Playing with GrandBob

I apologize for the tardiness of this post--I've been doing the recipe blog the last couple of days instead. It is filled with tales of cucumber salad and chocolate cookies.

It is snowing for the second day in a row, and has been since we woke up (it's 2:15 now). It's beautiful. I wish I had a camera so I could take pictures. It's measuring in the inches now, and falling steadily and softly.

Yesterday we took advantage of the Louvre being free the first Sunday of each month. We discovered that once you get on the train, you don't have to set foot outdoors again until you get back to Rueil Malmaison, which is nice for winter travel. We also discovered that, since there turns out to be an underground mall next to the Louvre, there's lots of food court opportunity that lets you avoid museum food lines. The Louvre is as close to being toddler-friendly as any museum I've seen, since everything they don't want tourists to lean on for photos is behind glass. I think we'll brave letting Tristram out of the stroller there before we leave France. It was extremely crowded, but since we stayed in travel mode we got to see most of one wing of one floor before we left to get home for a late nap. That's not bad for one trip. We covered Egyptian antiquities (well, the thematic grouping--the chronological tour is upstairs) and part of ancient Iraq. I think our favorite was the mummified crocodile, though Tristram's favorite was a statue they were calling a dog and I would probably call a jackal. We also saw some displays promising us statues of Sokar, which made me thoroughly catsick, but those were not in the case at the moment.

We figure next time Jonathan has a chunk of time midweek we'll get a multiday pass and go mornings, so we can skip the huge free-day crowds. We got pretty sick of people walking right into the stroller. There are two exhibits coming up that we can justify as dissertation research for Jonathan--one on French-Chinese aesthetic interchange (form of woodcuts) under Louis XV and one on Ariosto of Orlando Furioso fame.

Tristram is giving us lots of zerberts. He tried to give one to the snow through the window this morning. He also has just learned to throw things overhand, which he thinks is great fun, and to bang his head or his butt against our one non-concrete wall to make it thump, which I'm sure won't wake up the baby downstairs.

Tomorrow Jonathan heads back to work--but only for a week; then it's dead week and finals, and then a week off. We're planning on a lot fewer classes next quarter.