Babyhood

Christmas Day at P.’s parents’ house was a very pleasant, relaxing day for me, and Méemée cooked a lovely meal, as usual. For the first time though, the children hardly ate a thing, as they were too busy playing with the new dolls' house and Action Man. The doll who lives in the house is only a babe in nappies, but she owns the most amazing demesne! It’s a two-storey, colonial style mansion with balconies, window boxes and white railings everywhere. The kitchen and bathroom are fully equipped, there’s a mechanical rocking horse, private plane parked on the roof, and even a horse and cow tethered in the garden! Disturbingly though, the children like to put the baby and other dolls behind the balcony railings, saying in a deep, gruff voice “Je suis la police et je te mets en prison!”

We left them to it and ate foie gras, coq au vin, green beans and raspberry roulade in peace and quiet. (In fact, the children were amazingly calm for ages, thanks to the new toys). That night as we drove home a storm struck and it was terrifying driving through the torrential rain and feeling the wind gusts buffet the car. As usual, most of the other drivers didn’t slow down sufficiently on the motorway (have you noticed my favourite gripe often involves French drivers? I’m a careful driver, so why can’t they be the same?), and we passed three nasty accidents in an hour.

But P. got us home safely and we listened to the wind howling for most of the night. The children snored through the whole thing. Next morning when P. went outside and saw so many trees down, roof tiles gone and flying debris, he told me we had to keep all the shutters on the back of the house closed. He was mainly afraid that the huge beech tree in the garden behind us might fall on our house. But it didn’t, and we only lost a few roof tiles, which he fixed the following day, in bright sunshine. The tall trees opposite our house suffered several casualties, about a dozen fell en bloc (some snapped in two and some were completely uprooted), opening up a completely new view to the horizon for us and letting a lot more light into our lounge.

The power was cut off at 8 am, so we breakfasted by candlelight, which was great fun. A week earlier, the children and I had made lamps out of stiff tracing paper and little candles, so they turned out to be even more useful than decorative. The power stayed off all day, but we quite enjoyed it, as we had gas to cook with and plenty of stocks of drinking water in provision for the anticipated Y2K shortages.

We’re eating a lot of canned and frozen food at the moment! However, the power came back on in the evening, so it’s a relief that we didn’t have to manage without it for three whole weeks, like people in some parts of France. That afternoon the weather was beautifully calm and sunny, so we went into the forest to see the damage.

We thought it was pretty dramatic, dozens of trees – the biggest ones - were broken or uprooted, leaving huge craters in the ground. It’s sad, but I found a kind of terrible beauty in it too. An illustration of the force of nature, one might say. You didn’t know I could be so poetic, did you?!

The river Loing down in Moret had flooded in some places, including our favourite tossing-bread-to-the-ducks spot. On the Monday P. saw a car completely crushed by a fallen chimney. Every time we walked anywhere we could see people up on their roofs, fixing tiles and TV aerials.

The children had their school Christmas party at the end of term. Père Noël came and gave them all a present. We Mums made fabulous cakes, as usual. I made a chocolate cake iced with a dark chocolate background and piped Joyeux Noël and snowflakes in white chocolate. I also made a batch of carrot and almond chutney for the café in Fontainebleau, even though I don’t officially work for them any more. My old boss had rung me to ask if I would do it for Christmas, so I didn’t mind. I just don’t want to be doing it regularly anymore. Especially when I found out that they had raised the price of my jams from 20 to 25 francs sometime last year, but not my pay!

The school Christmas break has started, so for two weeks there will be less rushing around and I don’t have the ordeal of getting them ready for the bus four times a day. Kevin is very amenable, and puts on his anorak and shoes with very little fuss. But Pauline is going through a stubborn, horrible phase (yes, another one), where she just doesn’t want to co-operate. They both start the day saying they don’t want to go to school, and yet once we’re on the bus they’re all smiles to their friends. Grrr…

On Saturday afternoon I took Kevin into Fontainebleau to do a bit of shopping, but the main objective was to go to the cinema and see ‘Tarzan’, Kevin’s first Disney movie on the big screen! It was pouring with rain, so I put his glasses (made in NZ last February) in my coat pocket because he wouldn't have been able to see through the glasses and the rain.

Unfortunately, they must have fallen out of my pocket in the car park when I pulled out my wallet to put coins in the parking ticket machine, but I didn't realise.

We got to the cinema, discovered the missing glasses, and so he had to watch the film without them. It didn’t seem to spoil his enjoyment of the film.

We found the mangled frames in the car park later that evening, after they had been run over by dozens of cars. The "unbreakable" lenses were nowhere to be seen, even though I spent half an hour looking! I got a big telling-off from hubby when I got home, because new glasses are very expensive. But Kevin was due to get new ones this year anyway, and the old ones were so scratched and battered that I feel it was a happy accident. His new ones have tortoise-shell patterned frames and look really nice on him. And the lenses are so shiny and scratch-free, I’m sure he can see better now. He really enjoyed telling people that his Mummy broke the glasses, not himself!

One Thursday I spent the morning with Pauline’s class by prior arrangement with her teacher Pierre. He had asked me to come in and bake biscuits with the children for decorating their Christmas tree. I arrived armed with all my baking equipment and the school provided the ingredients. Pauline was very proud to have me in her classroom, but she was rather possessive and wouldn’t let go of my leg for half an hour. She was very cross with the other children when they tried to look into my bags of baking things.

There are 24 three year olds in her class, but luckily I only had to cope with eight or so at a time, while the others got on with a different activity. I managed to let them all have a turn at spooning flour in the bowl, beating eggs with a fork and kneading the dough, but my God it was stressful! I was sadly lacking eyes in the back of my head! While I had my attention on Théo, Gaston was pouring flour on the floor, Zoe was fighting with her neighbour, Julie broke an egg on the table, and all of them invariably put my measuring spoons and cookie cutters in their mouths. When the dough was mixed we had to let it rest in the fridge for 20 minutes, I was able to sit down and watch my daughter participate in the serious business of her education.

The children all lined up and formed a little train to go down the corridor to the toilet. Afterwards they danced and sang in a big hall, it was delightful. Then some of them went outside to play while I took a group to roll out the dough. The part they liked best was stamping out the shapes with the cookie cutters, of course. It was a big success and the nicest part was having the young student teachers to help tidy up! But it took all morning to make 4 dozen cookies and I had a booming headache at the end of it. Those little children are so noisy and run around non-stop. I will never, ever, be a teacher, even in a future reincarnation

P. took the children to the Christmas party at his work. I was sick with tonsillitis, so didn’t go. It’s the first time I’ve missed it. They had a great time. They were given an enormous afternoon tea and watched a very funny clown show. Pauline and Kevin are now old enough to tell me all about it themselves, and even acted out some of the funny things the clown did. They didn’t stay for Father Christmas this year though, it’s always a long, hot and tiring wait too late in the evening for the little ones. P. sneaked their 'comité d'entreprise' presents home and they will open them on Christmas day with all the others.

I felt well enough in the first week of December to get straight back into the routine and even started my Christmas baking and assembling little baskets of jams, chutneys and biscuits for presents. Sarah, my Australian friend, brought her children Nina and Flynn over for lunch. I made pumpkin soup with bacon bits, mussels in parsley and garlic, green salad, chocolate and orange marmalade cake and ice-cream.

We decorated cookies to hang on the Christmas tree. All the children spread the icing extremely thickly (yuck!), and although they had a lovely choice of coloured sugar, chocolate hail, hundreds and thousands and silver cachous to use, this is what they did: Flynn’s cookies were all blue, Pauline’s all pink, Nina’s all had chocolate hail on and Kevin dumped fistfuls of every colour all mixed on every cookie!!
When Kevin and Pauline hung theirs on our tree, they were all at the same height and on the same branch. At night I arranged them a little more symmetrically and aesthetically. However, they all mysteriously disappeared within a few days, so we had to make some more!