New Year News, Post Christmas Fun

Dying to know what we did between the 28th and the 30th? Here's a little glimpse of the back end of our week in Angers.
Finally, I met Maya Beuchard!

Maya is daughter to Guillaume and Caroline - who were both at our French wedding and most notably Guillaume was one of Thomas' two "temoins" - best man. Maya is 4 months younger than Léna.
Group shot #1: Thomas looks like a gangster
Group shot #2: Guillaume is now the gangster. Incidentally Léna did not like seeing another little girl on her daddy's lap!
Playing cards:
Wednesday 29th: Lison comes to play for the day. Lison is 5 months older than Estelle, and is daughter to Celine, childhood neighbor to Thomas. p.s. yes i did those 'French' braids myself!
They were just perfect playmates.
Lunch, ham and pasta, can't go wrong!
4:00 gouter: crepes made by Manou (Andrée). YUMMY. Lison's younger brother Merlin makes an appearance with his grandmother Myriam. You can see all the toppings we had to choose from! Also note Estelle's reindeer headband from family friend Virginie....
Then Lison/Merlin's dad Nicholas comes to collect his charges - he is a "sommelier", which means a wine expert. As in that's his job!
Two happy grandchildren with their Manou!
Reading stories with Papy at bedtime:
Thursday 30th: we had an amazing raclette lunch, joined by Virgine (who escaped being photographed????) and we also had a visit from "Che" (pronounced 'shuh') otherwise known as Olivier Cheminet, Thomas most eligible bachelor friend. Love him!
Che is recently back on the market, ladies! He does computer support for a humanitarian doctor's group in Paris, and recently lived in Burma for over a year. Like I said, love him! And bonus: he breakdances!
Moving on - back here in Nice, the New Year has meant obsessions with building forts. Here's some photos of a recent fort:

Before packing away the Christmas things, the girls enjoyed one last reading of their family-voiced recorded book "Twas the Night....".
Today, Thomas went to Marseille for hockey and I manned the fort (literally, as there was an enormous fort built in Léna's room before he left). Later my friend Marie came & took the big girls to swim lessons while I had the little girls at home.
This was Louise's first sighting of the piano so she was quite enraptured:


Lots of fun for these 2 little squirts:
Look how we can touch our toes (this is easier for Louise than for "Her Tankiness")

Speaking of tankiness, I should add that we saw the pediatrician yesterday: so at 20 months, 29 1/2 pounds, 35 inches, or 13.4 kilos, 89 cm. Chart? What chart? We've been far off that ever since Day One.
5 quick videos:
First, yesterday I went to the P.O. for a package and it was Xmas DVD's from my brother Paul. George, YOU ROCK! Still no pkg from Mary B, :-(
#2: 2 under-2's tinkling the ivories: things were fine until I complimented Louise and Léna immediately furrowed her brow with consternation.
#3: New Year Musings
#4: Estelle listening to her "Twas the Night" book recorded by my family. After a while I realized she was able to imitate the intonation of certain pieces, specifically certain family members reading their lines. One afternoon she spent a half hour cozied up on the couch, whispering the lines of the book over and over and matching the inflection of the recordings - I tried to catch it on video but the clip doesn't do it justice. She was pretty incredible, for a 4 year old.
#5: When you're not even 2, things are silly.

Happy New Year!

Each new year brings me the same memory: 3rd grade, and how difficult it was for about 2 weeks to remember to write "1979" instead of "1978" on all my papers. Once I shared that with my dad and he said he had had the same problem from '39 into '40. We swapped these stories while filling all the bathtubs in our house with water on Dec 31, 1999, since on that day he wondered if our society's infrastructure would break down as we entered the New Millenium and there'd be no water. In the end, all was well and the next morning he ordered me around draining tubs and sinks. It was his last healthy New Year's and remains a great memory for me!

Last night, after flying back to Nice, we had an impromptu aperitif with our friends Marie & Ludovic whose own plans had fallen thru at the last minute, which worked out perfect - they are 2 blocks away. No photos of the adults, but a few shots above and below of the "ELLE" brigade = Estelle, Léna, Louise & Eva. We enjoyed some champagne and foie gras and had those girls home in bed by 10:30.
Eva is 2 months older than Estelle.
Louise is 7 weeks older than Léna.

Happy New Year to All! And to my mother and all 10 siblings who are all together today in Vermont to ring in the New Year together in the snow.

Christmas Vacation continues....Nice & Angers

A week ago on Estelle's first day off from school, we started making our Christmas cookies...


Even Léna got into the act:

Tuesday afternoon we went to a "Gouter de Noel" at Emmanuelle's house - she has 2 daughters Charlotte & Maelys who are at Estelle's school. We know them thru Eva & Louise. So these 6 little girls spent a few hours together. Emmanuelle made us waffles!
Here's Estelle wearing one of their costumes that they let her borrow, even! It makes me realize I have no dress-up clothes for Estelle.
Weds and Thurs are a blur of rain, laundry and packing. Friday morning at dawn we flew up to Angers and by some miracle avoided all the cancelled flights which plagued Europe last week. We arrived to see a few changes in Estelle's room:

And a sitting room ready for Christmas:


Friday night we went to mass and Saturday morning there was some excitement!
Estelle made out like a bandit.
Our breakfast table:
For our Christmas dinner we had a "chapon". This is a castrated rooster, I learned. Very good.
At 4:30, as tradition goes, the Saulnier family joined us for champagne and the Buche de Noel.
This year after years of threatening to do so, Guy made his OWN buche and so the one below (from a bakery,chocolate mousse) had some competition. Somehow I don't have a photo of Guy's! It was very much like the ones I have made in the past. Excellent!
Lots of fun everywhere for Léna...
The day after Christmas (yesterday) we walked over to the Moreau's house for some Christmas cheer around their central fireplace. There were 4 different families represented, all neighbors from the cul-de-sac area where Thomas grew up and where his parents still live.

Agnes with Sebastien Rigollet and Virginie Saulnier.
Here's Lucie Rigollet and her two boys Ferriolle and Robinson, who are both within days of my own girls.



So far, lots of sweets and meats but no sweetmeats (yet).
It's pretty dang cold (32F) but no snow.
More playdates this afternoon etc. All is well.

Christmas Vacation begins, Weekend One

This photo above is from this summer/4th of July, but that little girlie peeking out is Heather, and today is her 4th birthday over in Vermont - Happy Birthday to my goddaughter! It is also my nephew Jacob's 13th - officially a teenager today!
Yesterday morning, we took a stroll over to the Christmas Village, right when it opened at 10:30. Estelle was the first kid in to run around on the trampoline, her favorite. Meanwhile, Léna was in the Flintstone's car:

Here's Estelle running from one trampoline net to another. Normally there are 2 or 3 kids per net. Estelle had all 10 to herself!
Photo op on Santa's sleigh:
And here's "Santa's Reindeer Stable" (in English). Interesting, Dasher and Donner don't make the cut apparently. Only 6 reindeer! I loudly protested, singing the song for any passerby, noting with wild gestures that Dasher and Donner had no representation here!

Earlier in the morning (like 9:30) I had ridden my bike over to our old neighborhood to the bakery we used to live above, just to get some Buchettes de Noel. This is the 3rd time in a week I have gone, the other times there weren't any left because I went in the afternoon.
Above, clockwise: pink = buchette de fruit rouges (berries), then lemon (with coconut, I discovered upon tasting, blech), then praline with the deer, lastly, chocolate mousse. Below: close up of the deer, may be the closest some of my brothers get this deer season. :-)

And here we see Estelle, who will not eat an orange or a strawberry, eating a boiled quail's egg, with salt. She loves them, ate 3 in a row. Who can explain children's gastronomic tastes?
This morning we ate "oeufs à la coque", i.e. soft-boiled eggs. We have no less than 6 egg cups in our little apartment, a traditional gift at birth. For the first time ever, we used them. I just tried soft-boiled eggs for the first time in November courtesy of my friend Melanie and found I liked it very much.
Like I said, she won't eat a sweet juicy grape, but a soft-boiled drippy egg, no problem. Here she is:
Estelle demonstrates dipping her "mouilette" (thin stick of toasted bread with salted butter on it , literally means "a little wetter") into the liquid part of her oeuf à la coque:
I had two lessons at home this morning (yes, on the Sabbath!) with my favorite 2 brothers, Thomas and Quentin, home from the Naval Academy in Brest and Saint Malo and in need of some specific English assistance. While my Thomas was at the market with Léna, Estelle played quietly in her room during my lessons:

She was a good little girl - but she knows Thomas & Quentin well, sort of like her big cousins so she was not phased by them in the living room working with me. A close up of this little tea party. She told me they were eating soft-boiled eggs.
The rest of our day might involve some cookies. Who knows!