Posing

Some friends who know me well accuse me of posing for a camera. I'm slightly alarmed to say that, while not yet 6 months old, Estelle seems to have a bit of a chip off the old block.
Today when I took out the camera she immediately stretched her arms and started smiling. Maybe she thinks my Nikon is another family member?

"I think, hmm, Charles Hamilton may get it!"

If you get that reference, you know where I'm going with these photos.....
Estelle, surrounded by little boys, vying for her affection - or at least her hand to kiss/fingers to chew on....


This was yesterday's "Galette de Roi" party - eating pastry cakes filled with Frangipan - a paste made with almonds. It's the "king cake" of the New Orleans mardi gras for those who know it. Cut it open, and whoever gets the bean, or little statuette, gets to wear the crown. The period of "galette de roi" lasts from Epiphany to Mardi Gras - in other words, lots of calories. But these babies (there were 8) were none the wiser whilst checking each other out. Estelle was much more interested in someone else's rattle.

Sho-Lo's & Tennesse Top Hat

These are Estelle's new favorite things - the magnets on my fridge of men with mullets. In this photo, she's talking to her friend, Squirrel Pelt.

Under the gums!

If you look closely, I'm sure you can see the teeth that simply must be lurking under the surface. Hence the constant drooling and off and on fussiness!

Dig In

Back in sunny Nice after 9 days without a speck of sunshine in the north. I spent my first Holidays with Thomas' family in the Loire and my first not in Vermont. There are too many differences to mention between how home and my adoptive country celebrate Christmas, but why bother with details, let's just cut to the chase -- look at the desserts.
Temptation Number One: The Buche de Noel
Had I been allowed to ram the whole thing down my throat, I probably would have, sinfully divine!

Temptation Number Two: No idea what it's called, but there was a LOT goin' on in there, and it was all good stuff.

The difference is that everything is in moderation, with reasonable helpings, and sprinkled with champagne, foie gras, etc. Hence no fear to get on the scale, unlike the previous 35 Christmases of my life......

Talbot's Girl

Here's Estelle in one of her 400 cute outfits that we got as gifts. Luckily we also got lots of bibs, because otherwise this outfit would look like one big spit-out of carrot purée.
The good news is that as of Tuesday, Estelle has a new cousin, Heather, who will inherit all of Estelle's wardrobe, whether my sister-in-law likes it or not! Heather joins brothers Wayne and Cole, who can't decide what is better: Christmas, or their new sister.

5 months

Another milestone: Estelle eats something other than milk and her toes i.e. homemade apple purée. She devoured it.
To celebrate, she partied with her friends LuLu and Maxence.

I Accept

Sometimes all it takes is a college roommate's boldface dare on your very own blog's commentary to get you to do things your husband never knew you were capable of. Touché!

No Plantar's Warts Here

Don't tell this girl she can't have her toes AND eat them too.
I think this counts as Milestone #2 but who knows. I'm impressed with the flexibility, frankly. I can do that too, but I'm not quite as graceful about it.

Milestone #1

It's official. She rolls over on her own, all by herself, and can prop herself up and look around. She was pretty interested in that other baby she discovered in the mirror.However the glee doesn't last too long, as after awhile she starts to drool or shreik or both - see this last photo for a visual of that kind of moment. Bit frightening look to tell the truth.

Electrolux? No.....Fire!

Last night at 8 pm, I came out of my kitchen where I'd been cooking up garlic and onions, thus had the range fan on and the kitchen door shut, oblivious to anything else going on in the apt, and this is what I saw. Thomas in his pyjamas with this man. Who is he, you may ask? Why, one of our local firemen, naturally.
Each year around this time, they go door to door, all over the country, selling calendars. Ours is complete with photos of the French Riviera on fire and various states of disarray. Note the wallet in Thomas' hand. By "donation", you get one of these lovely calendars. I wanted to invite the guy in and hear his life story. 8 pm, going door to door! Can you imagine?
Just one of the many things that make life interesting living over here. Plus, let's discuss that uniform. He was proud as a peacock to have his photo taken by an "American".

It's beginning to look a lot like....

Estelle's new boyfriend, Alessandro, half French, half Italian.
Born about a month before her; they got together at a holiday tea yesterday to check each other out.
Bellissimo! And below, Estelle's new favorite thing, a "Teething Bling", looks like my jewelry but is secretly a teething ring. A gift from my friend Shannon in where else, the land of opportunity and creativity, the good ole US of A.

Papa Content

I don't know who is happier - Thomas to see Estelle again, or me to have a computer and broadband.
Alive and well as of yesterday afternoon, back in Nice after what can only be called a whirlwind Queen's tour of Vermont. For those I never called, I apologize - but when you have 10 siblings, and your mom is one of 16 and your dad was one of 6, well, you get the picture.....

Dial-up

With Dial Up, all you get is one photo!
Estelle is on a whirlwind tour of visitors every day, after making it thru her first Thanksgiving.

Recent Photos

Here are some recent shots!

hallelujah, wireless!

Desperate times, desperate measures! I am sitting in my car, outside the Glover Town offices, connected to the wireless internet on my sister's laptop.
some recent photos:

Estelle and Estelle

Here is Baby Estelle and the Original Estelle, my aunt, who drove 4 hours in the driving rain to see her namesake. They fell in love with each other......

Vermont Vacation

Wayne and Cole playing with "Uncle Estelle", which is how Cole refers to her. He hasn't grasped the cousin concept yet!

Walking with my sister-in-law Darlene and my nephews Wayne and Cole and the baby in Darlene!

Estelle on Halloween!

Wayne holding Estelle

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, MR. MOOSE!

Some babies go trick or treating on Halloween. Mine goes down to the Moose weigh-in station to visit her uncle Cedric the wildlife biologist and gets her photo taken with a real "live" dead moose, all chopped up. sorry for you faint of heart out there. But it is Halloween, after all.

One for the Road

A few shots of daughter and Dad before we hit the skies without him tomorrow.
Here's hoping I make it across the Atlantic with a 3-month old without too much trouble.

Don't look for much action on this blog for awhile; needless to say, there's ain't no wi-fi in Glover!

p.s. they are watching soccer together. Thomas' team wasn't winning if it isn't obvious.

Raining Cats and Thongs

Before I even begin this story, allow me to backtrack.

In August my sister Lisa and her husband came for a week to help me get on track with the baby. Every morning we'd get up and meet in the kitchen while Estelle was still sleeping and review how my night had been. One morning when I stumbled in looking for my tea, Lisa looked up from her coffee with pity on her face and said "How ARE you? Rough night?" In fact I'd had a great night and told her so. "But your underwear?" she whispered confidentially. She pointed to the balcony off the kitchen. "I put a clothespin on it for you."

You know, when you are a new mother & generally totally sleep-deprived, you really have to assume that when things said by other rational people you know and love make no sense to you, then YOU are the problem, not them. This time I'd had enough sleep to know I wasn't going crazy and she had just said to me what she had, in fact, just said to me. "Huh?" We shuffled out to the balcony in our robes and slippers. There, on my clothesline, was a pair of beige underwear that can best be categorized as "granny briefs". I looked at them. I looked at Lisa. She patted me on the shoulder. Her 6th-grade-teacher-voice-for-girls-who-meet-"Flo"-for-the-first-time-without-the-proper-supplies kicked in: "Did you have some trouble in the night? You can tell me.", the pity-face got more concerned. I had to really think for a moment. "Lisa, that is NOT my underwear." We looked at each other for 2 seconds, and then I got my brain in gear and logically looked up. There hanging on the line of the 6th floor balcony was the laundry of our upstairs neighbors, whom I have never seen and have no idea who they are, just know that it's an eldery couple.

We clapped our hands over our mouths in laughter and jumped back inside. Then you've got a dilemna. What does one do with someone else's underwear which drops from the sky and lands on your clothesline and you don't even know what the people look like? After a roundtable discussion with my somewhat-amused-yet-mildly-horrified-brother-in-law, we decided to put it in a non-see-thru bag, and at midnight left it in front of their door without a sound. The envisioned scenario of "knock knock, hello, I'm your downstairs neighbor and here are your granny briefs" just overwhelmed me, more so in French.
I have yet to see this couple, I have no idea who they are.

Flashforward to today: frenetically doing laundry preparing for the trip to the motherland. Do one load, hang it out, do another, hang it out... but wait, why is there a space on that 3rd row in between my biking sock and Thomas' pyjamas? I never leave a big space, of course, because I need all the space I can get (that statement applies to just about anything in Europe, and certainly laundry-drying-apparati). Oh fudge...... and so I lean over and sure enough, 4 stories down, there it is: my underwear, like a splatted dead animal, clothespin still attached. Lying on the back terrace of whoever lives on the 2nd floor. A black thong.

DANG. What's a girl to do? Why can't it have landed on the guy below us who is a professional oboeist with the Monaco philharmonic and we water his plants when he travels? Or the annoying adolescents on the floor below that who live in their own apartment because their parents live in the apartment across the hall from them? At least I wouldn't be embarrased to ask them for my thong. But who is on the 2nd floor? And why my black thong? Why not Thomas' jeans, or Estelle's little pink pyjamas. "Hello, I'm your neighbor from the 5th floor, so sorry, but I think my daughter's adorable pink pyjamas are on your terrace." Slides off the tongue so much nicer than "Hi, can I have my thong." which p.s. in French is "Bonjour, est-ce que je peux recuperer mon string?"

See, if I was living in America, this wouldn't happen, because I'd have a dang dryer, and even if I lived in an apt building, there'd be a laundry room where my thong could just anonymously have been left and I could just as anonymously sneak back to get it. Now I gotta go knock on a door and in my best French....... sigh...... you get the picture. Already I'm known as "la femme enceinte" (the pregnant woman), or rather, I was known as that. Now I'm "L'Americaine" (think you don't need that translated). The nice people refer to me as "la femme avec le bébé". Whoever is on the 2nd floor will now call me "Madame String". Dang.

So, not capable of the stamina needed to go down and do it, I opted for a photo for the blog.

"VICIOUS" ???

There are moments in your life in a foreign country which offset other days and other experiences like at the Prefecture (see previous post "la honte").

About once a month or so, I will suddennly hear a school bell clanging out on the street. It gets louder and louder, accompanied by some hollering. The first time I heard it, I naturally thought it was a teacher searching for students or the organ grinder with his monkey (yes, we have one of those too in this neighborhood). The beauty of living near the Port of Nice is that it is a real neighborhood, and part of the oldest part of the city. As opposed to where I lived before - first in what was the Russian Czar's palace at the turn of the century, now transformed into a school, and secondly in the bourgeois part of the city - full of rich anglophones, tourists, and retired people from the north of France.

But here in the Port you get a little bit of everything, and nothing too scary. So it took me a few months, staring from the heights of my balcony, to understand what the heck this guy with the tiny little cart and school bell was selling. He kept hollering out things I couldn't understand, clanging his bell and stopping every few feet and looking around. Nobody else was out on their balcony, wondering if he was a Jehovah's witness announcing the apocalypse. He stands practically in the middle of the intersections, yelling and ringing. His cart was just a little thing, grubby and dirty and made of wood as far as I could tell. There was nothing on it, no produce, no food, nothing with color. I strained to hear what he said, but just couldn't make it out. Sounded like he was saying "vicious" - not the way to get a client, whatever you're selling, I thought.

Finally, Barry Manilow (my neighbor who is old-school nicois thru and thru, has an "accent du sud" to die for, dyes his hair, constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY smokes skinny cigars, plays guitar and should break out into the CopaCabana at any moment) explained. He's the Sharpener. He'll sharpen your stuff for a few euros. Just go down on the street with your knives, your scissors, your sabre, whatever. He's got some stone that he turns with a crank or something.

In the States, if you have an ice cream truck that comes thru your neighborhood, it is considered quaint. I've got Mr. Sharpener. The mystery is only partially solved-- I still don't know what he shouts. Believe me, I've had the dictionary out trying to figure it out. Thomas gave me a blank look because he's never here when the guy is out on the street. Next time I see Barry I'm going to get to the bottom on it. p.s. to my family: kind of reminds you of Mom and the "ee tan yah"?