Here is the most beautiful carousel I have ever seen.  All of the animals move in the most amazing ways.  For instance, that bird Magdalene is sitting on so triumphantly, knocked me in the head as it swung back and forth and I stood below it next to Mimi on a little ladybug.  Magdalene moved the wings herself.  The boys went on a flying man and got to pedal his wings up and down.  All of it is made of wood, with just the mechanisms in metal.

Aside from that, we visited the boys' school (they begin on Thursday, and then it's Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri from 9 to 4:45 (with the option of starting at 7:30 and ending at 6:00, for a moderate price determined by how much we make.  The price they pay for school lunch (all of you wish you could have their school lunch, I swear, it would be like going to a fancy restaurant every day) is also determined by how much Sean makes).  How very egalitarian of the french.  Anyway, Simeon and Matthias are going to a small neighborhood school (5 minutes walk from our house) with one class per grade.  It's an old old building.  Matthias's teacher has historical pictures of the school pinned to their classroom door, and it showed elementary school boys Simeon's age training for WWI by learning to shoot rifles in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian war, when revenge was on everyone's mind.  
Other than that, I have discovered that the grocery store delivers for free!!!  No little old lady carts for me, and no more twenty minute walks carrying 100 pounds of groceries.  Freedom to buy 5 liters of milk if I want to (but no longer the ability to browbeat my kids by pointing out how much I suffer to provide them with food).

Oh, and I want to make an inventory of what the streets smell like in my neighborhood:  first, there's the smell of diesel, all over town, wherever you go, I guess they use it a lot here.  Then, anytime you go near any of the rivers, there's the smell of mildew and rot (really fun to run with all that in your nostrils).  Then, any small alley, or even an unexpected wall smells like the strongest human pee smell you've ever had to endure.  Then there's the dog poop EVERYWHERE.  This is especially galling to me because aside from picking up my own dog's stuff (and often other dogs') fanatically (it's all I have left to allow myself to feel superior to my neighbors.  I've lost the 'I'm French and they're mere Americans' attitude, both because I don't find the French quite as admirable as I used to, and because I'm here anyway, the lowly American), there is such an abundance of public garbage cans here, I never have to carry my little brown bag more than 5 minutes, no matter where I happen to be.  So that excuse, which sometimes tempts me around Bellingham (I can't stand to carry this thing for the next hour of my run) is not available to anyone here.  

Ok, then there is the smell of the sewers, a smell which materializes randomly in different places at different times (except, it very reliably wafts from my toilets, not at all masked by all the perfumed cleaners I have used).  Then there are the huge dumpsters near the market where the fish salespeople dump their refuse (and they sell a lot of fish and shellfish at my market), that's a really powerful smell, together with the smell of raw meat and blood that also permeates the market (when I was a kid, I always thought that was the smell of horse meat, I don't know why).  Oh, and when you have to pass people, then there's sweat and (lots of) aftershave and perfume.  

Once in a while, very rarely, you happen by a bakery that is just baking its breads, and then all is forgiven: that smell is even better than the smell coming out of Haggens when they are cooking their donuts, or the smell of Target when they are popping their corn (!).  And in the woods, there is a smell I only recently remembered from my childhood, I think it's the smell of chestnut trees, or else it's the Platanes, huge majestic trees that grow everywhere here: here is a picture of us walking among them.  That is a very good smell, acrid and fresh at the same time, a little peppery, the smell of french woods.