Happiness is....

To clelebrate Spring a little blog post about my happy spots these days.  Yeah I know it's been awhile since I've popped in here.  I've just been cooped up in my art den drawing scratching off the days until the sun arrives.  I haven't been doing much else.  I've had lots of interests.  My brain is constantly churning but mainly it's centered on those few categories of interests that keep me happy.  It doesn't take much!

Art makes me happy.  I bought a new sketchbook last month and finally; finally FINALLY filled the one I started in November 2009.  I had such a bad relationship with that book.  I don't know why but it just had no identity.  I like my new book.  It's an 8x11 Canson 100g sketch and I'm loving it.  My goal is a drawing a day for the next year and that should have me filling it by one year with four drawings per page.  I'm only drawing in pencil now too.  Big change for me since I've drawn for the last five years in pen.  Funny though because I did that graphite ATC challenge a few months back and now I'm really comfortable with pencil again.  Reminds me of art classes in school all over again with the little tin box of drawing pencils, all serious about which one to use!  Nowadays I just grab an Ikea pencil and get sketching.

I can go on and on about art and fill pages about my workshop I'm conducting, ATC's I'm trading and art journaling but I'll save that for other posts.

Books make me happy too.  I'm thinking about making a vow here to myself to read more starting now.  I've got to get back to reading.  I've set a little challenge for myself to read a book a week but I think I'll make it three books a month instead.  I can order three paperbacks from Amazon and score free shipping with three books.  Anyway, I've been living in a cave since having kids and I haven't read much in the last seven years so any suggested reads, even the obvious ones, will be duly noted.  Right now I'm reading Loves and  Louis XIV by Anotonia Fraser.  I like me a good historical read any day.

Fashion makes me happy.  I have a a place to play now.  My closet ie. my fashion playground, looks amazing.  I'm so pleased with it.  It was a year in the making and made on a super small budget but it turned out so nice.  My husband is so cool that he's also building me a shoe closet downstairs that will hold over 200 pairs of shoes.   And yes I do have over 200 pairs of shoes--mostly heels that I barely wear because I have to hike uphill four times a day to deliver my kids to school, but I have them for when I want to wear them in the house and you know, check the mail.  I probably have way too many clothes and accessories but I'm a girl and it's my prerogative (ear worm alert)

Makeup is another happy spot.  I'm totally addicted to those You Tube makeup bloggers  (Michele Phan, Ruth Crilly...), so much so that Charlotte is addicted to watching them too.  No excuses.  A guilty pleasure like chocolate.  I've perfected lots of makeup in the past year watching these videos.  Charlotte watches them on her own.  She even has her own little makeup table in the bathroom.   She  is nothing like me at that age.  I was such a tomboy.  I guess my mother being a hairdresser  and makeup artist turned me off from it until I was a teenager.  Charlotte is the only five year old that can do a smokey eye.

Complaint time.  Why is makeup so expensive in France?  I would love to have a cheap option right up the street but no it costs a fortune.  I am in dire need of a visit home to spend all my piled up birthday money at CVS.  I can spend hours in that pathetic little store.  Talk about happy spots!

Cooking makes me happy.  I am still eating 80 percent raw vegan foods, but I have been baking for my family.  I got a bread machine which I love.  It's my new best friend.  I love the way you can just start it up and go.  I haven't got the kids 100 percent sold on it yet because they're so picky and so used to chemically filled sliced bread (my bad).  The machine bread is really good though.  It's really fun to make.  On Sundays I still cook traditional lunch and dinner.  That's why I'm 80 percent raw and not 100.    Each Sunday I make a feast from my Julia cookbook.  I miss cooking if I don't get out the pots and pans.  This weekend  I'll indulge completely.  Easter holds no boundaries.  I'm even eating cheese.

Lots of other things make me happy but those are just a few silly ones off the top of my head!

Bullets for speed

The best way to catch up is in a bullet post.

Everything is going well and I'm really happy living back in our old hometown. I hope we won't have to move again for a long, looooong while. The kids are happy with their school and we get lots of exercise walking them to and from school, uphill all the way. I'm keeping fit!

I've been looking for work in Switzerland and I hope I can find a good placement by next year. My goal is to get my French citizenship approved by next September. It's almost impossible to get a job in Switzerland without being an EU member, at least in the Canton where I want to work--lots of hurdles to cross. Anyway I'm at the end of my carte sejour in June so I have to do it now. Before now I've just been really lazy about it getting my papers done but it's time!

Even though I swore I wouldn't do the sales I've bought about twenty things so far. Shopaholic? Maybe, but the French sales are tempting because everything gets marked down incredibly low. I'll share some pictures. I bought some fun stuff from the usual stores, ProMod, H&M, shoes from Bocage and few pieces of jewelry from the odd shop. I swear this is the only time of the year when I don't thrift my clothes. Normally I buy everything second hand because it's so much more fun.

Charlotte has the chicken pox. She seems to be one of those kids who gets everything. She turned four in November and seems to be calming down a lot. She's still full of energy and sass but in a more constructive way.

Little S is doing really well in school. He loves his teacher. She's really good with him. He can almost read now. He's got a few friends at school but no playmates yet which is tough.

I'm happy but we're all a bit lonely here. I unfortunatey had to leave all my friends I had in Paris when we moved. I had a nice circle of ladies and we were a fun group. I created the group in fact and now they've kept things going without me. We did ladies night once a month and changed whose house we'd hold it in. Our kids were all the same age and it made life easy when you were stuck because I had about six people I could call on for help. Our husbands were all friends too and we did lots of dinner parties. I have neighbors here but everyone is really distant. I invite them sometimes and then it just sort of fizzles. I seem to remember that from living here before. It was really hard to meet people and I was often lonely talking to the walls.

That's all I have for now. I'll add more bullets in another post when I get time.

Trust

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.

The latest links

I've had a little less time on the computer lately and it honestly hasn't hurt me, except when I try to make my favorite gateau chocolat that I've never written the recipe down for and I realize my life is a giant crutch held up by little green lights. So I'm being good now that we have slightly better reception and FT (the French internet gurus) have told us they'll replace the lines inside and outside in a few months but first they want to carefully dismantle them and send them to a telecommunication museum because they're older than me and the guy who repaired them combined. The first thing the repairman did when he came in our house the other day was whistle and then he said, "wow those line are really OLD. Those are the GRAY cables from..." "You should have seen the cool rotary phone they were connected to" I said "but my husband threw it out" "we're going to try to bring you back to the 21st century as soon as we can" and like that he replaced two or three wires and then we were back online. But we still have a lot of blips and we still have the gray lines.

I've got a few links to share!!

First of all there's a new favorite blog of mine The Wish Jar by Keri Smith. She's so very amazing and I love all her tips for getting you to see things differently. I'm ordering a copy of Wreck This Journal as soon as I can afford to because I need to break out of my journal anxiety. One of the first exercises is to break the binding of the book, agh! I don't know if I can do that but how fun is that to do all these terrible things to a book. I was telling someone about this book and they were saying "why? why would you want to pour ketchup on a book page and paint with it!?" and I was thinking "oh she really needs this book " because it was written for people exactly like her.

Along the same lines is artist Michael Nobbs blog. He has a great downloadable book or two via Flickr, really fun FREE!!! books, one is called 75 Ways to Draw More. Check them out because they're really clever ways to get you to start sketching and journaling even if you've never drawn anything and you have no skill in art. He also has some of the best daily links on Twitter if you like discovering new artists. I've found most of my favorite sites and blogs through him and his daily Tweets which I think he said he spends a few hours a day researching.

Etsy has a lot of videos on their blog This Handmade Life which are really interesting peeks inside artists homes and workspaces. I particularly like their series called There's No Place Like Here.

This interview with John Lennon was done in 1969 by a kid who snuck into his hotel room. Now that kid all grown up has added images to the sound and along with some help has turned the whole thing into an amazing amazing amazing animated video. It's called I Met The Walrus. Wow.

Then there's food. And so when isn't there food? Well actually lately not a lot because my kitchen is a 10 square meter appetite suppressant. It's a disgusting mess. In spite of this (despite?) I'm really liking Smitten Kitchen lately. I can't believe I never even knew about this blog! It's so good. And it's really funny! It makes reading her even more fun. I really love her disclaimer which is along the lines of she won't make anything with really impossible to find ingredients. Yay! a snoot free cooking blog. I love those type of blogs because there are so many of the opposite type blogs out there. It totally inspires me to throw on an apron when I can identify with the ingedients list. I've cooked five things from her blog in the past few weeks and everything came out wonderfully.

All my other latest links are under Drawing Inspiration. I'll share some more things when my link bag gets full again.

The fun stuff

Here are some funny photos from our road trip.

"Oh wow, those cute guys are totally checking me out while I'm doing my workout!"

Take a car, any car thank-you-very-much.

"Please don't mount the lions." *snigger*

Another cherished mother daughter photo taken by Seb. Next time I'll ask someone like Pasta Guy to take our photo.

Impromptu mass exodous or what happens when the baby projectile vomits in the car.

More links for my blogiversary

I thought I'd post a few more fun links to go along with my blogiversary. I always like it when other bloggers that I follow share their links because we often have the same taste (otherwise why would we read each other's blogs).

a flickr pool for period rooms. It´s so fun to browse through these rooms if you're a house nut like me.

It's Lovely I'll Take It, a really funny look at the most outrageous photos from real estate listings. This one is even more fun because the writer has a really sarcastic sense of humor.

Amy Stein's Photography Blog, Amy is a photo teacher in New York City. I love all the inspirational things she posts and her great insight into the art scene. It usually frustrates me to read her blog because she talks about all these great exhibits that I want to see! I have my ears open though (and a subscription to the Nouvelle Obs) so hopefully I'll catch something here in Paris once day.

The ever awesome Lori of Camp Creek started a new blog called In Heywood's Meadow. If you haven't been following her blogs you are completely missing out. Homeschooling or not she gives me so much information about educating my children that I feel like I should pay her for this. All of her blogs are amazing and even if you don't have kids just click over anyway because I guarantee you will want to start a nature table and start sketching in your nature journal that you keep in your homemade field bag.

Most people in France know about the blog Stuff Parisans Like, but I thought I'd drop it in here just in case because it's a fun look at the French (and of course especially Parisians). Everything they say is spot on.

I'm addicted to decorating blogs. I love so many of them that it's hard to stay loyal to any one for a long time. Here's an example of one on my bloglines that I've been enjoying lately, Decorology. If you have one to share please leave me a comment because there's nothing an addict loves more than meeting a fellow addict.

Isn't it fun to share links! What's on your must read list these days? I think you need to do a post too.

Information please

I've taken Little S out of Wednesday his judo class because he's really bored with it and getting him motivated to go was starting to get to me. I'm not a big fan of contact sports. Anyway now that we have Wednesday free we're going to start doing cultural things in the city once a week (when it warms up) and up until then we're going to do cultural stuff at home. I also want to get him started on the computer. My question is does anyone know any good online computer games for kids (preferably non-character related ie. no Dora please)??

And while I'm asking does anyone in Europe know a good mail order photo printing service because I really have to get on the printing photos thing. It's getting out of control.

Hier soir

Bits of our evening as the sky outside turned a lovely shade of purpley blue and yet my camera wouldn't focus on the trees. I got really frustrated with it. It was Charlotte's bath night--they take turns. Little S was mad because he wanted to take a bath too so he crashed cars on the floor making lots of commotion and threatened to put his car in the bath. All the while I made papillotes of vegetables and cut up chicken for grilling in a honey-soy-ginger sauce. It wasn't anything special but it was one of those evenings where the camera was on the table and I kept picking it up.

I'm glad I do this sometimes. It's important to take pictures of nothing special.

Shine on

In tribute to the wonderful wit and charm of John. He's been gone for 28 years now and all I can think about is all of the music we've missed by not having him around.

John Lennon - Instant Karma
envoyé par AntiFlag607

Bullets again

There's always a lot going on here and so I thought I'd write a bullet post. These might have been entire blog posts last week if it wasn't for the pesky elections. Only the first few things are actually bulleted because Blogger is p*ssing me off with their bullet on-off feature. Just pretend it's all bulleted because I am going nuts trying to figure it out in html mode.

• My friend Sara who I knew from Mexico lives in Paris now. Our boys went to the same school and our husbands work for the same company. She visited for lunch on Tuesday with her boys. It was really weird to see someone I met in Mexico living here. It's really nice that we can stay in touch now. She keeps pushing me to drive over and visit her but I can't get past my Paris driving fear.

• My bread baking is really haywire as I've had several dismal flops in the past few tries. The worst was the poofy pillow bread I made for Sara without salt (forgot salt btw). It looked so pretty on the outside! I would have preferred that I'd not have to serve that one to a French person thank you very much. It was horrible! I'm on my eighth try or so but have gone back to traditional kneading and have sort of nixed the no knead version. That may change. The goal is a crusty exterior, lots of air in the middle and a yummy yeasty/salty taste.
  
  The in-laws haven't called and I don't think they will.
  
  In a weird sort of adopted homeland syndrome I have Mexico on my mind nearly every day and I really miss our life there. My friend Sara who was eager to leave Mexico told me she has dreams about Mexico all the time and I do too. I think it's a special place that really gets under your skin. I can't bring myself to cook Mexican food here yet and I get really nostalgic when I start going through all of my pictures. Life there is so different from anywhere else. It sounds silly to say that but it's true. It's nearly impossible to recapture Mexico when you leave it. The only cure is to go back.
  
  Charlotte is pulling herself up to a standing position now. This is really exciting for us to see her determination. I love this stage! I have to get out to the big city and get her some shoes. She really wants to walk.
  
  The window estimates are making our hair curl. We do have pretty fancy windows but this is incredible. Seb has done some calculations and he claims the recuperation of heat over a few years will make the windows a good investment. I hope he's right. My window pictures are in my Flickr photos if you want to see them.
  
  I've put my Twitter stream on my sidebar. I'm not sure if I ever thought I'd like Twitter but it's kind of fun. I always enjoy glancing over at people's Twitters (err tweets) when I'm on their blog. It's a fun way to update in snippets of one line without writing a whole post. Maybe a little too much information for some though (in a pathetic she-really-has-no-life-does-she kind of way).
  

Maintenance

I'm doing some light maintenance on my little blog here--adding lots of missing tags and organizing things a little better. This might take the whole month so if your reader shows me with 25 new posts a day it´s probably because of that.

Ignore it for the most part but not too much. Somewhere in there will be a new post from time to time.

Mom's day

Mother's day passed without a lot of fanfare chez nous as we were all beat up from a rough night with two restless kids, lots of bed jumping and a six a.m. wake up call. I had a hard time being cheery this morning and poor Seb wanted to make the effort but got lost somewhere between the coffee machine and the toaster and then just sort of disappeared for twenty minutes fixing the pool filter. So we just kind of skipped over the whole charade and helped each other get breakfast on the table.

After eating I went in and sat down ready to call my mom but instead she called me. I gave her the "I was just going to call you" scenario which was true, but I really think she thought I was giving her a story. And then who should walk in behind her on the webcam but my sister who has been deep in the dog house lately, but was holding a gigantic blue ceramic Tuscan vase with enormous lavender plants jutting out of it. I looked like the bad daughter again this year. Oops, sorry mom! I owe you a lunch date or some mother daughter sewing time.

Later in the day I played with Charlotte in the kitchen while I was preparing a special Sunday lunch for the guys. It suddenly struck me as I looked into her big, curious eyes that one day my sweet girl might end up being a mom too. It choked me up a little bit thinking about it and then it made me laugh at myself for being such a sap, but up until this moment I hadn't thought that far ahead to what she might become. It was the best moment of my day imagining her holding a cherub-faced baby --fleeting images of her crossing a street holding a wily toddler's hand. Flashes of my future, of her future and the intertwining of generations. That was my mother's day gift.

At five o'clock my friend Haley called to ask us if we wanted to drop over for hamburgers on the grill and we said "great see you in 20 minutes!" They'd planned a cookout with some other friends who'd canceled and so we became the fallback couple. We were cool with it and really happy not to have to cook! Haley and I nursed the babies and chatted while the guys talked about their jobs. One of the nice things about living here is every expat husband works in the same sort of job so you can be sure they'll have lots to talk about and the evening flow smoothly with no conversation gaps. At all the dinner parties we've been to the men are usually more gossipy than the women. It's fun to watch.

It was an unexpectedly nice day. I wonder where we'll be this time next year?

Happy May Day

May Day is a holiday in Mexico just like it is in France. We are enjoying our day off and loving that the weather is so beautiful. Little S is out of school for three days so we are planning lots of craft activities and a few picnics.

I hope everyone is having a lovely Spring day!

Template blues

I have a burning desire to upgrade to the new blogger but to be honest I´m scared to death I´ll lose my blog. On my other blog, the family blog I am really enjoying playing around with the layout and I enjoy the look of that blog so much more. This blog is boring me and has lots of sidebar problems, and always has. I almost threw caution to the wind last night and switched over. I was really tempted!

I know you can back up your template and save your links but what about your posts? How do you save all of your posts? I have never saved any posts and it kind of freaks me out. I´m probably a fool for not doing this and I better leave my template alone until I do it.

update: Yay I did it! No more orange *sniffle* by the way there is a way to back up your blog but it involves temporarily deleting your template which is even scarier than switching over. It´s featured in Blogger Help if you´re interested. I definitely have to do that. The only thing I lost were some of my most recently added links which were for some reason deleted. I will have to put them back.

All those pesky blogs

I´m not really blogging anymore in my other two blogs. The house blog, well the work has pretty much stopped on the old house since we moved here. Maybe I will get to pick it up again one day, who knows. The infertility-to-baby blog is still there too but I really haven´t wanted to post too much baby stuff on it because it turned into an infertility blog and then, well it just feels odd posting about all of our joy in a place where there is so much pain. I do have a huge affection for that blog though because it helped me through some terrible, terrible times. I´m not sure what to do about writing in it. I´ve thought of keeping it for writing about breastfeeding and I still may. And who knows if we will ever try for another baby. Oh god are we really that crazy? Well, at any rate there´s another blog on the back burner.

I do have yet another blog and that is the family blog, also on blogger but under a different account. Each day I post a baby photo or do a video of our surroundings. It´s got a totally different vibe than any other blog I've ever done. It´s a Stepford Blog-- not a place to vent about what´s bothering me. It´s positive and happy and I-am-the-perfect-mother-look-at-me type of blog. Life is wonderful on that blog one-hundred-and-ten percent of the time.

The problem with the family blog is that I have to write it in English and French. No problem really because Babelfish helps with about 65 percent of the translations offering a quickie no-brainer placement of all the necessary accent marks and of course the other 35 percent just needs some fine tuning, (well, usually lots of fine tuning in fact). I´ve convinced mother and father-in-law and even sister-in-law to start making comments on the posts and they enjoy playing teacher and correcting my French mistakes as I knew they would. French people seem to love to search for errors and correct things! And I suppose I enjoy learning and practicing my writing in French even if I should begin thinking entirely in Spanish from now on as my teacher has instructed me. I guess I´m a rebel at heart writing in French every day.

So yes, I will definitely not be starting anymore blogs. I think four is quite enough.

Smileys :)

This video is hilarious. And for the record I only have two cats.

In blogger rehab sort of

Okay well I have a lot of excuses for not keeping up my blog and good ones at that. My main excuse though is that my damn internet has been out for two weeks because Mr. Contracter is rewiring our house and okay yes the lights and phone work so you know who cares about a stinky thing like misschris and her silly internet, jeez lady PRIORITIES.

So I took matters into my own hands and called FT which cost a pretty penny when they discovered a loose wire, snip! Fifty four euros please Miss.

But even if it was up to speed my mom is here and there are lots of stews brewing chez nous. I'm just saying that if I owe you e-mail this is why. I'm sorry. I'm just not the internet café type. When it's down at base camp we don't go out in the field.

So don't fret. I did not die, get pregnant or move to Mexico (yet).

It will take me a few days to get caught up here.

Geek alert

On Monday night Little S had a tantrum and threw a chic little wood ABC puzzle across his bedroom which hit me square between the eyes on my forehead. I've got an enormous bump to go with the gash and the whole ensemble looks like a huge, pulsing zit.

Welcome to The Terrible Two house. AAAAAhahahahahah ooooewwww.

Um apparently it's Valentine's Day tomorrow. Seb actually had to remind me. That should tell you how much romance I have in my life. I totally forgot. I felt like a moron when he told me. Isn't it usually the husband who forgets?

My cat has been helping herself nonstop to the food bag in the cupboard. I just figured out what's going on. The girl does not know when to stop eating.

I'm talking about my cat...that is

So I called someone I'd met in the park, a new English speaking aquaintance for a play date this week. I'd left her a message on the weekend and she never called me back so I called her and left a message again. She was the one who approached me first for a date? I just decided to fess up and call her again today so I could get on with planning my week. I was a bit proud calling back so I was trying to appear casual.

me: "Hey you know maybe we can do something Wednesday Thursday or Friday" (note casual tone)

Gwyn: *long silence* ...*nose breathing* "Wellll, uh okay. How 'bout we try Wednesday first though and then we'll see about Thursday and Friday, okay."

me: *scratching head* Huh? ...Oh god she thinks I said Wednesday, Thursday AND Friday not OR...OR Friday...OR, OR I said OR! I sound like an idiot now! Why would I want to see her three days in a row anyway? Should I explain (...that she needs to get her hearing checked)? That's so weird she must think I'm such a geek. "Um yeah Wednesday's good for me!"

So here I stand sounding desperate for friendship with a huge zit on my forehead. "Well Gwyn you see it's not really a zit. My son here throws chic puzzles at grownups when he's pissed off. Okay go on now Little S and play with Charlene! Y'all have fun together!"

Later in the day I talked with my American friend Bea in the States on Skype. We were trying to have a heart to heart but a certain toddler wouldn't let us. He just kept pulling my arm and howling to get me to help him with his playdough which I had given him to EAT while I talked. I thought I'd go mad and Bea too. She's having a lot of problems and I really wanted to talk to help her work them out. She just seemed so sad. It was really frustrating because she was telling me really personal details of the "I said, he said" variety and Little S was acting like a total ass screaming like a terrydactyl for no clear reason. I lost my temper and started screaming at him. Groooooan...bad mommy. Then my camera went haywire and I lost video but I could still see Bea. We went through the whole "can you hear me?/I can't hear you/I can see you but I can't hear you" thing. Finally I was so desperate and grumpy I just started clicking everywhere to get it to come back. Bea kept saying "try this! click this!" and so I did but nothing worked. We ended the call with Little S SCREAMING in rage and throwing a play-dough spaghetti machine at me.

Bravo.

Anyway so tonight I pop online to check my gmail and suddenly I've got all these guys calling me named Marius and Enrique and they keep popping up over and over with Skype messages. And suddenly I notice that Skype is on and so is my f*cking camera! And it's been on for six hours in some sort of look at me I'm a cool lady in my living room watching tv in my woolly scarf thing! When did I notice ? When Enrique sent me a message saying I looked charming in my glasses:

"je trouve charmante dans tes lunettes mmlle"

So I'm feeling like a geek. I have no idea what I clicked on but you can be sure I'm deleting Skype and starting over.

Oh and Happy Valentine's day Enrique.

An important date or two

Oops it seems I've overlooked my blogiversary a few days ago. Well you know how that goes. After a while you stop keeping track. I'm like an old granny blogger now. Pretty soon I can start telling boring stories... "Back when I started blogging they didn't have Laser Blogger you know. We had to type our posts onto a keyboard with our fingers one-by-one." Everyone will look at me amazed. "Wow you must have been blogging a long time ago."

Anyway there are other more important events to celebrate than blogiversaries. Riana had her little girl on Sunday! She's still in the clinic with the baby (not telling the name yet...I'll let her reveal it) and everyone is fine. I'm really pleased to see all these new moms in France who are blogging. That's the reason I started my blog, motherhood. Trust me it gives you lots to write about. I look back at those old posts and laugh sometimes. First of all I was much chunkier and secondly I was so wrapped up in this world of baby and breastfeeding there seemed to be nothing else around me. It will be fun to watch all these new moms going through the same thing via their blogs. It's a very unique time in a woman's life.

Oh and I met this Ameircan woman at Little S´s gym class. She invited us to her place on Wednesday to do a hike in the snow. It seems that her little girl likes Little S and would like to see him because she said "wouldn't you like to play with Little S?" And she said very enthusiastically "YES!" He is always badgering her in class so I guess it has finally paid off. He's constantly chasing her around. I think it paid off.

Randomness

-Little S starts at a daycare center in the country tomorrow two mornings a week. I'm terrified. I have never left him with anyone except my mother in law and my own mother and even those times I can count on one hand. I know it will be fine but I think it will feel like my arm has been severed.

-He has some cool new Spiderman chaussons for his first day. I let him pick them out himself.
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-We start Spanish lessons in one week.

-My nosy eighbor is trying to help us find a babysitter on the day we go to our language lesson. He's nice to want to help but he keeps suggesting his grandaughter. She's nearly 30 so I feel strange. I'm not sure how much money to offer an adult. We didn't want to spend a fortune. I also feel weird about insisting that she stay at our place and not take Little S to hers. I'd much rather find a responsable neighbor girl so I can lay out all the rules but I feel a little trapped. What do babysitters get paid anyway? How do you find one?

-My mom is coming to visit in one month. I think she'll be staying for a whole month. We'll do our usual staying up late to talk and watch movies. I'll have to sleep up in Little S's room. Grooooan.

-I had a horrible nightmare last night that my sister was murdered. You know one of those really realistic dreams. I woke up Seb and said "Oh my god I have to call Jane!" This morning my first piece of mail was from her saying "I can't get you off my mind Chris it's so strange. Are you okay?" I hadn't heard from her in four months.

-Four months is the longest I've gone not speaking with my sister. It wasn't intentional, it's just that she lives with The Bulldozer now and it's pretty clear how I feel about him.

-I think the dream has something to do with wrapping my head around leaving Little S at daycare. Still it was strange that she wrote me this morning after four months of silence.

-Seb begged me to put away all the books on my little bookshelf in the hallway. I did it to please him but now I feel naked. I kept out 22 of the books just because there's no way to put away all the books. I have nothing to read!

-I borrowed a book from a friend. It's in French and I am enjoying it immensely. It's in my sidebar if you're interested. I like reading in French as long as it's not too weighty. The first book I ever read in French was called Les Survivants (it's called Alive in English). It was about the Uruguayan soccer team who survived a plane crash in the Andes by eating their dead friends and family. Yep, Cannibalism! I've also read Kurt Cobain's biography in French which was pretty fascinating. I learned a lot of slang from that one. I'm not sure if it will ever come in handy. I've also read l'Adversaire in French, a book about a guy who killed his entire family to cover up the lie that he didn't finish medical school and wasn't a real doctor. It's a true story. The book is really well written. Those are the ones I read--page turners! I can't read real literature in French. I get too distracted. I hope that changes one day.

-I have all these gaps after the titles in my sidebar. What on earth have I done?

-The other day our contractor asked when our cat was going to have her kittens. Seb and I realized that she may need to go on a diet. It's either that or stomach stapeling.