Meteorological Perfection

Sometimes in France you get everything you want. Yesterday just as I finished blogging the sun came out it and it warmed up a few degrees, so we went out for the afternoon. When I got up this morning, it had snowed. Not enough to cover the ground, just a thin dusting on the cars outside, but still! And now it's raining. What an obliging country.

Yesterday was doubly satisfactory because I got to do things I've been wanting to do for a while but have been too sick for. I got the last of the ingredients to make Tristram's tour de lit, I went to the mediatheque to exchange movies, and I managed to time it so we got to see the local history museum. It's an interesting place. It's in the old mairie (mayor's house), which is an extravagant centuries-old affair. It's absolutely packed with stuff, from neolithic & paleolithic hunting materials up through the late 20th century. It's kind of haphazard, as if someone's grandma made a giant scrapbook that took up several rooms, but there are all kinds of neat things hidden in amongst. There is an old ceremonial church chair with the supposed number of Napoleon III's votes on it (I doubt he really got over 7 million) and Cardinal Richelieu's deathmask tucked in a corner, for instance. Why? Because lots of stuff happened around here. It's still stunning to me to walk into a room of a local history museum and see photos of dead soldiers in a battle that took place a few blocks over--Oh yeah! World Wars I and II happened right here where we're standing!

There is a second floor that is apparently filled with toy soldiers, but as there was no elevator and we didn't feel like wrestling a stroller up a grandiose old staircase, we saved that for another day. When we left, it was already getting dark, so I got to see all the Sparkly Day lights on as we walked home. I've seen them up for weeks now, but as I'm never out at night I hadn't seen them lit. They do an impeccable job on Sparkly Day here; there are sapins de noel and lights all over--like, every remotely important street or square in town--but no obnoxious nativity scenes at all.

That's a good reason to stay: They handle the religious/secular thing so much better here. Proselytizing is actually illegal, as well it should be. Jehovah's Witnesses can't come to your door, so they have to content themselves with conspicuously reading The Watchtower on the bus. And having that firmly secular foundation means you get to enjoy winter holidays to the full without all the worry about religious insensitivity, because nobody IS trying to shove their religion down someone else's throat. It's just all to be enjoyed.

I want to leave because I'm starting to get really eager to see the winter regrowth that I'm used to, where all the fresh grass comes up and early bulbs start blooming and you take a nice hike in the sun on Sparkly Day. That's probably not going to happen this year.

I'm starting to understand how some people end up not taking their full course of antibiotics. It's just so easy to forget once you are feeling good again and not thinking about taking medicine. Of course, there are also some truly stupid people who think it'd be a good idea to "save" them for next time they're sick, but probably none who are intentionally trying to become walking incubators of drug-resistant superbacteria. Today is my last day, so unless I completely space out tonight I should remain a good patient.

Something is definitely up with Tristram; either he is not feeling good or that next tooth is about to finally pop through. He is mostly happy, but then will just shriek. And he's back to three naps instead of two.

His new game is opening and closing doors. This will inevitably lead to some finger-pinching, but he's clever enough to usually stay pretty careful. Soon he will have figured out the doorknobs and we'll have to keep the deadbolt on the front door. He also has taken to putting apple pieces down my shirt; I'm not sure what makes that so entertaining to him since all I do is pull the apple back out the bottom. I think he is trying to figure out some way to combine breastmilk and apples, his two favorite foods.

I'm starting to forget what nice weather looks like. It's gray and cold every day, and I am still feeling like we've been having an unusually wintery front come through but it will be back to normal any minute. That, though, seems less and less likely. It may be that I won't see the sun, or feel warmth on my skin, again until spring. Which I gather comes later than Feb. 1 in these parts. I would mind the gray and cold less if it would get its act together and precipitate, but it's just dragging on in this taunting, "ha ha, I'm going to storm--no, just kidding--going to do something cool--no, just kidding" way. Rain or warm sun, make up your mind and get to one or the other already! This weird liminal weather grates on the nerves.

The weather reminds me of one of my biggest reasons for wanting to stay at least through the summer, if not for a whole 'nother year: I'd love to see the area when it's nice. I'd get to enjoy it more, and there are so many places that would be beautiful in summer, not the least of which is the park next to our house. It seems a shame to come for the winter and leave as soon as things get nice again.

I want to leave because I miss my friends and family. Thanksgiving makes it apparent how alone we are here; we have no family and don't really know anyone in the area.

Better today. I actually slept last night! There are very few feelings more blissful than lying down when you're tired and being comfortable, so that you can feel you're actually going to drift off to sleep soon...it tempts one to lie awake longer just to enjoy it. Today I'm swearing up and down that I'll never take being able to lie down when tired for granted again, but of course I will by the end of the weekend.

Tristram is a little fussy, though--he seems extra-tired, and he's unhappy about something. I think he's picked up a bit of a cold. Oddly, Jonathan also is starting to get sore in the same place I was, even though he doesn't have tonsils. Hopefully it will stay at the level of a minor cold, like I now have, for both of them.

Tristram is, though, extremely happy that Mommy will play with him and read to him again. We went to the library today; I had put off our weekly trip because it seemed so mean to go and get a stack of new books and then refuse to read them. He's just too young to understand why I haven't been doing my normal mom things this week, and now he won't let me out of his reach.

Baguettes continue to rise on my list of useful parenting implements. They're a snack he can work on all day, the older they get the better they are for him to teethe on, and they're the perfect width for his hands to grab. Plus they kind of roll if you throw them right.

Bureaucracy with a Baguette

Yes, I did go to the Prefecture. I decided that there's a certain state of illness that's actually ideal for dealing with bureaucracy and lines. It's when you are just sick enough not to care where you are or what you are doing, since all you are really up to is staring blankly into space anyway. Now mind you, that's dangerously close to too sick to drag yourself around, and I was right on the edge on Tuesday. But I figured I could sit in a chair and hand over a stack of papers well enough as long as no one threw any surprises at me.

What I forgot to take into account, not having been this sick for at least a couple of years, is that babies aren't so big on letting you just sit and stare. No, instead I walked Tristram around and around the waiting room to keep him content for an hour while we waited to be called back to the guichet. I started thinking that it had been a mistake to come, but once you've handed over your convocation and your passport, you really can't leave until you get called because you need the passport back. Well, when we got back Tristram was just completely done with sitting in the stroller, or on my lap, and so the whole appointment went like this: pull out one piece of paper, dash across the room and retrieve him. Pull out another piece of paper, dash across the other direction and retrieve him. And so forth.

All this rigamarole for my recipisse de sejour was not the best for my health, but it turns out that my health was probably the best thing for my recipisse de sejour. I thought I had all my paperwork in order, but that's not necessarily possible when dealing with French bureaucracy. The lists they give you aren't very clear in their descriptions of the required items, and often each fonctionnaire has his or her own interpretation of what a particular item is supposed to be. So while I thought my "attestation bancaire" was supposed to be the same documentation I had provided at the visa office to show that I have the means to live on for a year if need be, it turned it had to be from a French bank. I burst into tears. The fonctionnaires are very used to people coming in with missing paperwork and then being rude about it, so the woman at the guichet had clearly gone into dismissal mode. I think, though, that it was a lot harder to be mean to a sick mother with a cute baby who, instead of yelling at her, started crying and asking what she could do to fix it. In the end, she filled my whole dossier except for that sheet of paper, drew up, signed, and stamped all my recipisse paperwork, and hand-wrote me a note on my convocation to come back at 2 pm on Thursday with my attestation rather than starting the appointment process over again.

That left open the question of what the attestation was actually supposed to be. There is no clear description available, and I don't have a year's worth of assets in euro, though I do have that much saved in various American accounts. I went to the bank yesterday, and the banker asked what kind of attestation--he ended up drawing me an "attestation classique" and warning me that it should work, but "one never knows" with government. The DMV was really starting to look like a model of clarity and efficiency. I took Tristram by the playground for this picture on the way home since he's been very disappointed in my listless mothering this week.

This morning, I was feeling so awful (I've been sleeping 2-4 hours a night because of being so sick) that I started crying again when Jonathan had to leave for work and asked him to cancel his evening classes so I wouldn't have a 12-hour childcare stint on top of a possible second prefecture failure. As it turned out, though, my luck changed today. My attestation--which was in fact nothing but a letter from my banker stating that I have a French account "and it functions very well"--was correct, and I have my recipisse. I also (I think) have finally turned this illness around, though how much of that is emotional relief is hard to overestimate. I have had a terrible soreness and pressure in my tonsil and ear since Sunday morning, so that it felt like I had strep throat and an ear infection all at once. It spikes if my ear or throat gets cold, and when I lie down--hence the sleepless nights. It didn't seem to be bacterial after all, since the antibiotics made no difference, and even the corticosteroids weren't taking away the swelling like they ought. Early this morning, I got a truly horrible taste in my throat and a truly disgusting runny nose--I mean, I salt-water gargled for a solid half hour because it was just gross. Now the swelling and pain are just about gone, and I've got at least 80% of my voice back all of a sudden. I think what actually happened was that I had a pocket of infection verging on an abscess that was pressing on my throat and ear nerves, and it finally drained. Hopefully, hopefully, this means I will be able to sleep and get better now. I've never been so delighted to have an immensely runny nose and a chest cough. It feels great!

And Tristram? He will be equally delighted when I am up to reading to him again, but he has been handling the week very well. Turns out the trick to getting him through bureaucratic appointments is to hide a half-baguette in the bottom of his stroller and let him find it and pull it out himself. Then he will happily gnaw away. He just keeps getting smarter and smarter, too. He always puts a quick stop to my reading my own books, usually by stealing my bookmark and eating it and then throwing my book on the floor. Last night he came up with a new strategy: he took my bookmark and put it back in my book. He's also got a new way of telling me when he wants a nap: he goes into his room and tries to climb into his crib. Clever boy! Now, if we can just teach him that food is not for stuffing down dad's pants or in all of our shoes, and that sharing your foodd is very nice but only BEFORE you chew it,we will be all set.

Still sick. It hurts a lot more when I lie down, so I only slept 1:30 to 5 am last night. The big question is whether I'm going to make it to my appointment at the prefecture today to get my recipisse de sejour. I'm thinking yes, since once we have them we can go the CAF and get government aid on our rent, though it's going to be a very painful day. But it'll suck whether I'm home or out, and if I go out at least I can feel better that I'm getting an essential task done. Jonathan had his prefecture appointment yesterday while I was at the doctor. I almost begged him today to skip teaching and help me so I don't have to drag myself and Tristram to the prefecture in the freezing cold without help (the rooftops I can see from our window are still all icy) when I feel like this. But of course that's not something he can actually do.

While I was up late drinking tea, sucking on throat lozenges, and whimpering, I started thinking that someone should base a superhero on tonsils. Without any direct reference, of course, because that would be silly. But they could usually save the body from infection/world from peril, albeit while that effort caused them to swell up and inflict great pain on their surroundings and those they are protecting. Once in a while they'd get so out of control they'd have to be aggressively treated and possibly even removed. Then I thought, wait a minute, doesn't that exactly describe the Incredible Hulk? So now I can't think of him as anything other than the Incredible Tonsil. I suppose one could argue that it describes every Stan Lee superhero. Maybe I've just figured out something about Stan Lee's medical history.

What My Tonsils Look Like

No, actually this is my most sewing recent project. I made two of these mushroom cushions, but the first one turned out pretty disastrous. That's alright; I figure the first time I try something new and more complicated is just for practice, and if it turns out well, lucky me. If not, the second try is the one that counts. This is the fourth project I've gotten out of the halloween-costume fabric purchase (costume, pincushion, skirt, cushion). Next up is hemming some pants and making Tristram a tour-de-lit. This was a good learning project, because there are some things that seem like they should be very obvious (fitting the lining to the cover fabric properly, lining up all your pattern pieces for both sides so they are opposite, not parallel) but are surprisingly slippery till you've screwed it up really well one time. Then it's obvious.

Right now, though, I'm taking a break from everything possible. Turns out the reason the cold was hurting my ears and throat so much is that I was working on a doozy of a tonsil infection. I have no voice, and have barely been able to sleep for the pain, and Tristram doesn't understand why I won't read to him or sing to him or even play much at all. This morning I went to the doctor, and now I'm taking amoxicillin, prednisone, and a lot of paracetamol (that's another flavor of Tylenol, for those who haven't sampled the European analgesics). I don't remember the last time I needed an antibiotic for anything, but in the rare cases when they're appropriate, they're really great. Same thing for corticosteroids.

The system in France is pretty hard to beat. There are doctors all over, so you would be hard put to situate yourself more than a 10 or 15 minute walk away from one. Then, you can have an appointment practically the instant you walk in the door. Then you walk across the street to the pharmacy, hand over your prescription, and they turn around and pull your medications off the wall and hand them to you. I was concerned that I'd get charged a lot, since I don't have my French card yet and they're loathe to accept travel insurance. They want you to pay them and get reimbursed from insurance yourself. But guess what the bill turned out to be for a same-day appointment and three prescriptions? About 33 euro. That's about $45. The French do pay higher taxes--much, much higher taxes--, but they get a good deal for them, in terms of availability, quality, and efficiency of care. It's going to be hard to get used to the American wait, and the American prices even with insurance.

So I want to stay because of the socialized medicine. Why waste time and money like we do?

I want to leave because we're out of money for the month again till Jonathan gets paid. No new recipes this week; we're eating pasta every day.

Jungle Gym

Tristram likes chicken night too! So much, in fact, that last night he came over and liked all my potatoes right up and I almost did not get any for myself.

He also likes French toast (or pain perdu) so much that I've changed the title of my food blog to "A la Recherche du Pain Perdu." Same url as ever, though. Turns out that the recipe I put up there counts as health food! I have been eating mostly healthy food since I got here, which is made much easier by the fact that in France chocolate is considered an essential part of a healthy daily diet. Chocolate or no, and despite being much fattier than I eat in the US, I've lost a lot of weight, and so has Jonathan. We've had to retire at least two pairs of pants apiece. (There's no word that is the opposite of outgrow. I have not, fortunately, ingrown any pairs of pants.)

What other news? It's freaking cold. Really, really cold. I have started wearing a hat and gloves. It's so cold that it makes my eardrums hurt, and my face gets so cold it feels like even my gums are getting chilled right through my cheeks. I would just start wearing a ski mask around, but local businesses might get the wrong impression. I'm a little nervous about winter, especially with being down two pairs of pants and it becoming increasingly clear that, no matter how woolly my tights, short skirts are not going to be wearable very soon.

We've been digging out Tristram's winterwear, too. Have you ever set aside an article of clothing that was way too big for your baby, and gotten so used to thinking of it as really big that by the time you thought, "Hey, I bet that'll fit now!" it was too small? I've only done that with a couple of things, but it makes me feel extremely silly.

Tristram's new loves, besides pain perdu, are apples, the playground (especially watching other kids, though he's still shy--he walks up to about three feet away from the nearest older boy and then just stops and stares at his every move), and leaning back on stuff. He really loves reclining. Now that he's able to just get up and walk off whenever he wants, he has no more concerns about getting stuck. He lounges back on pillows, or our legs, or anything really, and just laughs and laughs. Also, as you can see, he thinks I am a pretty good substitute for the playground to climb around on when it is too wet out.

Part IV

Now after reading all about the train saga, you are probably asking yourself, "What moral lesson can I draw from their struggle?" Well, here it is: Jonathan is the best dad in the world and everyone should get him a really great Sparkly Day & birthday present, such as:

new headphones
Thinsulate gloves in black or grey
black sweater (xxl--he's thinner but not shorter)
grey sweater (xxl)
a smaller belt (36-38)
smaller jeans & pants (36 x 34)
VCR (French region or all regions--a simple one; we can't take it back with us)
Nintendo DS games
Taters of the Lost Ark Mr. PotatoHead doll
Giant KinderSurprise egg
A good sturdy laptop bag/briefcase with a shoulder strap
Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days game
art supplies
mittens for Tristram; he worries about the little hands in winter
something that will teach him how to knit

Part III

We thought we were being very clever by getting on the train at 5, in time to be home for Tristram's dinner and bedtime. It's supposed to be a little over an hour to our stop, and then about ten minutes to get home.

We started to get anxious when two trains in a row were cancelled or delayed. But we got on soon enough and were on our way. Then, two stops into the ride, we sat and sat and sat. Finally the conductor announced that the A line had been interrupted on the far side of Paris because of a "serious fire." We spent the next three hours getting on and off trains, both with and without having traveled to another station, and sitting in stuffy tunnels. At one point, we got to sit in the tunnel with the smokiest smoker who ever smoked. He smelled so bad I had to turn my face into my sleeve as a gas mask to keep from getting sick, and just being a few feet away from him was enough to make Tristram start coughing and then crying in distress. Could I have thrown that man under the train, I probably would have.

We did, after an hour of confusion, make it into town far enough to get onto the Metro line that would take us around the tunnel fire. Then we sat and sat and sat on that train, too. Apparently since more than a million people use the A train every day, and they were probably almost all going to switch to that same metro line, they started running so many more trains than usual that they got backed up and spent most of their time sitting in the tunnel waiting for their turn to pull up to the stop. So, another two hours to get through Paris on the metro.

Should I add that Jonathan was wearing Tristram all through this? It was essential to ease our getting on and off of trains, to protect Tris from the crowds, and to keep him relatively soothed. Of course there is no way to keep a tired, hungry baby from crying when he is overheated and stuffy in a tunnel of overbreathed air, especially when he is surrounded by frustrated, angry people. So add a crying baby to the list of the evening's woes. Still, though, it was one of those times when we were extremely glad to be able to wear him. Jonathan, miraculous dad that he is, even managed to get him to sleep.

Finally we got back onto the RER line, as they had gotten the fire out and resumed traffic. I thought we were almost home free. Then we pulled into the station that had not had any trains coming in for the last five hours. You know that scene at the end of Crocodile Dundee where the stop is so crowded he has to climb over people's heads to move at all? Yeah, like that. Only much, much surlier. Now, I should also add that with that weird sleeping-bag thing in the stroller, it's impossible to fold it up neatly (or at least I haven't figured out how yet). So our stroller nearly got broken, I got roundly cursed for having it at all, and the poor man next to me probably still has its indentations on his shins. As the crowd pushed on, I also heard Tristram wake up and scream because people were pressing on him so hard. That'll panic a mom. I was very glad that Jonathan was wearing him and was able to get an elbow around him and shove back to keep some breathing space for the baby. Nonetheless, I was crying openly by the time we got off at our stop.

Guess why I want to leave?

I want to stay because at least there is public transportation, and most of the time it works quite well, and it's not the southern California freeways had any guarantee of being better. But damn, when public transportation breaks down here it does so in dramatic fashion. Ask Jonathan about the time he had to take the bus home from work because some moron fell in a hole at one of the stations on our line!

Part II

So, Monday. We went back to EuroDisney, since we needed to bring our passports to get our annual passes finalized, and we had a free day, and it's fun. The trip out went fine, and since the park is pretty empty on Mondays we got to do lots--Jonathan got to go on his Indiana Jones roller coaster, we took Tris on most of the Fantasyland rides, we walked through the Nautilus replica, whose giant squid attack is Jonathan's new favorite feature...Tristram's favorite ride is the circus train. It goes a lot faster than the Anaheim one, so he looked at me to see if it was okay or if he should be worried, and since I was happy he broke into a huge grin that didn't leave his face till the end. I guess it was a roller coaster by baby standards. And the Snow White ride here has a conclusion, instead of just ending with the Queen struck by lightning and Snow White still poisoned and no prince in sight. Nice touch.

We discovered, though, that learning to walk seems to have been the turning point marking the end of his cheerful willingness to just go along with whatever we're doing. Our one lingering concern about the stroller is that it makes him too passive--he just sits there looking instead of really interacting--and apparently he agrees. He flat-out refused to sit in it at a couple of points, and was furious that we wouldn't let him walk and crawl all over the ground. Next time I think he will need to wear his real shoes. And we'll need to schedule walking time about once an hour to keep him content. Overall, though, he was still pretty amazingly good, especially considering that by Monday morning he had a tooth so close to coming through that you can actually see the white through the last covering layers of gum.

His new refusal to just be packed/rolled along makes me wonder--what is the official definition of a toddler? Is it whenever they start to toddle, or is there a specific age? Tristram now acts more like a toddler, and I think we have hit the toddler stage of difficulty taking him places. He's able to do just enough to keep him from being content.

Perhaps we should have been forewarned about the ordeal to come by our lunchtime adventure. I got in a line with 5 people ahead of me, and it took 45 minutes to get my food. Five different employees had to come to figure out how to use some coupon someone ahead of me had--apparently Monday is trainee day. I, and the other English speakers in line, were getting more and more infuriated by the minutes, but the French customers didn't seem to mind. I think they are used to lower standards of customer service. It was one of those times when you're caught between rage at the incompetence of the guy working the register and pity for him, because he can see the line backing up farther and farther with angrier and angrier people, but there's not a thing he can do to make himself any more competent to handle the problem.

Other than the world's slowest lunch line, the only black spot on the day was the mother who pointed to Tristram to tell her son (probably about 4 years old), "Look, he's just a little baby and HE's not crying! Why are YOU crying? Are you weaker than a little baby?" Publicly shaming your small child, especially for crying when he falls down and gets hurt (I think that's what happened), is not what I would call good parenting. Neither is refusing him the right to his emotions, and neither is being a sexist pig and teaching your son to be one too. Now, I must admit that she at least wasn't doing her child physical harm like the pregnant smoker we saw last time. But it upset me even more, and I think it's because she appropriated MY child to use in mistreating her own and furthering her nefarious goal of promoting sexism. Is that really any different from pointing out my child as an example to use in telling her kid to be racist, or anti-semitic, or any other evil position of prejudice? If you're a bigot, then fine, you're a bigot; if you're an unfit parent, then fine, you're an unfit parent, but leave my kid out of it!

So overall, a very fun day, though the next trip will require more careful planning to manage the baby/toddler/whatever you're supposed to call him at this stage. We have found the best day to go, we will provision ourselves with shoes and more food, and we will take him on the train ride to happy him up if walking around some doesn't keep him content.

Oh, my. This will require several parts. Unfortunately our camera is charging now and has been batteryless all weekend, so I have no new pictures to add. I'll make it up. Speaking of gazelles (and blog pictures), how'd you like that cornflake video?

So Sunday was a good day. We ate some bread, we got on a train, we went to the highest point in Paris. It's actually a cemetery in Belleville that you've probably never heard of. It is also the site of the first French visual telegraph, dating back to 1792.

We started at the Belleville metro stop, and found ourselves in a pretty impressive Chinatown. Well, more of a multinational Asiatown, edging more and more into Arabtown as you head up the hill. There were tons of restaurants and shops that looked delicious and very authentic. They even looked too authentic for us in some cases (Jonathan is pretty sure he saw canned camel meat in one window). There are also a lot of workshops that will build you custom furniture and so forth that looks to be of surprisingly good quality for its prices. As you head up the hill, it gets more and more low-rent, but there are also more really good artists' ateliers and high-end handmade-goods shops. The weirdness of the mix peaks when you get to the viewing point overlooking the Parc de Belleville, find yourself facing a better view than you had from Sacre Coeur, l'Arc de Triomphe, or the Tour Eiffel, and then realize that you are also standing next to a public housing building.

The park is gorgeous, even with the fountains turned off for winter. There's a museum about air (the Maison de l'Air) that looked to have all sorts of air-related toys spinning and flying around inside, as well as some genuinely informative exhibits. I found myself thinking, as I often do, "What a great place to take a slightly older child." The parc is terraced into a hillside, and is, like the last Parisian park we visited, easily in the top ten parks we've ever seen. Plus it had the most amazing playground, also terraced into several levels of hillside, that we have ever seen. Hands-down the best playground in the world. Indescribable, really--terraced levels of castles, sound holes, slides that send you diving through the earth to the next level, banked walls for running up the hillside, climbing walls on every possible surface, tangles of wooden beams to climb up and down on...

We realized belatedly that we should really have gotten off at Telegraphe at the top of the hill and started with the cemetery, then walked down through the park and Chinatown. Oh well.

I want to stay because 1) Paris has the best parks, 2) Paris has the best (and most) playgrounds, 3) How cool is it to put up public housing with the best view in the city?, and 4) The Arts et Metiers metro stop is set up to look like the brass-lined inside of a giant submarine.

I want to leave because 1) The wheelchair/stroller accessibility of public transportation is not even good enough to be a joke, 2) Even the best French playgrounds have no swings, and 3) there are some really, really awful women's fashions going around here right now. There's an atrocious haircut that's basically a modified super-chunky mullet (short chunks on top and on the sides, long underneath and in the back), a disgusting vest made of poufy chunks of rabbit fur ostentatiously stitched together to look as stupid as possible, and a resurgence of the boots-over-jeans look that takes us right back to the worst of the '80s. And you know what? It's still the case that only Australian cowboys can pull off wearing boots over their jeans. Parisian women certainly can't.

Just wait till you hear Monday's reasons.

It's Farm weekend! There's a small pedagogical farm in town that is open to the public the third weekend of every month, so we took Mr. yesterday, We got there at two, right when it opened, in deference to afternoon naptime (the French are not a very up-and-at-'em people, so the hours are 2-6, daylight be damned).

The pigs were not there; when we asked we were told that "they left," and when we asked where to the answer was "to be eaten." The French are more forthright than Americans about the fact that we kill to eat. I find that admirable. So no pigs, but we saw rabbits, chickens, geese, turkeys, cows, sheep, and goats. Tristram's verdict, after getting over his initial caution about all of them:

Rabbits: Possibly the most interesting, but too hard to reach inside those hutches
Poultry: Okay
Cows: A little scary, but he liked the calf that licked his arm
Sheep: More interesting than the chickens, but not interactive enough
Goats: Winner! He petted one friendly goat for a long time; they seemed to be making good friends, although he did not want to let the goat actually sniff his nose. He even managed to be gentle in petting with very little interference from us. His face gradually changed from fascinated consternation to nascent joy, and then he just started laughing softly and that built into a shout of joy. He tried really hard to talk about, or maybe to, the goats, but he was so excited he got stuck at "B-b-b-b-" and then just blew a lot of raspberries.

Next month we'll go later so we can get the cider they start at 4 pm.

On our way back, our bus got cut off twice by a little car, and the drivers stopped to have a shouting match. There was a lot of "je t'enmerde" going back and forth. That's the first time I've seen a person angry here.

I want to stay because of the farm.

I want to leave because I miss my own animals. I miss my cats, and my horse, and I want to get settled so we can get a dog. And some goats?

Ready for the Metro

Tristram learned to stand up on his own. I am given to understand that most babies learn to stand before they learn to walk, but not this one. He still pretty much depends on pulling up, then letting go and walking. When he tries to stand, he does it with one foot planted and the other leg kneeling, and that doesn't really work. He ends up pitching forward, and he'll travel around the room like that in sort of a frog-hop.

But now, he has a new trick. He has figured out that if he want to pick something up while he's walking, the best way to do it is to squat down and stand back up. The other day, it finally clicked that also works for just plain standing up. He looked at me curiously, and did it about ten times in a row, then shrieked with delight. By the next morning, he had forgotten again. But he's getting there.

Today is farm day!

I want to stay because there are so many great activities he's not old enough for, and I want him to get the chance to do them.

I want to leave because Jonathan hates his job.

Never Was a Cornflake Boy

I look forward to Thursdays now as Mommy-Tristram adventure day, though I am also really glad when Thursday ends. And Tristram is overcome with joy when his daddy comes home.

Yesterday he learned how to walk in his new shoes at the playground, which is apparently much harder than walking barefoot, and we took the new stroller downtown and all over. He got hungry, so I got a viennoise for him, a croissant for Jonathan to eat when he got home so he wouldn't have to wait another hour for Tristram to go to sleep and me to fix dinner, and an espresso for myself. I fortuitously stumbled upon the best espresso in Rueil, which comees with a little square of gourmet dark chocolate. And best of all, this shop has outdoor seating that is not filled with clouds of poison gas. Only a couple of smokers across the courtyard. And there was a French bulldog that came to see if he could have some Viennoise too, and his breathing sounded just like little pig snorts at every step. But between C3PO and the viennoise, Tristram did not care about the dog. I didn't realize till we were out the door that he was still clutching C3PO, and he didn't let go of him for a second the entire trip. He did hold him up to show a lot of people, though.

Putting shoes on a baby at least doubles the amount of time it takes to get ready to go out.

Tristram feeds me now! He likes to sit on the floor with me and pick up bites of food to feed himself, and as soon as he's over the first throes of hunger he insists on putting every other bite in my mouth. (Though sometimes he puts a bite in, then takes it back out without letting go and eats it himself.) We have been eating a lot of chataignes together.

I want to stay because I am starting to like this free-time thing, and when we go back to the States I will have to get a job. There's no guarantee it will be a particularly pleasant job.

I want to leave because of all the smoking. It disgusts me--ever since I was pregnant, the smell is not just unpleasant but thoroughly nauseating. It's a good thing the French don't smoke inside as much as I feared, or I would spend a lot of time throwing up on people. Also, I don't want Tristram to see all this smoking. I don't want him to grow up thinking that it's okay and that's what grownups do. This is the same reasoning that made my parents want to leave Louisiana before I was old enough to remember seeing the KKK around. Some things are not fit for children to grow up seeing as acceptable. Besides, if we stay here too long, most of his friends will smoke, and what a kid's friends do is far and away the best predictor of what that kid will do.

Stroller-Mania

OK, I like the stroller. I am much more excited about walking again now that it is not inevitably accompanied by intense shoulder pain in the short-term and a sore back all the time. We went for a long walk by the Seine yesterday, and discovered that we can take the footpath by the river all the way up the Foret and the pond there. It'd take about an hour and a half, and it'd be gorgeous. And more fun than the bus.

Apparently we bought the most popular stroller in France. Now that I have it, I'm seeing it everywhere. We even saw it in exactly the same colors three times yesterday. I am also realizing why those baby bags are so popular--he gets a lot colder than we do since he's not walking, he's up off the ground with cold air all around him, and when he's not strapped to my body he doesn't have my heat to warm him. But still, I think the French are a little crazy when it comes to baby warmth. They flip out if it's 70 degrees and your baby doesn't have on a wool hat and socks, and their babies have been bundled up in snowsuits AND sleeping bags since early October. Maybe their babies are more fragile, though--they are certainly smaller. Tristram is the size of kid at least a year and a half old by French standards.

Really, since he is our idea of normal babydom, we have tended to worry about other people's babies ever since he was born. We're always whispering to each other, "It's so small...Do you think it's okay? Is it a premie? What's wrong with it? It's so passive!"

I want to stay because we are so close to infinitely more gorgeous walking than we could possibly do in a day.

I want to leave because I am sick of getting weird looks from parents who think my child is not bundled up enough when he's perfectly comfortable. The French are much more inclined to interfere with other people's babies than Californians are. Less of an expectation of privacy, I suppose. Or just less respect for personal space?

We caved. We bought the stroller. It's the high end of the low end--basically a tricked-out umbrella stroller. It has a little mesh basket underneath, a rain cover, and higher handles with wider wheels than the super-basic umbrella stroller we already had. We bought him one of those little sleeping bag-deals the French stuff their babies in when they stroll them, too. We got it separately from the stroller, figuring he can also use it as a sleeping bag/warmth bag if he needs to till he's 98 centimeters tall. (He's 73 or 74 now, as best we can measure.)

I must say that, after all my years of mockery of SUV strollers, I now see the appeal some of the high-end strollers. There were a couple in particular that we coveted: solid black or charcoal gray, actually good-looking, wheels so stable you could send them down a mountain without fearing for your child's safety, super-padded seat, adjustable handles, less bulky than some of the cheaper, less sturdy strollers... But now that I do see the appeal of the 500-600 euro range, I can even less imagine what possibly makes some strollers worth $1000. What more could they possibly have?

Since our shopping trip was in Babies'R'Us, we also spent some time coveting baby toys, and Tristram spent a lot of time trying his hardest to grab the giant stuffed animals. Today's picture is him playing with C3PO, his current favorite. We got him a set of Star Wars baby toys at EuroDisney, and he takes C3PO everywhere--to the bath, to bed, to stuff in my mouth. What with our stroller purchase, we couldn't afford to get any toys at the toy store, but here's his Sparkly Day & birthday list:

giant stuffed animal
riding toy (in French it's a porteur; I don't know what it's called in English but it's on wheels and you scoot it along with your feet)
push/pull toys
bath toys
blocks; shape sorters
Saturnin DVDs (Saturnin is a duckling. The DVDs are only sold in French, through amazon.fr.)

He's also into putting things in other things now (though it's still mostly his toys into my mouth), so toys that feature that kind of action are probably appealing.

OK, that's done. For most of you it's irrelevant, but for the curious there it is.

I didn't do my stay/go yesterday. But here's the stroller-shopping edition:

I want to stay because there are little carousels everywhere, in malls and public squares, that I wish Tristram were old enough to ride.

I want to leave because everything gets SO crowded. A French mall on a typical weekend afternoon is as crowded as an OC mall on the day after Thanksgiving.

The Eiffel Tower

I've discovered, since moving here, that I have a moderate fear of heights. This is exacerbated by climbing them with a baby on my back, since the extra weight puts me off balance, and then he wiggles. He loves it though; he was chirping with delight at the wind on the Eiffel Tower yesterday. For me, the vertigo is heightened by the apparent flimsiness of the stairs, which are made of very thin metal indeed. You can feel a very strong vibration from every step anyone takes up and down the stairs, and every landing has little holes in it. This gives one a strange feeling, which is only mildly relieved by constant mental recitation of the facts that 1) you wouldn't want it to be too heavy to support its own weight, 2) it has to be able to flex in the wind and vibrate in order to be sturdy and not just break, and 3) no one has ever fallen through the Eiffel Tower stairs.

I will go up farther when either Jonathan's back is not hurting and we can trade off baby-schlepping at the first platform, or we have a stroller and get there before the lines get long so we can take the elevator.

Mister was a charmer again. He was so cute he nearly caused an accident on the stairs down, when some skater-punks got so caught up in making faces and noises to make him laugh that one of them nearly got knocked down by a girl who ran up the stairs right into his knees. The way kids run up the Eiffel Tower is a little alarming, partly because they smack into so many people and partly because it just makes you feel old in comparison. But what are their parents going to do about it? It's not like they can catch them!

Then on the train back he was being so cute that Russian strangers started taking his picture, and he played peekaboo with a couple of Italian tourists all the way to our change of trains. The Eiffel Tower and its surrounding public transportation is, it seems, the polyglot heart of Paris. We heard more English in our first 10 minutes there than we have in the entire rest of our time in France.

Tristram said another word last night: Duck. And he said Dog again this morning. I think there is a theme developing, which may give us some hints as to his interests.

The Great Stroller Debate

Our quiet little downtown is very, very busy on Saturdays. I took Jonathan downtown to see the Armistice Day exhibit before it disappears, since the mediatheque is closed on Sunday and Monday. I have never seen a library so crowded. Then we dropped by the church to look at Josephine's and her daughter Hortense's tombs. It is a very beautiful church. Catholicism is definitely aesthetically appealing, if not very politically or historically savory.

I took Jonathan to the kids' bookstore I found on Thursday, which was totally empty then, and we could barely fit inside. Gorgeous books, but no space to look at them. We found the big outdoor market (largely, but not entirely, a farmers' market), and walked home. We decided it would be faster than waiting for the bus, and funner than having a fussy baby on the bus. When we first got here, we wouldn't have thought it was a reasonable walk, but now it seems quite pleasant. We took Tristram to the playground on the way home, and he attempted to figure out how to stand and step in shoes. He's not so fond of them just yet, but he does like the playground.

The reason we thought we could walk home without suffering terrible pain was that we took the stroller. Since he's in shoes now, one pretty much has to choose between wearing him and getting bruised, wearing him with no chance of letting him down outside, or putting him in the stroller. Also, he is so big now that taking him for long walks is getting uncomfortable. The frame backpack is still comfortable, but it's also unwieldy for one person alone to handle. So, I figured it was time to start getting him used to the stroller.

But I don't like it. It's bulky, it's hard to get into a lot of places, you can't just take the stairs (and in the metro stops there are a gazillion stairs and very few elevators), curbs make crossing the street a major nuisance, you can't take a full stride without banging your feet into the wheels, and Tristram is much, much fussier. He prefers being in physical contact with us, being up high so he can look around, being near our faces so it's easier to entertain him and to meet the other people around him...In all, the stroller is a very imperfect creartion. I am quite bitter about this whole move-to-the-stroller thing. But his increasing size dictates that we must get hiim an all-weather stroller very soon. His little umbrella stroller just isn't going to cut it for Paris--winters here are rainier than in London. So there's another big expense. I am thinking this morning, however, that it may not be worth it after all, as Jonathan is having terrible back spasms from having to stoop over to push the stroller yesterday. Avoiding back pain was to be the whole reason for making the stroller switch in the first place.

I want to stay because the libraries here are amazing. They're beautiful buildings, they have genuine museum-quality exhibits, and they have tons of books and music and DVDs to borrow.

I want to leave because it's so annoying to have nearly everything closed two out of Jonathan's three days off. I really miss being able to get what I want when I want it.

A Myriad of Culture

He walks! He talks! We counted 41 steps without falling today.

International tourism ads on French CNN are really weird. They're in English, since it's an Anglophone channel, but have all sorts of weird translation errors. In Warsaw, apparently, you can find "a myriad of culture."

I walked home in the dark tonight--only 6:30, but dark--while Jonathan took care of Tristram. I can't remember the last time I walked somewhere by myself at night. I miss it. Especially with the lights reflecting on the Seine, and the moon finally out after a few days of rain, and the sky so clear and the air so clean from the rain...We even had a nice sunset, which is exceedingly rare in France. It was only the second real sunset we've had the whole time we've been here.

I want to stay because I can walk by the Seine at night after the rain clears.

I want to leave because I miss sunsets.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus

Hard to believe we took this picture less than a month ago--I guess this is what people mean when they talk about seasons changing.

Today was a good day--a frustration-free 12 hours of solo child care. We made it to centreville and back in record time; the bus drivers were in quite a rush. Tristram walks a little more ever day, so I decided it's time for shoes. That way he can go to the playground and play with the one-year-old toys (okay, toy) there. French playgrounds have all the toys color-coded to show what age children they are meant for. Plus, he needs something to keep his feet warm when I am wearing him in his carrier. So I went to the children's shoe store, and paid more than I wanted to for a pair of shoes he will grow out of too quickly, but I figured I was paying for a proper fitting on the first pair, and now that I know his size I can save on other shoes. When he outgrows these, I'll know to just go up a size. Then I realized I wasn't too keen on him wearing hard-soled shoes with which to kick me in the wrists and hips while I wear him, so I got him a pair of soft booties too for keeping his feet warm and my flesh relatively unbruised.

We tried to go see Josephine's tomb, but that church doesn't open till 4:30 except on Wednesday and Saturday, so we wandered on our way to the mediatheque. We found a children's book & game store that Jonathan will like, and then we found something rather astounding. The mediatheque always has an art exhibit on the first flloor--half out in the front lobby and half in a central atrium you get to after you go through the detectors. Well, it turns out Armistice Day is a much bigger deal in France than Veterans' Day is in the U.S. (which is only logical, when you think about the two countries' relative commitments to and losses in WWI). The front exhibit now is WWI photography, and the central exhibit is not only museum-worthy but actually borrowed from multiple museums. There were old uniforms, gas masks, shells, bullets, original hand-written letters, gas masks, helmets...Including one helmet with a large bullet hole right through it. There were also, perplexingly at first, two cases of stuffed pigeons. I wondered how the natural history exhibit got mixed in with the war museum loans, so I walked over and discovered that they were the preserved carrier pigeons of WWI. They were on loan from the "colombophile" museum. Didn't know there was such a thing as a dove-lover's museum.

When we went out, I saw the most beautiful (though evidently not the most useful) pigeon I have ever spotted. It was all white, except for every other tail feather. They were deep gray. How did such a creature get mixed in with the standard city pigeons? If only the colombophiles had been there to tell me.

I discovered a good sewing shop (at least I think it was good-they were on their hour-and-a-half lunch break), too. I am a frustrated at how utterly unlisted most French businesses are. They are neither in the phone book nor online. Not that I would belittle the pleasure of random discovery, but the weeks-long mixture of footwork and happenstance that is necessary to track down a spool of thread is a little ridiculous.

And that is why I want to leave--I miss having basic information available that would allow me to find the goods and services I am looking for.

I want to stay because it's so much nicer to be an American in Europe now that Obama's been elected. Everyone is happy. My neighbors across the hall, the librarians, our banker, the street cleaners...

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

We went to bed at 11 pm, when it was 5 pm on the East Coast and no polls had closed yet--exit polls weren't even in. We woke up and Obama was president-elect. Hooray is really not adequate to the occasion. I've been walking around glowing all day.

Tristram said another word this morning: Dog. He said it to Jonathan; I was in the kitchen and didn't hear it. This evening he couldn't quite remember how to say it and wanted to put his hand on my lips while I read his dog book to see how it was done. He is a clever little learning machine,that one.

It seems my recipes blog somewho triggered blogspot's robot patrol that searches for spam. It is under review waiting for human eyes to look at and determine whether it is legit or not. I'm not sure how that happened. In the meantime, you can still see it, you just will be routed through a warning page first.

I was so caught up in the election anxiety yesterday that I didn't even do my stay-or-go of the day. I want to stay because the espresso here is delicious--and is, much to my amusement, actually called "expresso" just like people mispronounce it in the U.S. I want to leave because Obama is so much better than Sarkozy.

What he looks like when he is about to eat your face

Election Day! We voted. We mailed our votes in last Monday. Or I did, since Jonathan was prevented from taking his ballot to the post office himself by a day-long seminar on democratic values that is required for all work-visa-holders to get a carte de sejour. It's actually kind of racist; it's Sarkozy's new law aimed at Arab and African immigrants. Mostly it affects kids who were born in another country and moved here when they were less than a year old, and who therefore have already gone through the French school system and know all this already. But they have to go and get their certificates now to stay in the country. The seminar covers French political history and then explains rules like, for example, that you can't beat your wife and kids.

There will still be no meaningful results by the time we go to bed tonight. I'm not sure how well we'll sleep.

The plate-feeding experiment was a grand success. He is much more fun to spend the day with when he is full instead of hungry. He ate almost a whole crepe filled with avocado pesto, and about half a baked apple. He is rejecting solid food for breakfast lately, though, in favor of my milk only until lunchtime. That's fine; breast milk is more nutritious than apples anyway.

I did indeed start my recipe blog, in deference to Christal's wishes. It is http://mckenziesrecipes.blogspot.com and it now features duck sandwiches.

I also finished my pants-into-skirt project, for the pants that shrank in the wash. I've now made it through my basic home ec sewing project list: baby poncho, pincushion, skirt made from old pants. Check! The skirt is much prettier than the pants ever were. Now I will go on to fancier projects, and I will never buy a throw pillow again.

The Baby Who Loved to Eat Crepes

I made a bunch tonight, so he will have more tomorrow. Today, though, he filled up on Viennoise and didn't want to eat his own food. I'm a little concerned about the pastry-heavy diet. But he was fussy today, since his nose was runny, and he is getting harder and harder to feed on the best of days. He won't sit in his high chair, he increasingly won't eat off a spoon, and now only wants to eat off our plates while we are eating. Tomorrow we're going to try putting his food on our plates and feeding him every other bite while we eat. He's not quite old enough to share our meals yet. You can see here what happens when we let him feed himself mush.

I am thinking, since my successful crepe-making venture this week, of starting a side blog to keep track of recipes I like. I suppose it depends how much free time I find on my hands. I recommend, for learning to cook on a different measuring system in a different language, getting kids' cookbooks from the library. The recipes are relatively simple, the instructions are clear, and there are pictures. Now that I've got a fairly good handle on how to read lists of ingredients and basic cooking techniques in French, I might try some grown-up recipes. Or not. In the US, kids' cookbooks would have you making ants-on-a-log, but here they have me making crepes and mousses and meringues and quiches and things like that.

Anyway, we got him a Viennoise because we were going for a hike in the Foret (yes, there's supposed to be a hat accent on that, and on crepe) de la Malmaison and wanted something we could feed him while we walked. It's quite a nice forest, with clearings and a lake and everything. It's apparently where the actual runners go to run around here. We saw one woman jogging with her dog in tight jeans and low pumps.

I want to stay because the forest is so lovely and I've never lived around trees that change color before. I want to leave because really, nothing compares to a redwood forest. When a map is labeled with "arbres remarquables" and I get to that spot and have no idea which tree is supposed to be remarkable or why, I get homesick. Those who went to my wedding will understand why I have difficulty telling why an attractive but altogether ordinary tree, of which I can clearly see the top, is not remarkable.

From a parrot to a real boy

We found something much more uplifting than Mass to celebrate the day after Halloween--Disneyland! We got an annual pass, too, since if you go more than once in a year that's by far a better deal, and Tristram seems to love it. I got my Halloween fun after all.

Here you can see Tristram in his parrot costume. It turned out a little big in the hood, since guess what? Babies don't always cooperate very well for fittings. Strange...Anyway, I console myself with the thought that it's not bad for a first garment ever created, and I can start a tradition of dressing up on more and more days till I find one when it fits him.

So he did not get to wear a costume to the park, but I don't think he minded. He loves Disneyland, both the Californian and European versions. Again, a day-long trip with no crying. He loves seeing new stuff all day, and we are careful to feed him BEFORE he gets upset. I learned that taking him to the National Zoo and watching kid after kid have a meltdown upon saying they were hungry and being told to wait.

He is, in fact, much easier to handle when he is out all day than when he is home all day. All he wants is for me to make our apartment as busy, exciting, and full of new things and people to look at as Disneyland! I console myself with the knowledge that novelty preference is the strongest indicator of future intelligence.

He also discovered his ability to entertain people while we were waiting in line and on the train there and back yesterday (it's a long train ride). He had everyone around us cracking up in our longest line (45 minutes). He thought that was fun, so on the train back he started leaning around to make faces at people and wave at them to see if they'd wave back.

Then, this morning, he became a real boy: he stood up holding my knee, let go, and calmly turned around and stepped over to the couch.

Today's go/stay comparison is a comparision of EuroDisney versus the original:

California is much, much better about smoking. Europeans will light up any damn place. In line, under an overhang, right outside a door...I find it impossible not to be judgmental about people smoking in front of their kids, and even blowing smoke onto their babies' faces. I even saw a pregnant woman smoking. California is also much cleaner; my theory is that the EuroDisney staff have to spend so much time picking up cigarette butts that they don't have time to clean up quite all of the other trash.

EuroDisney, though, has some design advantages. Being built so much later meant they had more Disney culture on which to draw. and being French meant that they co could make Tomorrowland largely Jules-Verne-focused. Space Mountain, for instance, is designed after the Baltimore Gun Club, and is set up as the giant pistol that shoots out the car to the moon. It's also less bent on tying every ride to a movie directly, so Pirates of the Caribbean, because of the later design, better materials, and lack of perceived need to add in new movie gimicks, is superior (though the ceiling is too easy to spot for the illusion of being outdoors). Also, because Europe is less litigious, they are more willing to make "dark" spots actually dark, which adds a nice ambiance.

EuroDisney is spread over a much larger area, but has fewer rides. That makes for more lovely landscaping, but less of the delight of finding something fun tucked into every possible space. That is how we spent a whole day there but did only three rides, yet were busy and content.

EuroDisney also is severely lacking in covered seating, which was quite a problem at lunchtime since it was raining. We ate standing up in the restaurant. There was plenty of seating, but most of it was out in the open. We later discovered that Fantasyland is the absolute worst place to look for protected seating, which is strange since it's the home base for small children. Where were the quality control people when that design got approved?

The great advantage of EuroDisney, though? Fewer parades. Sadly, they are lacking the only good one, the Electric Company Parade, but one's day is not constantly interrupted by the Parade of Dreams. So, while it is altogether seedier, it is in many ways more guest-friendly. I cant't help wondering, though, that the ghost of Walt Disney did not rise from the grave to drag that smoking pregnant woman to an otherworldly vengeance of cartoon hilarity.

Happy Halloween

Even though it really does seem to be more of the eve of Tous Saints than a holiday unto itself. One of the day-care teachers I can see through the creche windows across the courtyard was dressed up today, but that was the only sign of Halloween I could see. The stores are already filling up with Sparkly Day candy. I finished Tristram's costume; I will have pictures up tomorrow. Tonight the camera is charging.


No trick-or-treaters, either--even if there are some around, they couldn't get into our locked building. Kind of sad, really. Tristram didn't sleep well last night, and Jonathan was cranky all day, which was not helped by his new Friday class (ten classes now) being composed almost entirely of insolent and stupid rugby players. The dismal lack of Halloweeniness (EuroDisney, it seems, calls it Halloweenmosphere) is alleviated by the fact that it's Friday, which, for us, is chicken day. There's a market every Friday afternoon in the Place de l'Europe, the square that is near us, and there is a guy there who sells the most delicious chickens I've ever had. It's quickly become our weekly tradition.


I want to stay because of the chickens. I want to leave because I miss Halloween. It's so sad not to have much of a holiday at all for one of the funnest holidays of the year. What good is mass the next morning? You don't get to dress up and no one gives you candy.