire. I'll get some recompensation, losing a little money of course, but still I loved my car. I was feeling really sad and I didn't want to go to my soirée fille, my little monthly outing with my neighbors where we women get together without the kids or husbands. I didn't feel like getting dressed up and doing my hair and so I called my friend Myla and begged off but she insisted. She called me back twice and said "get out of the damn house! change l'air un peu!" I think I called the wrong person to beg off because she's always so positive and energetic.

At the soirée after about an hour of doing the bonne année bise ten times, (now you understand why I begged off going) the subject of our house came up and Seb's latest accident, the piece of old wood lodged in his finger, the other index finger. He had to have another operation, his second in two weeks, (the first being when he sliced himself with a drywall cutter at Christmas) to get rid of the infection that swelled his finger like a giant sausage, and so now he looks like a lobster with both pinchers on either hand wrapped in huge bandages. He can't work in the house for the next six weeks. "There isn't something wrong with your house?" one neighbor asked. "It seems like there's a problem somewhere" Everyone shook their head in agreement and then a few people launched into stories about "bad houses" and I stayed relatively quiet. The room seemed divided between believers and non so I didn't feel like telling everyone about my saga of the magnetisuer from the previous week. Then the most conservative mom I know leaned in towards me. "There's someone I think you have to see." I felt comfortable and shared a very abbreviated version of our magnetiseur story with her and we left it at that. The next morning I shared the story with Seb and told him how shocked I was that Véronique of all people told me that she knew someone and that she'd had problems in her house. Then Seb went off to run a banking errand in the next village and rounding a corner he ran right into Véronique who was also running errands. "Did Christine tell you?" she asked. She gave Seb the card of her guy and he came out to meet us that same day and made a plan to come the following week to clean our house.

Yesterday was the big day. We had the property cleansed and Dominique told us his views on the house after doing his ritual cleansing. When he first came he went straight in the front room and said "this room" and then in the basement kitchen "and this one" He asked if the previous owner had died in the house and even though I told him no he said she has a really strong hold on the property and "it's almost like she's jealous of you and maybe she's a little angry that you're in her house." When he first came he'd gone in the old mamies' bedroom without knowing, the room we threw all the furniture out of and that's the room he'd marked as having the most energy problems. The basement kitchen has all her old furniture, the table, the fridge the cupboards and the bowls and pitchers I'd kept so that's the only reason I'd think he'd have for targeting that room. He walked through the house burning incense and sprinkling holy water and doing his cleansing rituals. The house got really, really cold like last week before the heat got turned on. It was weird. Then when he'd finished he did us. He was using a crystal dangling it over my head and I felt this electromagnetic energy bolting through my body. It was so odd. I get the same sensation when I stand too close to a microwave because I'm really sensitive to them and I have to stay about a foot away or I get dizzy. Seb who is even more skeptical than me felt the same thing when he did him. The other thing was that I started sweating like a long distance runner as soon as he started, and it was almost embarrassing because it was dripping down my arms like someone turned on a faucet. I wasn't nervous at all, more worried that I'd start giggling so it was completely strange.

After his walk through we shared with Dominique what the other man told us but he wasn't so sure about it. He said it's not really a curse or anything from someone real (to be fair the other guy told us he'd really like a photo of the house to know who it was and he'd asked us to mail one and he'd write us back). Dominique said he did feel a lot of jealousy but it was from the previous owner's energy and there was a real feeling of propriety and a feeling of this house is MINE, something he said he felt like when he walked in and something I feel too. How can you not feel this when you walk into the house and it's been a museum frozen in time. I don't ever really feel like it's our house, or at least I haven't up to now. He asked when we started big renovations and when we said May he said "and that's when all your problems started right?" which we had to agree because it was in June that Seb "got blowed up" (as Little S says) and it so happens that he was burning the debris from the house, the walls we'd torn out and some of the broken furniture, go figure.

So that's about it--the house's energy is neutralized and so are we. We'll see how our luck changes, if we have to leave or not.* Even if you don't believe in this sort of thing and you think it's kooky at least you could latch on to the idea that the feeling of constantly having bad luck might disappear for us and that will make our own negative feelings go away.

(Seb has been dabbling with taking an expat offer at his job but it's a take it or 'leave the company' offer so we may not have the choice! I can't really blog about it though *zipping lip* but we feel pushed out and it's just more weird stuff that's been going on)

Varnished

2010-01-13T15:12:00.001-06:00

Originally uploaded by aprettyhow

The floors are done and the walls are painted. We've put the baseboards on and he's partially moved back in. Little S is one happy little guy. He has the first finished room in the house.

I'm jealous!

Year in review

2010-01-07T02:28:00.003-06:00

January - I was busy meeting my new neighbors and settling in and so was Little S. (It's odd to realize that I barely knew these people who are so much a part of my daily life now). I was enjoying the nature around our house and experiencing the first snow of the year. I was lamenting my new kitchen and complaining about it! I had no idea it would get worse!! What I wouldn't give for my old UPSTAIRS kitchen with hot running water and heat. We ran out of fuel and had no heat for three days. (that seems so tame compared to the three months we've been without heat now. I'm used to it now!).

February - We primed the living room in white (but have since decided to insulate it so it was a waste of time, bah). I started really meeting the people in our town. S started and stopped his Judo class because of boredom (my boredom mostly--I make an awful soccer mom). I took lots of everyday photos of the kids and our kitchen (I need to do more of this!). I unpacked my kitchen things and my pottery (and have since repacked it all). Seb went to China. Little S started learning the computer. Charlotte turned 15 months but still wasn't walking. We visited SW France and I fell in love with Toulouse.

March - We visited Paris at night as was our monthly custom (for a few months at least). Our good friend Marcel died. I did a field trip to the Paris Dali museum with Little S's class. We visited Versailles for my birthday. Seb was in full digging mode trying to get the basement prepared. The house next to us sold and we had no idea who bought it but I was hoping for nice neighbors because their backyard backs up to ours.

April - I painted Charlotte's room with clouds and a tree. I got to visit the decorative arts musuem in Paris (great museum if you like furniture). Egg hunts and more visits to Paris. I started planning my art studio. Doc paid me a visit while Seb was in China. I started my kid art workshops.

May - We tore out the upstairs walls and started the big work. Charlotte turned 18 months and still wasn't walking. I finished part two of my first atelier with the kids, papier maché masks. I met our new neighbors and they seemed nice (are still nice but not super friendly so far) We paved our mud pit of a driveway with pebbles (eventually we did it in concrete). I got a giant water heater installed in my kitchen. I started walking Little S home from school, 2.5 miles. Our yard came alive with wildflowers! The annual LO festival came to town and it was a lot of fun. I decided to stop being a frumpy mom and wear nicer clothes (still trying to do this). We put the order in for our windows (see how long it took!--normally it takes six weeks but it took six months). Seb moved his basement dirt pile with a backhoe (regrets I've had a few...he really tore up the yard with that thing). I shared my sketchbook started two months earlier.

June - We did another kid art atelier this time with plaster hands. I started really getting interested in gardening. Charlotte started walking. We tore out an old fence in the backyard that "belonged" to the new neighbors, oops. We camped in the mountains near Annecy and had a great time. I did a printing atelier in the yard with the kids and started organizing my end of summer backyard barbecue with the kids.

July - Seb got third degree burns in the backyard burning the old wood from the attic. The Portuguese workers came for two weeks and left us a huge mess. I moved into my neighbor's house for two weeks. Little S nearly knocked out his front tooth going head first on his slide. Our house was beyond chaotic and I was having a very hard time dealing with it (not much has changed there). I celebrated six months of drawing every night.

August - We were waiting for our windows (dum-dee-dum). We ordered our new front door from a menuisiére and we were waiting on that too. Both kids went to the ER for seperate episodes on the same day!! We housesat for a neighbor (same one as earlier) and my fil came to help us reroute our plumbing dwnstairs while Seb tore out my kitchen and transferred it downstairs temporarily. We spent a week in the mountains on vacation. (it occurs to me we had a grand total of about 10 days of vacation for the whole year, no wonder we're so burned out!!)

September - We were still waiting on the windows (and starting to get really worried). We thought about moving into an apartment for a while but it was way too expensive. Little S started Grande Section of Maternelle. I filled my art journal. I cleaned out closets and gave away huge bags of clothes. I also stripped the doors in the living room.

October - Little S turned 5 and we had a fun party, woot hoot! We finally found out what the problem was with the windows--never ordered!! The tile guys we hired came and ripped out all the floors down the the trusses but we had to wait on the windows before they could come back and put the new floors (tap..tap...tap). I took off for my in-laws for a week to escape the floorless house and all the dust. The heaters got disconnected for all the reno work to get started (still disconnected, sigh) We started looking for people to help us finish the rest of the house because the Portuguese renovation company bailed out on us. We had a local guy work one day for us but his work was really, really awful and expensive so we decided to finish the drywall ourselves because we could at least do a better job than that (still working). I started a once a month collage and a printmaking class.

November - Our windows finally came! I tried to do Art Every Day Month but failed. We alll got bronchitus (dust?) Charlotte got her first haircut and turned two. An anonymous neighbor reported us to the city for not have permits (crazy lies!) and we had to start the process of creating a dossier on the house for the city. We got our new front door and the tile got laid. We also had our living room floors done. We started taping the drywall in S's room (his room is nearly finished by now). Sil got all bent out of shape about something and freaked out on the telephone un-inviting us to her annual Christmas Eve family dinner (still aren't sure what brought all THAT on). Little S 's room got emptied.

December - My car got stolen and recovered, but the back seat was burned. It snowed an awful lot but it was really nice. Seb sliced open his finger and cut a tendon requiring surgery. We spent Christmas with my friend Dee and her boyfriend and then went to Normandy to see the in-laws (except for sil). We made it to the end of the year alive in one piece and still married...MIRACLE!!

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What a crazy year. Just reading all this makes me dizzy. It seems that around June things got really awful! It's funny because we recently saw a magnetiseur for Little S at mil's request--like many French people she loves alternative therapy and she will usually pay for it if we'll only just go. Magnetic therapy is used for diagnosis and then healing of certain sicknesses and magnetiseurs are often considered psychic too because they're extremely sensitive people. Little S has terrible tummy problems so we were seeing this guy for that. We'd never even seen him before. As we sat down though he touched *us* and swung his magnetic pendulum between us (I thought he was going to say you guys are incompatable! we'd been bickering all day) and he said "oh wow you have a huge home problem...you have a curse on your house and someone did it in the Spring. It's someone practicing black magic. I see fire so be careful" We were a little dumbstruck. He went on to say that it wasn't anyone in our family but someone in our community and it had to do with a profound jealousy. He said when we bought our house someone wanted it but didn't get it so they got mad seeing us in the house. Wow. We knew that we were in competition against a lot of people for the house but the owners chose us even though we had a low bid. We don't know who the other bidders were, just that there was some reason the owner didn't want one particular person to get the house. It was an old neighbor rivalry thing. Okay so it's kooky but how weird that he picked up on that out of nowhere. I know a lot of people don't believe in this type of thing and even we feel weird thinking of someone practicing black magic. He told us black magic is really common in France and that the Catholic church recognizes it. He also suggested we get our house blessed and he gave us some holy water to do it ourselves!--Poor little S. He apparently does have stomach problems. The magnetiseur zeroed right in on his intestines and said, "Oh yes it's all blocked up" without us saying a word.

Resolutions again

2010-01-05T14:31:00.008-06:00

We spent New Years around a table, just like the French like to do. Yes I suppose I'm gradually becoming one of them. It felt right though, just the four of us and me running up and down the steps to the kitchen cooking up a three star dinner. The kids decorated the table with leftover glitter from my friend Dee's Christmas table and we wished them both Happy New Year at nine o'clock, shhhh...don't tell,they're too small to know yet! Then Seb and I cuddled up on the sofa, champagne in hand to watch a Jason Bourne movie we totally forgot about buying in Mexico. I shielded my eyes a lot because I hate violent movies but I LOVE spy movies so I had to watch through parted fingers. Then we turned off the film and wrote out our resolutions and regrets. We both had a big pile of each.

My resolutions I wrote out on New Years were more like a list of *wishes* for the New Year, things I'd like to have happen without much work. This is just a little selfish list of things I'd like for ME to make me happier but that I'll definitley have to work at getting. Maybe there isn't much difference!:
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Make and buy better food for my family. I've started this week and it's really fun being back into cooking again even in my grungy underground kitchen.

Plan and take more vacations. Cheap vacations, dragging Seb kicking and screaming someplace. anyplace.

Work hard to help finish our house. I'm the resident painter but I need to learn to tape drywall so that's my next goal.

Do some nice things for my neighbors. I have such nice people living around me. It takes a huge crisis to see who you can count on and how much. It will be my turn to give back to them this year for sure.

Grow my garden! I can't wait to expand on what I started last year and wage slug warfare.

Sew and read and take photos of course...

Blog more about my day to day life. It seems a bit dull to me sometimes to write about my daily life but I think I'll appreciate it later. Sorry in advance to anyone reading!

Spiteful

2010-01-04T03:33:00.004-06:00

I seem to remember this from a theiving episode a long time ago, first you notice something big missing like a car for example and then slowly other things pop up missing. It seems our window friends weren't just installing windows but pocketing DVDs and jewelry the whole while. All the things I've been noticing missing were right near the windows that they installed. Seb has been really skeptical about it being them but even he couldn't ignore that it was someone pretty spiteful who tore out a whole wall of electrical cables leading from the kitchen to the upstairs, right next to the new kitchen window where my spare keys were last seen.

I'm really angry, mostly at myself for trusting them in my house and being so stupid as to let them near my things alone. How could I be so dumb?

They STILL have to come back and finish their work because they have the iron grill work on our windows in their depot and they owe us a pricey window that we know if we jump into litigation we will never get. I just want them out of our house and out of our lives.

The most wonderful time of the year

2009-12-29T03:11:00.004-06:00

It's that time of year again. Happy Holidays to all. I have lots of stories and pictures to share but for now I'll just share a few of my favorite things, my unlit tree and the most wonderful part of our house, the fireplace.

Rasputin

2009-12-20T15:06:00.013-06:00

I realized when I sat down to the computer tonight that I accidentally posted the draft I was working on about my car getting found. I had a really hard time writing about it, there's just so many details and so much emotion that it was a post in progress and I guess I hit send at one point and it ended up "out there" before I was done. Sorry if you left a comment. I did see the comments in my mailbox so thank you.

And now I can't find the post in my drafts so I don't know where it is. A lot of odd things like this are happening lately. I don't know what's up with my life these days. Honestly I'm starting to wonder. Anyway for a recap if you didn't get my post in your reader, --my car was found by the police and it ended up it was just next to the window installer's stock warehouse in a store parking lot, 150 meters away. People in the store watched in the parking lot as the guys set fire to the car in broad daylight and then ran off. They all gave some kind of vague description but the interesting point was that they all said that guys were wearing blue uniforms and that's pretty much what these window guys wear so it was odd. Another person said they saw them come from the warehouse parking lot pulling my car. They were seen by lots of people tugging my (no doubt) out of gas car along, chug, chug, chug.

The window guys have been giving us problems since forever and I haven't blogged about it because it wasn't something we wanted to dwell on. To be as brief as possible they cashed a check held in escrow, a biggie! and then they never, ever, ever ordered our windows. Three months later we still kept getting the phone tag runaround and we couldn't start any other work until the windows were in so out of desperation Seb cornered the commercial rep at the sales office one afternoon and the guy said "look I'm quitting tomorrow-- these guys are nuts and you'll never get your windows or your deposit money unless you sue them. They haven't paid me in weeks!" then he gave him the address of the warehouse where he said his boss was living because of personal problems, go figure. Sure enough Seb found the guy half asleep in his underwear in the warehouse and asked when we could get our windows. The guy blamed all the delays on the corporate headquarters so Seb, ever the detective called the hq in Alsace and found out that they had no idea who we were and our windows were never ordered. The hq ordered our windows but we still had to deal with our local sales branch.

So anyway when the window installers came they had HUGE attitudes and I've been dealing with them for weeks now. They also installed the wrong window upstairs, completely nuts and a whole other problem that I blogged a little about on my Flickr page. And so two weeks ago when I innocently asked Rasputin* the head installer about a few problems with the shutters he suddenly just blew up at me and I was completely shocked. It was like he had all this pent up rage and he was there just inches from my face screaming. He was saying things like "people like you with your old houses think you can have new windows that work correctly? Oh come on lady!" and I couldn't get a word in because he was just an explosion of anger. And I said to myself "oh wow he's probably the boss's brother or something."

I was pretty sure from the start that it was them for a few obvious reasons. My spare keys, or OUR spare keys were by the door he was working on that day he blew up at me. Seb is missing his spare keys too now. They knew my school pickup hours all too well because I'd always say it before I'd run out because I'm polite like that and I was worried they might need something while I ran out,--I'm such a naieve country hick. I see that now. And they knew I'd go in the basement for snack time and they knew the angle of the windows and what you could and couldn't see, because from the outside it looks like the people inside can see well but Rasputin installed those windows so he knew what parts of the driveway you can't see.

And he kicked my cat one day. I saw him do it. People who kick cats are generally criminal minded. So there.

The police aren't all that interested in our story and they said if there's another incident they'll look into it, *yawn*. Meanwhile my car is torched and impounded and they stole my kids Christmas gifts and set fire to my son's car seat. They likely have the keys to our house too because they installed our doors. They also very likely have Seb's car keys too, and get this they have to come back and work in our house at least three more times. I'm a little freaked out.

I can't figure out why we keep having such bad luck lately. It's like we have a black cloud following us.

*(he looks exactly like Rasputin, same beard and everything, and he has a sort of Polish-Russian name)

Stuck in the snow

2009-12-18T03:07:00.012-06:00

our street looking left

and looking right, with our cat in the driveway

Yesterday it snowed.

If only it had snowed on Tuesday, two days earlier, my car would still be here. You can't get out of our little section of the village on snow days without winter tires because they don't de-ice the roads so Mister Cambrioleur would have been stuck, tires spinning on my street. It's happened to me twenty times before so I know. My one big HA! is the car was on empty and I mean REALLY on empty when I last drove it. I've never let it get that low. Hopefully they ran out of gas and abandoned my car on the highway.

Last night I had a dream that I adopted a german shepard puppy. I've dreamed about this dog before. It was so real this time that I could smell him, weird. He's sending me messages. Adopt me! I'm here! I'll bite people who steal your car!

The snow is pretty and the kids love it. I've had to get a neighbor to take S to school and this morning they were stuck in the snow so it looked like neither her kid or mine would get to go the last day before vacation. Finally another neighbor got them out and took them in. Last night we watched cars skidding all over our road and then they'd get stuck. It's not a lot of snow but they just aren't equipped to handle it. Neither are we. We have to get snow tires this year. Snow tires in Paris! It seems funny.

Have you seen her?

2009-12-17T01:37:00.006-06:00

My car has gone missing. My very pretty, nearly new, low mileage, sport edition pretty, pretty car is gone. Poof, vanished.

She was last seen in my driveway at 4:45pm Tuesday as I unbuckled three kids and thought about bringing in the remaining Christmas gifts from the trunk and the Christmas box from my mom, "nooo, I'll get those later when I have a free hand." I locked her by remote and took the kids inside for a snack. Fifteen minutes later she was gone.

Call it women's intuition but my bones are rattling. I'm pretty sure that it's someone we've dealt with, maybe not them per se but maybe they served as a tipster. Someone who worked in the house. It doesn't seem possible that it's random. We live in the country, woods all around. We have two or three neighbors we pretty much know, wave to and get along with. It's not the city and our road is nearly all local traffic. It's not like I was parked in a public parking lot or anything. It was stolen in full daylight when the theif knew I'd be in the basement with the kids and couldn't see out very well, or knew that if I did look out I wouldn't see much from that angle. And there's the issue of my spare car key that "disappeared" from the house a few weeks ago. We blamed Charlotte for stashing it somewhere but now I'm not so sure. The only people who know all these things or had access to the key rack were the people who've been working in the house lately. Oh yeah and there's the day I even let the window installer move my car for me telling him "if I'm blocking you my keys are always RIGHT HERE" and I pointed to the key rack, DUH. We won't tell the insurance company about that.

I'm sad. I feel like I lost a close friend.

Favorite pjs

2009-12-08T07:24:00.004-06:00

Charlotte at 24 months

Little S at 26 months

It's so fun to make comparisons. They don't have the same face or physique but they do look like brother and sister.

The new hallway tile

2009-12-02T04:56:00.012-06:00

The tile in the hallway has been finished for a few weeks now and the new door was installed just afterwards but we had so much debris piled up it was hard to take a decent picture.

So here's the before... (with the wrought iron window grills removed for painting)

...and the after! (you can't see the iron grills very well in this photo but they're back in)

I actually liked the old entry tile but since the floors were sagging it made it hard to properly install the new door so I finally relented as long as we got something that looked like it might have always been in the house. The biggest reward is when people ask "did you clean the old floors or something?" Yay it's what I had hoped, nothing too shocking and keeping in the style of the house.

Now we just have to redo the baseboards and paint.

Another project that's finished is the living room floor. We chose a prefinished oak, a little light for my taste but we LOVE our new floors. I'll do a better picture next week when I can show off my Christmas tree at the same time. Right now the tree lights aren't working and it's bugging me. For now here's a sneak peek of where the hall tile joins the living room.

My double personality

2009-12-01T15:08:00.018-06:00

Seb comes home soon, whew. These trips seem to drag on and I'll be happy when he (one day) changes jobs and doesn't have to travel so much. He's been gone nearly three weeks this month with his other little Europe trips earlier in the month. It's tiring being a single mom of two!

I've kept busy though and I'm happy to say the artist block seems to be lifting. I've been painting every night once the kids are asleep, working in my mixed media/agenda book. It's really helped me to work in paint instead of drawing. I think I was just too tired to draw and it was feeling forced to drag out my moleskine each night. I just needed to shift gears and let loose a little bit with the paint and scissors. My results are terrible but I know it's just a way to get to other things that I *do* like so I'm really okay with the fact that my pictures are ugly. "You gotta work to get the cream!". I wish I'd understood that years ago in school.

My social life is in complete overdrive. I guess it's the holiday season added to an already busy schedule. I was laughing today because there are definitley two mes and there always has been. There's social me who makes big plans like the Art Ateliers and Kid Movies Night, which was tonight. The idea behind Kids Movie Night is that a bunch of the neighborhood kids, mainly the art atelier kids, watch a film together in the living room on Tuesday night while the moms sit back and enjoy a glass of wine in another room. It turned out fun but antisocial me was dreading it all day saying "why on earth did you plan this?!" to social me. Cursing, cleaning and saying "agh! we only have the tiny tv for French movies (because of the pal secam problem). The kids will hate it!" Social me always does things like this. Never consults antisocial me because she's BORING and she'd say no anyway. Turns out they all loved it and had a blast. Parents came and went for three hours. At one point I had seven adults in my little basement kitchen laughing, taking goofy photos and measuring their feet (don't ask). It reminded me of how social me came about. My grandmother was a total "social me" and I think of her each time I have a house full of people. It makes me happy to hear the laughter and the conversation, coffees being made and kids all talking at once. But there's still the other me. The antisocial one. The cave rat. I think I have to learn to balance the two and stop worrying. I do need some "me" time which is why I am not planning any art atelier for tomorrow. Time to rest.

My movie night thing isn't unusual, just something silly and new. Lots of my neighbors do things like this so it's always fun around here. There's so much interaction it's almost too much sometimes. A long time ago an Anon commenter left a snarky comment on my blog just before I left Mexico saying they'd get a kick out watching me *try* to make friends in Paris (got to love the anons, big meanie!) and my Paris friend in Mexico warned me "you know don't expect to make friends so easily once you move to Paris, it's not Mexico" She was being nice about it but preparing me for the shift. And so of course my first few months I was a more than a little worried with Seb travelling all the time. I even blogged about it because my car stalled and I was all alone! Oh dear! Boy were they ever wrong and I had absolutely no reason to worry. Not only have I met lots of people but they're all French which is amazing because it's hard to meet French women. The ambiance is really friendly and open. People left nicely dried firewood on my doorstep this week. My neighbor's husband came by to take Little S to school two mornings last week. And I can barely keep up with things in the village, art shows and little jazz concerts, coffees and after school playdates. Lots of fun happenings that exhaust antisocial me.

By the way I'm the only mom who doesn't work. I thought I'd mention that before an anon jumps up and says something sarcastic of the "it must be nice" variety, or before anyone even thinks it. Most of the moms who live here and who I see work full or part time but Wednesdays are usually days off for at least one parent, and so this is why I do the ateliers then and why a Tuesday night movie night works well since it's like a Friday night in many respects in France. A lot of the parents popped in on their way home from work and stayed to chat with everyone which made it feel even more like a weekend!

French Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:47:00.008-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all my stranded expat friends!

I've invited an English friend for pizza and movies. A girls night out to make up for being alone. Seb always seems to be gone at Thanksgiving time. This makes four years now. He obviously doesn't understand the importance of the holiday (grrr).

I really miss my family today. I don't really care about missing Christmas or Fourth of July, (well I DO but), but, missing Thanksgiving is really hard.

Eat lots of cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes for me if you are lucky enough to be at home today.

Still going strong

2009-11-25T14:34:00.026-06:00

A friend of mine asked me recently if I was still doing my kid art ateliers and the answer is a resounding yes! I just haven't been blogging about them as much as I should have. Mostly they've been held at other people's houses because ours is so torn up and to be honest I've missed hosting them (as much as I whined about all the details--whining is in my nature, sorry). Anyway since they've been held at other people's homes and it's winter it's been hard to do anything too involved like papier maché or the Jackson Pollack tennis ball paintings I want to do (I really want to do this!), so I've kept them super simple.

Here's a recap of what we've been doing for the past few.

About a month ago a mom suggested we do stained glass yogurt jars* using craft paint for glass and that was a nice "crafty" activity. The girls seemed to like it a lot but the boys were a bit bored. The moms loved it.** Everyone did one and some were really nice. I wasn't so happy with the results of mine or Little S's. It all looked too crafty when finished, not that there's anything wrong with that it's just that I felt disppointed. I did buy some of the paint last week though to try again at home using more restraint in the glitter pen department, ahem.

We also did a mod podge project with little ready made papier maché animals (designed for collaging or painting and sold in most craft stores worldwide me thinks). The kids LOVED this activity. The animals were a little cheezy,--- kitties and dolphins, cuteness overload, but what I liked about it was that the kids really got a feel for collage and the animals helped hold their interest for the hour they worked on it. It was a great way to introduce them to the idea of mixed media for later projects. Sneaky sneaky.

Today we had another atelier but a lot of people had other obligations and the host cancelled the day before *gasp* so I just decided I'd hold it at my house since it was small and manageble. A friend of mine came up from Paris with her boys and I had one other little girl who's a regular come over so we were a small group. I had nothing planned really so we cut out Christmas trees that the kids drew (folded in half and double cut--simple trick that they loved). Then they decorated their trees with hand drawn balls (I use old magazines for color and variety) and star stickers and in the case of the boys, truck stamps. It was really cute with their five years old drawings and they had a great time glittering and decorating them. In the end we had the idea of sticking them on the window as decorations or maybe stringing them up since they'd made two or three in one sitting. This was more of a craft activity but it just proves that the atelier can be off the top of your head if you can't find the time to organize it in a given week as long as you have a little stock of supplies. Voila! you can still keep it going.

I'm really happy with the whole experience so far and I have to say it's been more popular than I thought it would be. In fact we don't announce it around anymore because it's kind of awkward not to invite others after talking glowingly about it and how much fun it is. You really can't invite everyone though because it gets overwhelming. Probably the hardest part I've found is waiting for the next person to decide to take the reigns and host it. I like the control of having at my house and a few of the mom's tell me they've run out of ideas already (as if!) so in January I think I'll start hosting it more or less full time. It's just easier and it lets me switch around the invitees too because I now know two artist moms who would probably bring in some nice ideas.

The kids always run up to me on Tuesday at the school and say "Christine! Christine! on va faire quoi demain pour l'atelier?" (what are we doing for the atelier tomorrow?) They love it. Don't be afraid to start one because this enthusiasm will be there no matter what projects you do. It's really a nice ambiance and the kids are always much calmer in an atelier than if they're just visiting your house in a group with nothing planned. Many, many times amazingly enough we've been sitting there with eight kids around a table and you can hear nothing but the occasional peep of a little voice saying "pass me the scissors" or "can I use that red when you're done?" and like I said these kids are noisy kindergarteners!

*French yogurts often come in glass jars--small baby food jar size more or less

**sometimes the moms do the activities too--it's not planned and sort of just happens

Stuck

2009-11-21T17:00:00.005-06:00

Things are really crazy right now and I'm still finding it hard to write and impossible to draw or create. I'm really in a stuck place in my head and I have been for a few weeks now. I wonder if it's the holiday season. It seems to blow in every year around Thanksgiving time or around the time the in-laws start planning our Christmas with them, which brings up last year and then the fights start. We don't bother engaging in the arguments anymore and Seb bless him and his little hot temper was very calm this year. I was shocked because hearing the yelling on the other end of the line made ME get all hot under the collar. But he was graceful and that just made all hell break loose on their end.

So we won't be dong the in-laws Christmas this year because of the type of cake we brought last year. Don't even ask because the cake in question is just a catalyst and probably a fitting metaphor for the LAYERS of problems my extended family has. It's hard for me because it brings up old issues of me moving here, leaving my family and adjusting, all the adjusting! Why can't they just be all warm and fuzzy? It also makes me upset for the kids, but I think under the circumstances it's best that they don't get too close to the family because honestly they'll eventually pose the same questions I'm posing today, "who are these insane people?" And they'll get hurt because that brand of psychotic doesn't think before they speak and has too many missing filters. I was worried that the kids had overheard us later discussing the problems, and they probably did because the house is small right now, but then I said "yes well at least they'll know early that these people aren't easy and it's not THEM at fault when the branch snaps in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation." Because the branch snaps a lot with them. Seb has been apologizing for them to me since I first met him and it has helped me deal with them, knowing that HE thinks they're nuts.

So we aren't going anywhere for the holidays which is kind of shocking because suddenly we have no obligations. Weird. Sad for the kids and hard to explain. But to be truthful a little refreshing. Very refreshing. We are free.

And Friday was weird. We went to S's school for a meeting to discuss the two months of observation by the pedi-psych at the school who has been interviewing and observing him. I was all set for her to tell us he was "normal, just a little shy" but her conclusion was that we should probably look into further testing for autism (she didn't know he'd had this in his file already from his school in Mexico). We aren't really sure exactly what she was saying because she isn't allowed to actually diagnose him, she isn't trained for that, but she said he had several signs indicating to her that he needed to be tested and observed for the scope of autism. We left the school a little shocked. A little defeated. Everything from our perspective seemed to be that it was going so well for him at this school but evidently he's so non committal in his lack of speech and body language that he's beyond the shy introvert. There's a problem. It makes my stomach churn to even write about it. I really hope she's wrong but my gut instinct tells me she isn't. We have to go for further testing. I'm really frustrated and sad because I'd pretty much let all those worries go and now here they are again staring me in the face. I know he has serious communication issues and he's finding it harder and harder to put his emotion into a proper outlet so maybe this is a way for him to get help. I'm trying to look at it in a positive way.

Seb is away for two weeks so it was especially hard this week to get all this dumped in our laps and then have him hop on a plane again. My head is so full. The house is a wonderful distraction actually. For once I'm glad to have it and all its work.

A little man's bedroom

2009-11-18T03:01:00.010-06:00

I haven't shared much of the house's progress lately but since we've been working every night getting the kids bedrooms done I thought it would be fun to show off some of the work. We aren't pros so it's probably taking us ten times longer than it would a normal contractor. In the last week though we've managed to get S's bedroom completely taped and mudded and partially sanded with no bumps or air pockets, (hmmm, slightly better than the "pro" we initially hired and who started Charlotte's room).

These are progress pictures of S's room. Excuse our mess but it's a work zone!

There will be windows up there eventually in those triangles and we'll be either sanding the beams or whitewashing them, --jury is still out on that.

Before there was a drop ceiling in the bedroom (full of mouse poop!) and some crazy green bamboo motif wallpaper. Now, there's a 12ft ceiling and this great feeling of open space. I can't wait to decorate it but those ceilings won't be fun to paint. The play area is on the right (see photo below).

His play area, --looks very dismal for now but should be nice when it's finished. This was our idea to use the extra attic space nixed by nearly everyone who saw our plans. They thought it would look odd. It was either make one huge bedroom and one small one or give each kid a little play area in each room. I like this idea because later this can be an office/study area and I think it works perfectly as a private little niche. It just looked odd on paper when we first drew the plans.

On my Flickr pages there's a description of the giant window in S's room and the little problem we have with it and the window guys. We can't do much finishing on that wall until we get the new window so S's room unfortunately won't be completely done until after Christmas.

New door

2009-11-16T02:17:00.005-06:00

After three coats of varnish and lots of sanding we were finally able to have our new door installed. It was really tough doing this with all the dust. I nearly lost my mind between coats. I'm saving the last coat for when all the work is finished and the dust has completely settled. I wonder when that will be?

Here's our old door in the scrap pile. It's amazing how close the match is. No one even realized we changed it.

These pics are part of a dossier we presented to the mairie for our convocation. An anonymous neighbor told them that we were building on to our house without a permit, presented photos of our driveway and set the ball rolling. It was completely untrue, but now we've had to present all our projects and have them reviewed by the BdF. We'll certainly have to thank that neighbor next time we see him. Too bad he didn't report the guy up the street who installed a giant white pvc door on his house. Oh that's right it's the mayor's nephew so he wouldn't want to upset his boss.

Two!

2009-11-13T02:54:00.007-06:00

My big girl had a birthday yesterday.

She also got her first hair cut the other day so these are the most recent photos I have. I didn't get much cut, just her bangs so she could see again. This is her in the Carrefour parking lot before the cut doing her little twisty dance.

She's a big talker and picks up words and phrases easily. I'm really impressed with her ability to switch from French to English depending on who she talks to. We got her hair cut in Jean-Louis David (which isn't exactly the most economical solution for kid haircuts, 19 euros for five minutes of cut, gulp!)

Her favorite food is chinese, but she pretty much eats everything except green beans and strangely enough clementines (but I bet that will change because S inhales clementines--he eats at least seven a day).

People tell me all the time that she looks just like a doll, and I thought it was an expression like "ohh, what a little doll!" but I see dolls all the time now that look like her. S sees them too and he always says "look mom it's another Charlotte doll. Let's buy it for her!" Unfortunately she has no dolls only trucks, cars and Legos. She seems pretty happy with that.

Happy Birthday little one!

Frrroze

2009-11-10T15:03:00.015-06:00

We still have no heat and it's starting to get really difficult because it's in the low thirties farenheit. They won't be able to reconnect us until all the floors are done next week so we make do with our two space heaters and lots of layers! It's embarrassing here in small town so I just tell people "yeah it's fine we got our heat YEp!! (big fake grin) because if not people get too nice and start offering their grandma's house and it gets really hard to just say no. But yes I can say it on my blog that it's freaking cold in our house, help!!!

But that's not the freeze I was talking about.

A freeze-UP is more like it. Notice the lack of AEDM posts? I'm experiencing a nasty case of artist's block which is apparently a real problem for me. I never get writer's block. I always seem to muddle through my mediocre writing but over the years I've had a huge problem with art-block. I had it so often in uni that I changed my major. I get stuck. The new me though just journals with no qualms about who sees what but the new me never posted much art until lately. I like sharing my art in a hippy dippy "ma lookie what I done did" way but I think it's starting to mess with my head. So I will WITHDRAW myself from AEDM and go on with drawing, posting or not, and hopefully be cured of my little problem with sharing.

Not that I didn't do any art these past days, but I just got stuck and my head started going in funny directions. Ever had that happen? I just start going in circles like a dog chasing his tail. I get too many messages at once and then my filter gets blocked. I think that's what most artistic blocks are like.

My collage group met on Saturday and I did some découpage on my own which was lots of fun. I made a fox from one of our Eric Carle's books and it came out cute. I really appreciate his work now. It took me four hours to get the background and the body parts right. Damn. Découpage is super hard. Then the cool collage chick came by to see what I was up to and she said "oh you copied the fox from the book by that lady?" pointing to the picture in the book. And I said "yeah to learn how he (yep he,he,he,HE) does it." I think she's nice but she was thinking it was child's play and kind of poo-poo about it. I was working from a kid's book after all. Her work's been exhibited in Paris a few times and she's pretty talented at doing photomontage, which means she cuts from magazines and puts everything in a new perspective--not easy either but not really interesting to me because of the ethics involved in using other people's work. That's a fine line to cross. I really like découpage though and even more now that I know how challenging it is. From the outsider's view it looks very easy but it isn't that at all. Besides I can make it my own which is the best part (although admittedly to learn I'm not at all opposed to copying from other artists because that's the best way to learn, ...Manga anyone?).

I was curious after making my fox and I set about learning more about how Eric Carle does his pictures. I was really impressed. He actually hand paints his own papers and stamps them, storing them in drawers in color codes. I do this with my magazine découpage already but I never thought of painting and stamping my own papers for this use. Brilliant! You can link to his site for instructional pictures and videos. I think it's great that he shares his techniques in such detail. He seems like a very laid back artist. He lives in The Keys which to me means he's got his priorites straight--it's one of my dream house spots, ahhh (especially on a day like today).

Well here I am. I'm frozen and yet still inspired, somehow MIRACULOUSLY. I'm sure the frozen thing is the cold house and the pressure to post a pic a day. I never liked deadlines or critiques. Let's just go back to way things were and I may or may not share some art this month. Go on about your business. Pay no attention to the lady there drawing the ketchup bottle. Now git.

Whew.

The curls

2009-11-05T03:04:00.006-06:00

While I was at my mother in law's going through photos I came across a photo of Seb as a baby and was really struck with how much he looks like Charlotte at the same age. They're like twins!

It's terrible to have such blonde children and have dark hair like mine. Everyone makes the same remarks "the papa must be really blonde!" to which I sometimes say "no c'est le facteur!" My doctor even thought for a while that Charlotte was adopted and on the last visit she said "remind me what country you adopted her from again?" I burst out laughing. Charlotte has no French healthcare papers yet so she just assumed we'd brought her back from our travels to Mexico. A little blonde Mexican!

AEDM day 4

2009-11-04T13:54:00.006-06:00

I'm a closet manga fan and I'm starting to get hooked on manga drawing books. Seb teases me about this endlessly. He thinks it's for 12 year old boys and rolls his eyes when he sees me with them.

These are so fun to create even if I keep getting near misses with getting things right. This one today really bugged me for many reasons, mainly the eyes which were seriously crooked and oversized, scary! Anyway this month is just about sharing my stuff good and bad so even if I hate the drawing it's a banana peel like Danny Gregory says. You just toss it away and savor the fruity moment the drawing gave you that day.

AEDM days 1-3

2009-11-03T10:41:00.008-06:00

Here are my catch ups for the past few days of AEDM. It's just some of my usual night time or breakfast time journal drawing.

Day 1: I'm crap at perspective but it's always good to practice. If you draw upside-down then it's easier to get the lines right and trick your right brain but it's probably good to get used to getting it right in real life so I keep practicing (and going nowhere!). This is a fireplace from a book on living rooms and the sword is from the chateau Montmorency near Paris, ummm apparently. I've never visited I just have the brochure because it looked like it would be fun to cut up and draw from.

Day 2: When I get bored I look at the Every Day Matters drawing list. I'm going to sprinkle some drawings from the list in to my journal from time to time although I have to admit that it kind of bugs a little part of me to be told what to draw, or I guess to resort to a list. So, these are my brown oxford ballerinas sketched over breakfast. Little S said "get your shoes off the table MOM!"

Day 3: Everyone in our house is sick with bronchitus so we have a lot of medicine in the little white cupboard in the hallway and on all the tables. There's also another EDM sketch on the page, the halogen track light in the basement kitchen.

Art every day

2009-11-02T13:08:00.002-06:00

It's Art Every Day Month (AEDM) over at the blog Creative Every Day and I remember last year thinking I'd like to do it next time it came around. So yes here we are right in the middle of major renovations but I'm going to do it anyway. I've done the drawings for today and yesterday I'll back post them tomorrow, a little late, but what of it. I was locked out of my computer all day because of the window guy. He hogged all my outlets.

Nothing glam just some drawings but I think the most important thing is to show up.

Windows

2009-11-01T14:03:00.007-06:00

We're back all relaxed and refreshed and even if there wasn't much done on the house while we were gone it was good to get away from the dust for a few days.

The rest of our windows are being installed today. This is the second week of the install and it's freezing in the house. I hope they get done soon. The new windows look wonderful though. I was worried they'd look cheap being PVC and not wood, but no they look great and we're really happy with them.

Next week we're supposed to get our radiators reconnected and finally have some heat. I'm ready to live in a warm house again. We've been lucky that it hasn't been all that cold.

Lots of jobs still to do but the house is slowly starting to take form.

The state of things

2009-10-22T15:07:00.008-05:00

I haven't had much time for drawing lately because life has fallen completely by the wayside to make room for HOUSE. What else? I can't even believe how chaotic our living situation has become. Blogging about it seems superfluous. We're in the turbines of renovation and it smarts.

Our neighbors down the street came by to see if they might be able to bid us some work *sigh* I don't know why we said yes because clearly one does not hire the neighbors. It's Mosaic Mom's husband and they have major money problems so he's going into renovation from a background in cabinet making. I said yes out of a genuine desire to want to help them (okay well, maybe a sort of grownup version of peer pressure) but we could see from the moment that he opened his mouth that he didn't know much about interior construction and he was guessing at things. We have to say no. I hate to because his bids are really low and I know they need money, but we can't have any more delays or surprises because if we do I'm certain we'll kill each other, and probably the neighbor too.

I'm off to visit my in laws next week for five days with the kids. I'm actually looking forward to it. That's how warped things are lately. There are wonderful things like showers, heating, home cooked meals and babysitting in store. Paradise! Before we go though I have to pack up the kids bedrooms and mine. Well my bedroom isn't really a bedroom so much as a spot where I sleep and cast off my skivvies but it's all I know of comfort right now. It's a huge packing job and the kids will be a little freaked out again. Anyway we hired a guy for a few little jobs and when I come back the drywall will have been taped, upstairs at least and it will be time for me to paint. Seb also said he'd sand the floors but I don't think he'll have time to do it (unless he hires the ubiquitous neighbor, noooooo). I'll try to share some pictures when I get back. The beginning of living normally? I hope so.

Printmaking

2009-10-17T03:17:00.006-05:00

Last week I took a one off art class which I wasn't quite sure if I should or could take since I had so much going on. At the last minute I just called everyone I knew and begged for help so I could do the class. I'm so glad I did. It was an artist's printmaking class and it was so interesting. I'm totally hooked. During the class I felt that incredible rush of pleasure you get when you discover something you really, really love for the first time.

The problem is that you leave the class wanting to print more but you can't. I left with two zinc plates and a borrowed etching tool. I really have to find an intaglio printing press though. I told Seb to keep his eye out for one because he works in industry and you never know what's lying around an old factory or junkyard. And I'll be hunting in all the local thrift shops for the next year. They cost a small fortune used or new. Meanwhile I'm trying to think of what I can use to make my own prints. I actually thought about running over paper with my car and I already tried the rolling pin from my kitchen. Yes it's that addictive.

We live in a small village but there are a lot of artists in this little community and lots of opportunities to learn. I credit this to my reopening the artist vault that's been closed for over ten years. I just wish I had more time to do it. It would be so much fun to take classes like this all the time.

Collage gold

2009-10-13T13:56:00.016-05:00

My collage group is so fun. We spent three hours (some stayed on for four) cutting and pasting the afternoon away. Everyone came loaded down with magazines and the host already had a great stock of Vogues so there were lots of nice photos to work with. I wanted to steal a few of those Vogues I have to admit. I don't cut mine up. I study them!

We were mixed in age from 14 to 40 something *ahem* and so that mixup of women made it a really nice ambiance. The results were fun, silly, artistic, and nutty. Some people's work made you think and some were just starting out in collage spreading their wings so it was fun to see that too, future creative junkies! It was a really nice atmosphere and too bad it only happens once a month and not twice a month like I originally thought.

My collage art was very business like. I had specific projects in mind and only three hours to work until my babysitter-husband went on strike (they were running around outside in their socks when I got home) I quickly covered my date journal with a lovely smadgering of sea colors and earthtones and then I made cards for friends which I later painted at home. I was the Japanese art studio,--very efficient. In other words I just made backgrounds. I can't share those just yet because they need to get mailed off first to my buddies.

In other ART news (obsessed much?) I'm thinking of reducing my card format to 3.5 x 2.5 inches and I'd like to start doing some ATC trades. Does anyone know what ATC´s (Artist Trading Cards) are? It's such a great idea. Basically what you do is you make cards then you trade 'em for original art from other artists who swap too. It's like the way people trade and collect baseball cards only this is way cooler. They're the same size as sport cards and they fit in those plastic sleeve things. There are sites that do trades like SwapBot and ATC's for All but I'm not that far along yet. They have lots of rules and it intimidates me to start off with so many requirements because hey, isn't this supposed to be fun?

If anyone (and I do mean anyone) wants to try a swap out on me I'll be up for a one to one trade. You just have to promise me you'll spend more than twenty minutes on it and maybe throw some layers onto the surface. Let me know in a mail or a comment if you're up for it and I'll give you some more details.

Tearing out floors

2009-10-12T02:40:00.006-05:00

Dust allergies? Lots of nose blowing around here. We all sound like elephants.

Our old floors are being torn out this week down to the trusses (is that a word...I think it's what they are...floor joists? trusses?). Anyway since the original floor was laid on sand and dirt we had to remove the tiles and shovel out the old floors in preparation for the concrete. I didn't get to save my tomettes but the house will definitely smell better without all that dirt.

Here's some photos of what it looks like and what it will look like for the next few weeks while we finish the electricity and plumbing. The old kitchen (first photo), the hallway (second) and living room (third) are in shambles. If it looks like chaos it's because it is. We're living between the downstairs basement kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms and in between we have to walk through the mess. The kids don't mind but I'm having a hard time keeping them clean because they love tearing though the open spaces. We're going to really appreciate those clean floors when they're finished. Sanity where are you?

For this job (minus the electricty) we've hired pros but the rest will be us. We've laid off our Portuguese workers who were to do all the drywall and we've taken the job back. This is good and bad news but mostly it's good.

Makeover baby, oh yeah

2009-10-07T12:20:00.006-05:00

The front and back of my journal. The makeover is partially finished. I say partially because I keep adding to it and I haven't even whipped out the paints yet. I have a wonderful stack of old Science et Vie magazines from the 40's and 50's that were left in the house to work with. A little industrial but hey I have over two years worth so I have a lot to choose from. The ads are great. I'll have to scan some of them because they're really funny. You can actually own the cutting edge in recording technology with your very own REEL to REEL tape machine, portable of course.

Oh and next to my journal is the coolest rotten apple of the bunch. I love the color of it and it matches so well. I think I can Mod Podge it on there somehow.

A bevy of journals

2009-10-06T07:25:00.012-05:00

My Moleskine arrived last week and I think I'm in love. How could I have doubted you Mr. Skiné? We've hit it off so well. It started off as a blind date of sorts but ended with laughs, drinks and lots of fun crazy stuff and I LOVE him. My only problem (and it sounds superficial) is he's a little stuffy with his black outift and the dumb elastic closure thing. But we're working on it. Poor Mr. Skiné though. I think he thought he'd be out and about in some Swiss business man's breifcase, dashing to summits and meetings, the highbrow life, and here he is stuck next to my dusty bedside table and getting his nerdy cover all decked out in glue. Sorry. I still love you.

I'm really eager to start a mixed media journal and I've been reading up on it to get some ideas for supplies and techniques. I realize it's a no rules diary but I still want it to have some style and have it be pretty. I don't think I can justify another Moleskine purchase just yet (if only, sigh) but I really think I want ANOTHER journal for crazy uncontrolled thoughts and the mixed media business. Hmmm, maybe I'll try to make one. I'm starting with a collage group on Saturdays through my local library which please, PLEASE don't let it be a scrapbooking class because I have a little imagination spot in my head where it's going to be all these funky artists types and I don't want to be disappointed. It's nothing against scrapbooking but I'm just not into traditional scrapbooking at all so a scrapbooking class to me would be a waste of time. I think this might be something fun though because I know a few of the people involved and they're funky artist types. SOooo, I need the new journal for my collage group.

All these journals and I haven't even showed my datebook which is my other, other journal where I can jot down my to-do's and my planetary notes. It's where I've been slowly getting hooked on mixed media for the past few months because I do about a month in advance each time and then draw and cut and paste and stamp the daylights out of it until it looks ready to write in. I got the date journal model from Geninne Z's blog and flickr set and I've really had fun with it. It's so much more personal than a store bought date book and so charming to pull it out and write a date down as everyone else fumbles with their iphone. Yes I'm old fashioned. I'll share some bits of it when I get a chance to lay everything out and do some photos.

Five

2009-10-05T02:23:00.001-05:00

Angels on my shoulder

2009-10-02T02:40:00.010-05:00

Tomorrow my guy will be five. Whoa. Where's my baby?

Whenever his birthday comes around I get nostalgic. I think back to how scared I was to bring him home from the hospital. I was a geyser of tears, a hormonal basket case. I had a huge panic attack the night before the big departure for home and I had to be given a Xanax by night duty doctor. The nurse called from my room, "is it okay if she takes it because she's breastfeeding? Yes but I think it's a case where she really does need it" "well, yes her milk isn't really in so it's probably okay for tonight" Nobody knows that story. I cried on an interns shoulder and said "I can't do this!" And I stayed awake all night staring at Little S in his bassinette with this impossible fear gripping my throat. I ended up taking him home because I didn't have a choice. You can't stay in the hospital indefinitely can you? Or can you? I took him home and guess what. I didn't do such a bad job. And I didn't drop him, not once. I did trip on the steps the very first day home though and fell down the whole staircase, bare metal parts and all. The stairs were new and didn't have the treads yet so they were slippery. Bam! Bam! Bam! My mom screamed and lunged after us. I reached the last step bruised and breathless, and there I was. I mean there we were. I was miraculously still holding him cradled against my chest. That's when I knew that mothering is a complete and awe inspiring reflex that we have no need to control. It was useless to worry about not being a capable mother. It isn't something you learn it's something you know. I have to remind myself of that all the time.

On Wednesday I organized a kiddie birthday party for ten even though the new concrete driveway was barely dry and the new terrace has missing bricks. I made this very homemade looking train cake that I was really dubious about, we played American party games and there were prizes for the best party hat because everyone was asked to come wearing a silly party hat, and there were prizes for other games. We drew pictures, sang songs and believe me I kept those kids busy!

By six o'clock everyone was exhausted. I'd survived my first kid party. This was no Mexican kiddie party like so many we'd been to in the past with a rented party hall and hired catering. This was all me working with one electrical outlet and an awful lot of extension cords in a basement. I'd worried so much and I was totally unprepared but it all worked out somehow. The house is in chaos we've never known. There's virtually no electricity and three of the upstairs rooms are closed off because of the work and the danger of falling objects, ahhh! We have our new front door stored in the hallway and it's enormous. I'd burned a giant hole in the carpet with the heat gun and that's one of the first things you see when you walk in the house. It's a landmine of possible child catastrophies. No bother we had the party in the basement and I decorated so much it didn't look like a basement anymore. I played music and we danced!

The kids hugged me when they left and the moms told me the next day that they'd had as much fun as the kids. Two French people have since asked me for the cake recipe. It was delicious. The party was a success.

Even now it's still all reflex. I'm not sure how I pulled off a birthday party in the condition the house is in, really people kept asking me over the last week "are you sure you want to do this?" because they'd drive by and see the concrete truck spinning around or they'd see me cutting this foot high grass with a huge power mower. Somehow I did it. Being a mom comes with special powers. It has to because I'm in awe of myself right now.

The importance of journaling

2009-09-27T02:20:00.014-05:00

In this video, assemblage artist Janice Lowry talks about her art and particularly her journals. What an amazing collection! She's been journaling since she was eleven years old and now her archives are in the Smithsonian's collection. I like what she says here. It's sort of what I talked about in my last post, personalising your journal and why it's important to make it your own. And she talks about why it's important to even keep a journal and how it leaves a footprint and a mark of who you are.

"The reason I started the diaries was because I didn't really feel like I existed. So the diaries and the journals were really evidence of my experiences and responses to the world."

I didn't know that much about her but she died last week, which is probably why this video popped up. It's interesting that her work really is living on after her just like she says in the video.

Done

2009-09-25T03:34:00.009-05:00

I've finished my first sketchbook and I'm so excited. Seven months of drawing nearly every day!

I'm really eager to keep at it so I've ordered a new book which I hope to fill by Spring (but there's no real goal or anything, ahem). My new book, a Moleskine large size sketchbook, corresponds sizewise to my old book but I'm still dubious about it. As you can see mine is really broken in and has no pretentions. I carry it everywhere and yes the spine is cracked, á la Wreck This Journal so it's really comfortable and you can peel it back and hold it just so. It's been my little friend for months, all covered in treasure hunted stickers and my collage of the lovely Diane de Poitiers. I'll miss it.

Here are some of my last few pages, a mish-mash of sketches of some of my favorite subjects.

Stamps

2009-09-24T03:17:00.011-05:00

Yesterday my little kiddie mom art group started up the Wednesday art atelier again and I decided to show them how to do eraser stamps. I started carving these stamps over the summer and it's really addictive. I've done about twenty of them and Little S has done quite a few too. They're great fun for stamp addicts like me.

My inspiration for these and the atelier was the blog artist Geninne Z. I love her bird drawings and her collages are amazing. I also really love that she's so giving and shares so much of her talent. She's linked in my sidebar.

The supplies needed are easy-- a few dimestore quality rubber erasers, a small cutting tool (I use a cheapie exacto cutter from the diy store, small size, but it's a good idea to invest in a lino cutter which I really need to do soon here), and an ink pad or two, (preferably acid free like Colorbox but you can start off with anything really).

To start the kids drew an image on the eraser and we carved the images them for them. The kids really wanted to cut and stamp and have at it right away so they weren't that into the drawing part. I think it wasn't instant enough for their age level and we were having the atelier at a moms house where she has a veritable jungle gym in her backyard so that didn't help! The idea was to make the stamps then show them what they could do with them, like make cards or stamp your own wrapping paper. We never quite got that far though. Maybe in a second atelier we can do this.

I think the moms enjoyed the atelier the most and it was fun for me to share it with them. One mom was really talented and made these beautiful carvings right off the bat. But pssst I had a suspicion that she'd practiced first because I know she hates to get caught off guard. To be honest you probably won't like your first few stamps. It takes one or two tries to get the hang of it so don't get frustrated and start off with something easy.

It's fun to use them in collage and on cards. We make all of our own cards and wrapping paper so I get a lot of use out of mine. Make sure you wash them between color changes and after each use, otherwise they get messy. Mine got really messy with the kids yesterday because it was just too hard to ask them to rinse them each time, grrr.

Photographing kids

2009-09-23T03:11:00.014-05:00

I love taking pictures of my kids. I have so many photos it's almost like an obsession. They are so used to having a camera stuck in their faces that if they ever become famous it's going to feel completely normal to them to be chased by paparazzi.

Okay here's a great shot to do with kids of all ages, even babies, peek-a-boo in the curtains. There's something cute about the height of the curtains and the smiles you get from the game of it that works well. The natural light of the window is lovely. I have a ton of peek-a-boo curtain photos of my kids and it always works well. I think this is a great photo for an older child too. Just let them play and snap away. Give it a try.

The garbage can on the head shot? As long as it's relatively clean. This one was not my idea. Little S likes to bang on her head and face with a stick when she puts this on and she loves it,-- my chic, little garbage can not so much.

We finally made Little S's invitations for his fifth birthday party next week. Am I stressed about having ten kids over with the house so disorganized. Nahhhh.

Hey does anyone have any party games ideas for five year olds besides the usual,--pin the tail, musical chairs etc. ? I'm looking for something a little different or forgotten and I'm too lazy to dig through Martha Stewart archives.