Free fall

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.

Jets

"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 hamster wheel

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)

Mother hen

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).

Stuck in the snow

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.

My double personality

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!

Printmaking

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.

Gribouillage

When Little S plays sometimes he uses pens and because he's a Real Boy he uses his pens like explosives. Suddenly he'll be drawing straight lines then he'll start making the airplane sound, then the explosion sound and BOOM all those sound effects. There's always a narrative like "the airplane is going reallly, rreaalllly fast and then ...pooooo, aghgg pow!" It always surprises me to see all the scribbling. The calm stillness of his straight lines is suddenly an explosion of color as he fills the page. It's out of nowhere. Last night I was thinking my life has been like that lately, calm lines then an explosion of airplane crashing scribbles.

So much happend in two weeks it's hard to imagine that it's been so short, wow. Writing about it all in detail would take me three posts so I'll just try to summarize. School was finishing up for Little S and we were planning a party with a few moms, straight lines and then it all started snowballing into about 15 moms and all their siblings, scribbles starting. I was cleaning all weekend in preparation and Monday night I got mad because Seb brought home a last minute dinner guest, an Arab collegue. It was a trying evening because he was anti feminist, heck anti woman from what I could see, and I had to REALLY bite my tounge the whole evening to keep from starting an argument. I was happy at the end though that he was there just as our bathtub came in a truck from Lyon at 9 O'clock, a long story funny story actually, but the short version is that a teenage couple brought it in a pickup truck, and anyway he was there to help unload it, so he did serve a purpose even though I was ready to pitch him into the driveway for being an asshat.

The next night I told Seb to try to get home early to help me with the garden because we'd lost a night. He owed me this after forcing me to entertain his lovely dinner guest. Seb was tired but one of the jobs was to burn all the trash at eleven o'clock when the neighbors are sleeping. And that's when after pouring gas on the fire I saw my husband in slow motion flying through the garden backwards. He ended up with second and third degree burns on his legs and he couldn't walk for a week. I still had to have the party because at least half of the moms coming were casual aquaintances and I didn't have phone numbers, plus Little S was a completely traumitized seeing his dad taken away in an ambulance at midnight. The party was a good distraction. Ummm, yeah you could say that.

We still had the workers coming from Portugal to begin the job on the house in three days and there was no way to cancel it. That meant lots of boxes had to moved, heavy furniture stored and we had to prepare the work area. Their boss, Seb's friend who was loaning us his guys said over the phone that he couldn't cancel, "but don't worry they'll help you move everything." I tried to move as much as I could, running up and down the steps over the next few days, filling boxes, fetching Velux windows, but I started to lose my mind with Seb in bed needing full care (he should have stayed in the hospital, we realize that now) and the kids under my feet, bored and restless. We called the in laws but they launched in to their usual speech about how they were busy. A day later I called back and we begged. Could they please come? They came the next day with their camping car ready to go with us into a campground. It seemed like such a good idea at the time but it makes me laugh now. Lots of scribbling.

The Portuguese arrived at 10 am on Monday. The camping car was in the driveway, husband was in the bedroom surrounded by piles of laundry and I was taking Little S to a birthday party. Everything normal right? A mom at the party asked if I could water their garden while they were gone on vacation the next few weeks and then she said "hey why not just stay in our house too?" What a stroke of luck. I think sometimes we have an angel. I thought about that when I saw Seb flying through the garden too. An angel because he had singed ear hairs and eyebrows but his face wasn't touched, just one leg very badly.

The Portuguese, all four of them, ahem took over our house. They did great work but for two weeks they used my tea towels to mop up grease, slept on the kid's mattresses and blankets in the dust upstairs (they borrowed them from the living room boxes) and littered our yard with beer and YOP bottles. They broke every trash bin in the vicinity and they never did move the furniture from upstairs but instead used the handy sofa table to cut boards. Seb's response, so typically male you have to laugh, "why do you even like that table anyway?" There was a lot of cringing in between admiring their work, truly a love-hate relationship. I was torn.



Yesterday we moved back in and I cleaned the toilet while Charlotte screamed in that whining "mom, bananas, nowwwwwww" voice. I was completely grossed out and I said to myself "are they really coming back in two months?"

The whole two weeks was like that. I also got a root canal, Little S knocked out his front tooth on his slide, we had dinner in Normandie with Seb's parents and I had a lot of moments where I sat in the wonderful garden at my adopted house and drew pictures of the view. And we watched the town empty as all of Paris went on vacation.



And that was what all the scribbles were about. Like when I moved to France and later to Mexico. And when Charlotte was born. And so many other times in my life.

Summer barbecue

I haven't had any blog time lately because things are just so nutty here. We've got some carpenters from Portugal lined up to work on the house, all legal (I wish people would stop assuming everyone in Portugal works under the table), and they're coming in ten days. It's a between jobs thing and they're squeezing in some work at our place when they can over the next six months. It's all very last minute and it will be like that until Christmas. They'll just kind of show up and then we have to leave them the house and let them work.

So for this visit we have ten days to clear out the upstairs and break the faux ceilings and most of the walls. All the kids things have to be packed and we have to find a place to live for the ten days too. I guess we at least have some notice but ten days isn't much.

In between this there's the end of the school year for Little S and the Wednesday picnic/barbecue I planned in the backyard with ten moms and about twenty kids. It kind of snowballed because at first it was just supposed to be our Wednesday art group but people kept saying things to me like "do you think I could invite Delphine?" (there are two Delphines coming) and I have a hard time saying no to anyone so I said "why not." It should be lots of fun and I love a backyard party but the house is a little skeery.

The whole house is hopping with fleas and there are boxes piled to the ceiling in the living room. And as if that wasn't enough there are large pieces of ceiling and house debris in the backyard where my terrace should be. And adding insult to it all is the famous tractor ruts all over the yard from the bulldozer, but hey I really don't care. If it doesn't all get cleaned up by tomorrow I'll throw a tarp over it. I've even invited Mansion Mom (I'm really curious about her). So yes, love me love my house.

And... if you love me and my house now then maybe later I'll let you sit in my very awesome cast iron Napolean III bathtub bought off of E-bay for nearly nothing. That thing is going in my future bedroom, right in the center of the bedroom like a piece of furniture. I'm in love with it. Right now it's in the (you guessed it) BACKYARD. It's quite pretty though. It should add to the kooky party ambience chez moi. Love me, love my bathtub.

Party weekend

We've spent the last three days in full fête mode at the LO's annual party. It was lots of fun, in the cool forest with tons of games for kids and S's favorite, a huge net suspended in the air for running on, boing boing. So many things to do we didn't even get to do it all in three days.

I'm totally worn out though--sun! crazy food! music! people! This town has been a zoo for the last few days, and while it was way too much fun it's kind of refreshing to hear the silence once again.

Workmen, workwomen

The French communist party is having their annual fête on the May 30th weekend and guess whose backyard it's in? Yep, mine. Isn't it fun? Every year our town hosts the event for the Lutte Ouvrière on the grounds of the old chateau about five minute's walk from our house.

If you like politics it's an opportunity to hear the famous Arlette Laguiller speak. The weekend is supposed to be lots of fun and even if you don't like politics it's got lots of music and activities for kids. All of our neighbors have been telling us it's not to missed and there are lots of little spectacles.

I think it costs around 15 euros for a ticket and kids are free. If you do come out with kids and you read my blog drop me an e-mail. I can at least offer you napping quarters for little ones and a place to warm up a bottle. Or just drop by and say hello.

Marcel

It's been a long time since someone close to me died. I forgot all about death, how impossibly hard it is to understand, but then our good friend and neighbor died over the weekend and I remembered how death overwhelms and suffocates and buries you in memories. It wasn't a sudden death but slow and long in coming, over a year. Its length should have made it easier to accept but because he was someone so full of life it's been hard to understand and it's a shock to everyone around him. It's always that way with people who are so present in life. Marcel was like that, omnipresent and energetic, he seemed to be everywhere at once. When we first met him he was in his late seventies and biking 40 kilometers twice a week. He had beautiful legs and he wore shorts so late in the season that you could see snow in the not so distant Alps, but he didn't get cold. And we noticed from our upstairs window that he saw everything. He watched the world go by and he studied the lake and us and our house from his bird's nest of a living room.




We've felt completely lost for the last few days. Marcel, Marcel, Marcel...he was more than a neighbor he was a parent to us. He said "you are like my kids" and we knew it. He didn't have to tell us. We had plans to go to Th*non either this week or next week to see him and say goodbye but of course it was too late because his cancer was far more advanced than he let on to anyone. We knew though because the last time we saw him he looked like an old sick dog, lifeless and barely able to move. He made us coffee but with so much effort he had to stop halfway through and ask for our help. It wasn't like him and I had to turn away and hide my tears because it was hard to watch. It hurt too much. In the last phone call to him he asked Seb to please bring the kids so he could see them one more time. We kind of knew what was coming.



I have so many Marcel stories! He was such a character. We never knocked on each other's doors, just hollered which was sometimes annoying for me running around half dressed "I'll be right there!" And we borrowed things from each other right and left,--onions, eggs, pots and pans and chairs. Whatever I'd need he'd have in his garage or usually something close to it. Barely a day went by when we didn't have coffee together and I always took over my extra cakes and cookies and later he would say "j'ai manger ton truc americain hier" but never offer a compliment because it wasn't his style. He always took our side against the snarky neighbors and since he was the Godfather of the street everybody listened because they knew they couldn't trump him.

But, what was most fun were his endless stories about the street and how it was in the old days when everyone would gather at night on their steps and talk and sing. He told us that gossip ran rampant and people would fight, actually fist fight because they'd had too much wine or something, but everyone laughed later and grudges didn't last too long. He told me stories and then he said "so you'll know and tell everyone how it was, especially this one because he's a Riveois",* pointing to Little S. And he told us how it was a child's paradise growing up on the lake, jumping in the water naked in the summer or playing leapfrog by balancing on the moored boats, and of playing hide and seek in the alleyways until past midnight with kids as young as three joining in, running free at all hours. He told us all his stories, about the war when he went to hide in the mountains and joined the Resistance and about how they found the American soldier whose plane had crashed and they helped him hide until it was safe. He told me about the German soldiers in the chateau at the end of the street and how the people on the street worked to feed the resistance with supplies from Switzerland brought across the lake and about how the provisions were hidden in a false roof in our tool room. He told how they ate stray cats because there wasn't any food and about how he finally moved to Lyon for a few years because he couldn't survive on the meager rations of his grandmother and the rest of the family. He brought it all to life for us and it was facinating.



And he was a fisherman. He made his living on the lake for most of his life. He explained to me what the treasures were in my attic, old rigs and lines and cork floaters, leftovers from a bygone era. He used to laugh at us when we said we loved lake Annecy (everybody loves lake Annecy). "It's a pond! he'd say. This is a real lake! C'est ne pas la même chose mes amis." He told us stories of working the steam boats on the lake, shoveling coal into the boiler. He'd always vie for the job of running the boiler for the yearly Rolex trip when they'd attach some watches to the bottom of the boat and drag them across the lake, testing their durability while executives toasted champagne. He'd always get the servers to bring him a bottle of the champagne to drink while he worked downstairs. I don't think there are any steamboats left on the lake anymore. They've all disappeared along with the rest of Marcel's stories.



Memories come flooding back. I can see us four ducking out from the sun on an absent neighbor's porch, listening to him and his wife tell stories about their travels to Corsica and Casablanca and telling us how they met. And my mind wanders off to his tenderly bandaging my hand when I nearly lobbed off a finger cutting carrots. I ran to his house for help. He bandaged me and said it was no big deal and told me of all his fishing knife accidents. I still have that scar. And of how they were the first ones to see Little S after he was born and how Lison would tear up when she'd see me with him and give me old world baby raising advice that seemed a bit off kilter at times but at times it worked and I would be surprised. And I have memories of us showing them 1930's artists singing on You Tube for Christmas dinner a few years ago and them falling back in time with each video, getting drunk on memories. And a funny memory of his fixing my tire when I crashed into the house (don't ask) and joking that he'd stick up for me if Seb got mad, teasing me about it for years after. He always stuck up for me, telling me with a wink that the mean lady at the end of the street who never said hi to me had cheated on her husband with ALL the men in the village in her younger days and that she was putting on false aires with me because she was jealous that I was young and she wasn't. And then there are the memories of all the dinners we had together, whew there were a lot of dinners and apéros!

Marcel and his wife on our back terrace--yet another dinner

He called my mom The Pin-up and she called him Picasso. They were fitting names for each other. He didn't just look like le Maistro he acted like him too, macho to the core, proud and an admirer of pretty women.

He told me once, "one day I won't be here Christine and you'll look at my house and say " It's Marcel's house" because for you it will always be my house but someone else will be living in it. Mais c'est la vie!" and he laughed.

*meaning born in the sector of Th*non called Rives, the French are very proud of their provenance and have a proper noun for "being from such and such town, sector or village"

The countryside

Sorry, I'm slightly addicted to these Picasa montages, (which btw you have to click on to make bigger here. They appear normal size on Picasa but when I upload them they shrink to nothing!).

These are just some mundane photos shot this morning on the way to S´s school. As you can see it's really rural here and we're really lost in the countryside. It's amazing to think that the photos from my last post of Paris are only 35 minutes away from all of this. Oh and check out the furry frost on top of my car this morning. Strangeness!!

Meeting

Slowly things are evolving. Gradually things are changing. I've started meeting people. Little French village is turning out to be a social goldmine. Who knew. I met four people last week alone. It is the charm of living in a little village that everyone wants to band together and affirm that "yes this is why we live here and not in the city." And it works. People smile and say "bonjour" and come up and just start talking.

I have been hanging out with Myla often and she tags along with me to brocantes and really scrappy thrift stores when she has time. She's starting her own business so she isn't around much. She introduced me to Etienne who lives up the street from me, a really nice mom of three who works from home. She's the one with the Dutch husband. They're a really sweet couple and Seb even got chatting to dutch husband one morning without knowing I knew him. Then out of nowhere the English mom I've met once or twice started telling me "we have to get together" which surprised me because I had written her off as not interested after chatting with her three times and not getting invited (for an American three times --that's a definite snub!). But I know sometimes it takes some (English *cough*) people more time so I've invited her over for coffee right away. I hope I'm not being too forward.

And then just yesterday a woman came up and tapped me on the shoulder. She lives right around the corner from me walking distance. She seemed really nice and I think I'll probably end up inviting her over at some point too once we get past the French obligatory three week wait period.

It seems there's a particular bond between the people who live in my little sector of the village and they even have a different name for this section of the community. It's an older part of the main village. It's like there are two distinct social circles.

What's funny is that everyone already knows our house. Many people even toured it when it was up for sale. They know when we bought it, what trees we've recently cut, when we open the shutters, they saw the moving truck, they saw that we took the ivy off the house, EVERYTHING. I don't even have to tell people where we live. They already know! Such is small French village life.

Thankfully it isn't like Chocolat (or at least not yet).

Burning wood

The night before last when I climbed the stairs and reached the landing I looked out Little S's window and thought, "more crazy neighbor burning wood--now we'll have to deal with all the smoke smell." But it wasn't a fire it was the sunset. I dropped Little S's pyjamas and ran for my camera. I started shooting, adjusting, and cropping out things like my dirty windows and the neighbors car. But it was so beautiful in person that I suddenly realized I wasn't going to capture what I was seeing and I was missing the moment.

So we sat there and watched it for about five minutes together.

The French countryside outside of Paris is magical. We are sure there are fairies and elves in the stretch of forest behind our house. There are traces of them everywhere. Every day we see magic, --footprints in the snow, foxes crossing the icy road, pheasants strutting into a delve and deer posing by the bend just before the rondpoint that leads to the Paris autoroute. I am so pleased with our little house in the country and all of the contact we have with animals and nature.

And the sunsets are amazing.

Everyone's talking...

...about the snow in Paris.

Okay, so apparently in Paris it never snows. Silly me, I just thought it did this every year but Seb says the people at his job are all talking about the big snow we had yesterday. For us it was pretty typical, an early January layer. But apparently this is pretty rare in this area.

I think it was a lovely gift. If I had known that it rarely snows in this part of France I would have been pretty sad. This makes it a little easier. I love snowy days.

The only problem is that the town isn't really good at keeping the roads cleared. We live in a really hilly town with ascents and descents on par with any alpine village in Haute Savoie. This morning I decided not to take Little S to school because I couldn't even get the car up to the end of our street. I felt really dumb because I learned to drive* in the French alps for goodness sake. But here they don't salt anything but the main street and at 8:30 it was a solid patinoire with cars skidding everywhere. I know what it feels like to lose control of the car and it's not fun. We decided to wait for the thaw.

I hope the snow stays for a few days and I wish we had our sled. There's lots of great places to go sledding near our house!

*learned to drive a stick--or re-learned to drive that is

Opulence

It's been a really busy time lately but also a really social time. I've met a really nice mom from Little S's school named Myla and we went to their house for a play date last week. Myla and her husband are lovely and I had in fact already noticed them because they are such a handsome couple. People watching outside of the school I'd been amused by them. They were like a sitcom family, so perfect. Her so pretty and ruggedly chic, and her husband somewhat dashing and polished and their little boy a small doll-faced blond, the kind of child you might imagine yourself having as you dreamed of having a family one day.

I felt very comfortable with her talking and being myself until I walked into their house and was a little taken back by the opulence. Their house is a palace, --three floors and five bedrooms and an office, a sitting room and a living room twice the size of my living and dining room. Myla is an interior decorator and they collect sculpture and rare furniture so the house is filled with things you might think at first glance you'd seen in Ikea, but were in fact on closer inspection the Real McCoy. I recognized things I'd seen in design books but I couldn't tell you where or which one. After I saw the house I began thinking of our house and all the broken tiles, dust and the shower in the kitchen and I felt a little out of place. But it turns out she's very nice and down to earth and interested in design so she knew our house just based on the exterior alone (touché) so I felt like I'd scored some taste points with her. In fact she's been so curious about our house that she hasn't stopped hounding me to come by for a visit but I've been putting her off until we can get through some boxes because right now it's just chaos and there is the Big Screen Monstrosity issue sitting in my living room. I'm not one to put on aires bit believe me if you saw her house you'd definitely feel odd about her asking to pee in your blue toilet with the white plastic lid. "Yeah, just lift the tank lid to flush it okay. Oh and wash your hands in the kitchen sink because the sink in there is broken (as we both stare down at the at the broken pipes jutting out)."

It must be my week for swanky friends because yesterday Little S and I drove to Paris to see my friend Sara, the one I met in Mexico. Sara lives in Neuilly which is the poshest section of Paris and the poshest part of France for that matter. The president lives in Neuilly with his wife the singer Carla Bruni and it's very chic to have a Neuilly address even if you only live in a tiny 75 square meter apartment like Sara. I had no idea about the Neuilly reputation until after I met Sara and started telling mil and others about my friend. Then Seb would always add "her friend from Neuilly" and everyone would roll their eyes. In fact sil got into a fight with Seb on the phone recently and used that as a jab "ohh, pff all your friends in Neuilly that you have SOooo much time for and not us!" or something ridiculous like that. I began to see that having a Neuilly address was like having a Beverly Hills or Uptown Manhattan address. Anyway I was really curious to see this Neuilly place and so yesterday even though the thought of taking the car to Paris and driving through tunnels freaked me out (note GPS doesn't work in tunnels!), I drove to Paris to see for myself what it was all about. It was pretty nice and the avenues were wide and tree lined like in all the nice areas of Paris, but it did have many average looking apartment buildings (Sara's for example--not a big deal except for the address). The difference was that there were more than your average number of Haussmannien apartments but not like in central Paris, these were ones with gorgeous iron gates opening up to large grassy knolls. What's was most shocking though was the houses you'd see here and there, --huge sprawling estates plunked right in the middle of Paris. Having a house in Paris, how much does that cost anyway? We know from studying the market all these months that in an average section of Paris a 75 square meter apartment will cost upwards of 400 thousand euros so the idea of a HOUSE in Paris isn't even fathomable. Otherwise there were lots of international types, rich private school kids dressed grungy on purpose (it shows), and the American Hospital where Angelina and Brad gave birth which is about three doors down from where Sara lives. I heard lots of English as I walked by the hospital and that was weird,-- people with midwest accents talking to people with Southern accents. Snippets of conversation, "I knooooow it is so cold and then I told him I said listen if you get transferred...." And when I got to Sara's apartment I said to her, "did you really have to go all the way to Mexico to meet an American? They're right outside your door!" And she laughed. Sara got her apartment by having some inside information through her banking connections. Since she's in finance she had some kind of inside track on the real estate market. Frankly though I found the apartment a little stark and the building was average. If she paid the market price for it, which I know she didn't, I would say it was wasted money but apparently it's a goldmine because of where it is. It's amazing what people will pay for being in the right location.

So that was my week of opulence. It's kind of fun to see how the other half lives and I'm enjoying it, but also missing my quaint little mountain life with my grumpy Savoyard neighbors. Things are so much simpler there and it feels more like me.

First snow

It snowed yesterday in la région parisienne and our back yard started looking a lot like the Playmobil advent calendar we have sitting on top of our giant 1980's tv . The first snow is so exciting isn't it.

Lots of fun wintery photos on my Flickr stream.

Avec papa

There is a funny phenomenon in French schools. The fathers often drop the kids off in the morning before work. It's kind of sweet the way they show up, father in business suit and little person grasping his hand. This morning I walked behind a little boy who rode on his dad's shoulders. I think this father often carries his son on his shoulders. I am amazed he has no regard for getting his coat dirty before work.

Seb works with several men who take their kids to school in the morning. It's acceptable in his company for the men to show up at nine o'clock. Meetings don't start until nine thirty because a lot of men show up later.

In Mexico the few times Seb took Little S to his school the mothers all commented and gushed. It wasn't so common for papa to drop off the children. I guess it's mama's job to do that! We always thought that was funny that they even noticed it.

Wednesdays

Seb is gone for two long weeks on a business trip and I'm here with the recovering kiddies. Charlotte still has bright red cheeks and looks like a little tomato with her fluctuating temperature going up and down from 36 to 40 like a stock market profile. It's always awful when a baby is sick because they just seems so helpless and pathetic. The other day we found a nice doctor that we all really liked and she explained to us that it isn't flu season yet (we have that to look forward to!) and that the kids are suffering from a simple ear/nose and throat infection. This is their second round of this same infection and I'm willing to try just about anything to get them well including antibiotics which she prescribed for Little S. Normally we don't do the antibiotic thing but this time I'm really desperate!

With me being alone for the next two weeks it has really hit me how much we need a change of pace. The thought of Seb gone and me being here alone threw me into a panic for two full days. It's nothing to do with being alone because I lived in Mexico for two months alone with the kids and that wasn't such a big deal. It has more to do with being tied to staying in this small town for two weeks and not knowing any adults. In Mexico I had friends but here it is really....quiet. I think I need to get a new routine. Developing this routine is going to be my new goal.

If you live in France you know all about Wednesday activities for kids but if you don't I'll explain. Almost all school age children have Wednesdays off here and it's on this day that most kids have an activity or two or sometimes even three! that they do. Many working mothers in France have Wednesdays off from their jobs and basically all they do all day is shuttle around the kids. In an effort to get Little S integrated I signed him up for Wednesday judo class. I was really excited because it was right here in our small town and there were in fact lots of fun activities for him here in small town. But I'm thinking of yanking him out for two reasons. One is that he's not that into it and he seems a little lost in his own world. In fact the judo prof's grandson has been assigned to constantly supervise Little S so that he gets his legs in the right position or any position for that matter because he just sort of stands there staring off in space blocking all the other kids. It's more of that kind of stuff that I just hope he outgrows eventually. Anyway, that's a big reason but it's also for a selfish reason. I'm trapped in small town all week and it's driving me nuts!

My newest idea is something I wish I' thought of before I signed him up for this class. It's to get him into some art appreciation classes at some of the museums in Paris. I like this idea because this will allow us to escape get out. I think this is more for me than for anything but I think it will help Little S a lot because he seems to get engaged in activities when they involve art. Seb is a little upset because with his upraising "you always finish what you start...blah, blah, blah" but I was raised with a sort of "hey you quit something when it annoys you because it only makes you deeply unhappy in the long run" You only have to spend 10 minutes with both sides of our families to see the good and ill of both philosophies.

So my plan is to take the Wednesday morning train and have him take an afternoon museum class if one is available. Then we can have gouter in a little cafe somewhere. Sometimes we can even have lunch. I also want to get my old digital camera fixed or else get him his own digital camera to take to the city. I think it will be really fun for us to take pictures together. I know he'll love this especially if we print them and make a project album out of his best photos.

Doesn't this sound like fun?

Here are a few of Little S's pictures. He takes so many with my point and shoot that I actually have to hide it from him because he's obsessed with it. He gets very excited when he see his photos and he actually recognizes them when I run across them on the computer. I think that's funny that he knows his own work from all the way across the room!


That's Seb and our cat Milly during our time that we were traveling with her. She was in the Sherpa Bag a lot of the time between the house and the hotel, slightly p*ssed off

Dad's reflection on a rainy car

His foot and a found gold ball in the new house--we live near a golf course so we find lots of balls

He has millions of photos --all very clever. He sees things we don't ever see. Make sure to give your kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews the camera as much as you can. You will learn so much about your world through their eyes if you do!