Babyhood

Kevin and Pauline are very proud to welcome Madeleine and Bastien to our family!

They are two bouncing baby goldfish, weighing about 3 grammes each! We got them last week at Truffaut, the garden centre which has a big pet shop. The fishbowl sits on our dining table and it's very pleasant to watch them gliding around in the water, definitely a calming influence!

The children race to feed them in the mornings. The only thing I have to watch is that Pauline sometimes wants to put bits of her meals in the water. Otherwise they are very easy pets. We have to clean the bowl and change the water once a week, and we use rain water, not tap water, which might bleach out their orange colour. They have such lovely, delicate fins, almost transparent.

We've had lovely spring weather and I was really keen to get my vegie garden started early this year, so have been doing lots of digging and composting. I've sowed lots of seeds in indoor trays, as it's so much cheaper to start from scratch, rather than buy little plants in a month's time and plant them directly in the garden. Kevin has sowed radishes, peas and carrots in his little plot and indoors I have tomatoes, lettuce, basil and - for the first time - aubergines (which is rather brave of me!) I'm preparing a plot for potatoes too. I spent two whole days digging up the old strawberry plants, trimming their roots and replanting them in a new plot lined with black plastic, which will save me a lot of weeding. I'm going to sow the same seeds every two weeks, so we'll have a continuous supply. It feels really good to be organized this time, instead of the more haphazard and impulsive gardening I did previously. Last year all the sweet corn ripened at once, so this year I want to be able to enjoy it all summer long.

Pauline recently discovered the existence of her shadow (on sunny days, naturally) and the first time she realised what it was, she said "Look, there are two Paulines". Her great game now is to try and jump on Kevin's shadow as we walk anywhere, which of course provokes howls of outrage from the young sir (you would think he really was in pain!) and if P. happens to be with us, he can't resist joining Pauline. I seem to spend a lot of my life rescuing Kevin from his father's teasing, not a job I enjoy. Recently however, Pauline was very angry at her father when he insisted over and over again that she put her slippers on. She howled with rage and shouted "Your name is poo-poo!", which is the worst insult she knows.

The two of them have very long and highly amusing conversations in the back of the car and I love to eavesdrop. When driving back from Provins, Kevin said to Pauline "If you found a poo-poo in a pond, what would you do?" She said she would try and fish it out with a stick! Hope I'm shopping in Paris or travelling to London if that eventuality ever occurs! So you can see what their current obssession is.

We haven't had any more "How do babies get out of their mummies' tummy?" conversations for a long time. Today Kevin put a dress on over his trousers and Pauline told me he was a little girl called Madeleine playing with her. She took K's hand, saying, "Come on Madeleine, let's go shopping" and he was furious, saying his name is Kevin and he's not a little girl. Maybe that will teach him not to cross-dress!

Our visits to Fontainebleau library continue every two weeks and we're consequently doing a lot more reading, as they pick four books each and make me read them every night. They don't like having to take the books back though, they'd like to keep them! There are even a couple of books in the library which we already have at home and they understandably get very excited to see them. But annoyingly, they always want to take them out, and start screaming when I say no!

Last Sunday P. drove us out to Provins for the afternoon, as it was beautifully sunny and almost warm. It has a perfectly preserved medieval fortress. The original town centre is extremely old and most of the houses have a plaque indicating their historic interest. Joan of Arc attended mass in the cathedral there! The primary and intermediate schools are right in the middle of the old quarter - how lovely to be able to go to school surrounded by so much history!

The children were fascinated by the stocks (or pillory?) in the old town square, comprising a narrow, black cage-like structure atop a seemingly bottomless well. There was also a posse of Harley Davidson motorbikes and their leather-clad riders parked in the centre. P. admired them very much and says he would like to get a motorbike licence. I think he's half, or even three-quarters serious!

In the summer Provins will be crawling with tourists, as they hold costume parades and jousting tournaments, eagle and falconry shows, etc. it's very famous. It was a 45 minute drive there, through some very pretty green farmland. On the way we passed a village called Lourpe, which I think sounds like a tremendous burp! Before going home we walked a little way along the ramparts for a spectacular view, but I didn't really see that much, as it was very high up and I was trying to stop those nimble and over-excited little children of mine from jumping over the safety barriers.

Last week Pauline had another attack of impetigo and this time it was on her scalp, just above her forehead. It was really difficult to clean and treat, because her hair was so long. And as we hadn't noticed it early on, the wound was really big, a huge open sore. I had to clean it with Betadine, which needs to be rinsed off the skin with lots of water, so this was very difficult, as you can imagine. She wouldn' t sit still, and of course the water went in her face, etc., so in desperation I chopped her fringe right off at the roots. Of course it didn't look very pretty, plus the ointment made the rest of her hair incredibly greasy, but my priority was to get her healed up. It took over 10 days of twice-daily treatments.

Well P. was absolutely furious when he saw what I'd done. He thought the haircut was a disaster and made her look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I was furious that he made such a fuss over it, especially as I was the one doing all the hard work. I told him it would grow back within a few weeks and that a bad haircut on a little girl her age didn't matter (I wouldn't have done it if she'd been much older and obsessed with her appearance). I also told him that if a doctor was treating her he would have shaved the hair around the wound off completely! Anyway, it's all healed now thank goodness, and it took about 5 shampoos before the greasy ointment came out. What a saga!

Yesterday I took Kevin to the château in Fontainebleau for the annual gourmet food fair (funny how this theme crops up in all my letters), which was fabulous. We tasted flammekeuche (savoury tart from Alsace), truffles, salmon, sushi (a team of Japanese chefs were the special guests this year), gingerbread, shortbread, chocolates made by the Patissier de l'Année 1999, many different kinds of ham and cheese, etc etc, and all that for 25 francs! My taste buds were in heaven! We watched real chefs at work and one of them carved an apple into the shape of a bird and gave it to Kevin. Then we picnicked outside and played soccer, after which we were rather cold and tired. So a nice, restful afternoon at the cinema was called for. We saw Toy Story 2 at the cinema instead. It was a really lovely day.

We've had another full and exciting weekend. Friday night was fun with the kids because P. went to Paris after work, so we made a big mess, ate dinner with our fingers and baked gingerbread men and ladies for the school afternoon tea.

I went to a Red Cross jumble sale on Saturday morning and bought myself a skirt and trousers, and gumboots and a woolly hat for Kevin. After lunch I took the kids to town for the spring carnival. They were dressed up as trees in costumes they had made at school, decorated with tinfoil and crepe paper flowers and cardboard butterflies. Kevin's was painted in conventional tree colours, and Pauline's was BRIGHT Barbie-doll pink!

There was music and horse-drawn carts, giggling children in brilliant costumes, and bright flowers, streamers and confetti everywhere. They absolutely loved it. We paraded through village for about an hour, with police escorts fore and aft, and then made our way to the community hall for a free afternoon tea (big bag of cakes and sweets for each child) and children's disco. When the dancing began the dads all slipped outside to watch a soccer match, and we mums danced with our kids to young people's music (of which I was able to identify the Spice Girls only). That is, Kevin ran madly around the hall with his pal Bastien and Pauline held my hands and her bag of goodies and jumped up and down for about 20 minutes without stopping. They were as red as little tomatoes by the time we left! They even managed the long walk home and were absolutely zonked by evening.

I recently showed Georgina Beyer's autobiography (she was the first transsexual ever to be voted Mayor, and to be elected to Parliament) to a French friend Patricia when she was at my house. She was really interested (having spent a year in New Zealand as a nanny) and asked lots of questions, including “Where was she operated?” Her three children and mine were in the room, so I was a little embarrassed and whispered “Well you know…. the genital region”. She burst out laughing, as she had meant “Where did the operation take place?”, i.e. in New Zealand, or overseas!