Signs that we are adapting to France: #13

We have quite limited food storage in our house - in fact this cupboard is pretty much it.  Suffice it to say we have to prioritize and only keep on hand the most important staples of life.
This is what one of the two shelves looks like.

That's right - three  unopened jars of nutella (the big one's)  and four Bonne Maman jams.

Note - we just opened a jar of Nutella, and there are three flavours of Bonne Maman jams open in the fridge.

Signs that we are adapting to France: #27

This is what our youngest son wanted to wear to school yesterday:

UPDATE: this is him doing his homework yesterday

Chartreuse - encore.

The week before Susan's mom left we hiked up in the Chartreuse mountains - and went up by la Grande Chartreuse monastery.   We stopped along the side of the road for a pic-nic on our way. 

Micah insisted on a picture 'of just the boys'

 For those who are starting to wonder if this is a re-post - nope we just seem to like this particular hike.  We've done it once here and again here.  

The weather was quite nice out - so we thought we better take advantage of it.

Q: look familiar? A: yes and yes.

We went quite a bit further down this trail than we have before - where it leads to climbing up through some cracks in the rocks.

 

And over some boulders that have quasi-ladders built into them

 At one point you have to kind of crawl through a slanted opening in a rock.  That's the kind of afternoon stroll we take when you have Grandma and a two-month old with you.  

After we drove a bit further on to la Grande Chartreuse.

This is called: "...why didn't you tell me it was bubbly water?!"

We hiked up to the cross up above it all - as the view down over the monastery and across the valley makes it all worth while.

...and she's gone

Well -  Grandma is on her way home again. We had a great time with Susan's mom over the past few weeks. We have all loved having the chance to spend time with her and Susan and I have been spoiled by her help.  

We know that living this far away from all of our family - that seeing them is not a given. We know quite a few people whose family is not willing &/or able to visit - so it's not something we take for granted.  Since we've been here we've had Susan's mom, her parents were both here, my mom and Aunt Nora, my sister Marie, cousin Nathan, Aaron and Heather and their girls were here this summer....   

  It makes living away from home a lot less difficult when the part  you miss actually comes to you (because it sure is not the Edmonton winter that we miss - as forecasts for this weekend give us temperatures about 30º warmer here)

This visit we were able to travel to Paris with her and do some fun trips etc- but mostly just have her here.   The kids were glad to have someone else to read their english homework to, to go on walks around our place, someone to take them for lunch, and to show them their favourite hikes.

deux mois

Our little Alma is two months old already.




We took her for her 2-month appointment last Friday - and she is continuing to bulk up nicely.  5.5kg  - so she has gained more than 1kg again this month.

She continues to eat well, sleep well, and bring much more joy into our family than you would expect from someone who weighs less than 6kg.

Paris - Day 4

Day 4 we went to la Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.  It's a pretty impressive museum that was opened the same year that the Eiffel Tower was built - 1889.  The museum is actually in a huge park where there is a zoo, huge gardens, and other museums.

We spent our day in the main gallery that is full of stuffed animals.  It's kind of strange - there are all these exotic and some endangered animals  - but they were all shot and brought back to Paris 100 years ago or so when no one really cared about killing off a species.

The strangest was the gallery of extinct species - where you are looking at a specimen of an animal that no longer exists. It's a bitter irony how many of them were 'over-hunted' to extinction - just like the one that you are looking at behind the glass.

Later we got on the metro bound for La Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. 

It's A LOT of steps to get to the church at the top - but it's worth it.

There is an impressive panoramic view over Paris from up top

 

After walking through the church we wandered around the Montmarte neighborhood for a while.  The kids picked out some post-cards to put in their journals

We got back on the train for the last time.  

The next day we loaded back in the van for the 6 hour drive home.

We had a fantastic vacation in and around Paris.  The kids saw so much stuff for the first time - and we saw a lot of things for the first time, and saw many things differently through their eyes.   We are truly blessed to be able to live here for this stage of our family's life - and we are trying to truly appreciate it as much as we can.

Paris -day 3: Château de Versailles

Day 3 we went to the Château de Versailles.  We were incredibly fortunate to be staying at our friends house - just a 15 min drive from Versailles, so we headed over in the morning.  We decided that the Château itself may be a bit much for the kids, seeing as you can't take a stroller, and they say to plan on two and a half hours just to walk through the thing - so we opted to take in 'just' the gardens.

The gardens are over 800 ha (~2 000  acres) with over 200,000 trees, and over 210,000 flowers planted annually.  

This - is a serious back yard.

There are dozens of fountains around the gardens which were mostly put in under Louis XIV in the late 1600's.  The fact that there were functioning fountains at this time is impressive to me in itself. 

The fact that there were so many fountains and they used so much water that there were a number of significant technological advances made just to keep these fountains running is incredible. 

Some say at the time, the fountains in the gardens of Versailles used more water than the city of Paris.

 I have no idea how a king using the public treasury in this way lead to a revolution.   

Oh well - it sure is pretty.

Paris - day 2

For our second day in Paris we decided to first head to the Louvre.  We wandered through some ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman stuff - then Susan sat down by some 2000 year old marble sculptures to feed Alma - and the kids were on a mission to find the Mona Lisa. 

They found her - and surprisingly- they weren't disappointed (which seems to be the usual reaction).  Jonah said that's all that he wanted to see.  Sure  - there's only 35,000 works of art - spread over 60,000 square meters - might as well focus in so that you don't get spread too thin.  It's impossible to do justice to a museum that has been around since 1793 in a building that was started in the 12th century - but it's hard to visit Paris and not go see it.

One thing that we had been looking forward to taking our kids to was the Cité des Sciences - an amazing hands-on science and technology museum.  It was so big - and so amazing that we could have spent more than a full day just there.  There was tonnes of things that we didn't even get to - but what we did see was great.  

 

At the end of the day we as we headed back to catch the train to our friends place for the night, we walked through the Louvre grounds as the sun was setting

We could just see the Eiffel Tower over the city as it sparkled at the top of the hour (not willing to say which hour - or whether we had fed our kids supper yet)

Day two: success.