Last Saturday, we spent the day at the beach in the town of Pornic, on the south side of the Loire estuary.  It's a little touristy town, but since it's been touristy since the 13th century, the present day tourist shops aren't too disturbing: there's still the castle, houses from the 16th century, and countless incredible mansions with towers from the 18th.  On the beach, the sand was very yellow, the water crystal clear, the people not too numerous (though numerous enough to look askance at us, because their children didn't make a quarter of the noise ours did).  We spent hours in the water and both parents got sunburned (but we did put sun screen on the children!).

Look at that, as soon as you take my sons out of our apartment and out of the confines of the small car we rent from time to time, they actually love each other.  That warms my heart, as they have been tormenting each other with their unhappiness since we've been here.  Matthias prevents Simeon going to sleep at night with his tossing and crying and whisperings (last night it was because today Simeon was going on an outing with his class and wouldn't be at school all day, and Matthias was punishing him by complaining loudly that the only good moment in the day, the moment he waits for while bored in class, is seeing Simeon at recess, which he wasn't going to get to do today.)

I have now been to both boys' 'reunion' (I don't know what to call it in English, the teacher

 holds a meeting with the parents to describe, with great seriousness, the stringent curriculum they're going to try to teach the kids that year, and they're just as serious and concerned about math and French as about the arts and gym--the education of french children into high culture, including the culture of eating a huge number of different cheeses is of the utmost importance.)  Although this is the first time that I have thought, upon being presented with such things, 'Oh, my goodness, how can my poor children ever master all this?', I also found those meetings highly amusing.  They consisted mainly of the teacher railing against the 'education nationale', the ministry of education, which sets curricula in detail for all of France.  Every time he (both boys' teachers are men) would raise a new point about something the children have to learn this year, either he or one of the parents would say, 'but how is this possible, without Saturdays?' (the children used to go to school on Saturday mornings, but this was changed last year).  Every time the teacher would describe some reform or other that he found obnoxious, or something the 'education nationale' told him to do last year that he REFUSED to do, everybody would rail against the government and how they are trying to run education as if it's a private business etc.  Me?  I just wanted to know when they did gym, so I could hold that in store to tell Matthias which days he would like.  But basic practical information like that was not forthcoming.

One fun part of having the four kids at such different levels of schooling is that I get to see what they teach them here about basic school procedure that they don't teach in America.   For instance, even Mimi has a cahier de correspondence, where the teacher writes down informations about outings, vacations, whatever goes in the Panda pocket at home.  By the time the kids get to Matthias's age, they know never to forget these cahiers, and they know to get them signed whenever there's something new in there.  But my poor Magdalene hasn't been properly trained, so she regularly forgets about it.  Same for the cahier de texte, where the children write their homework.  Matthias is being taught to do this, then to use a ruler to neatly separate homework he's already done from ones that are still to do (nobody crosses out stuff here, they  use their pen erasers, which they keep in their trousse, another bit of school procedure that my children are having to learn).  Anyway, Simeon is struggling with that one, and has been weeping and wailing because he can't tell what his homework is, or when it's due or what kind of test he's having.  If nothing else, this year will teach them to learn in a few days what the other children have had a lifetime of school to learn.

Magdalene is also learning about French emotionalism and patriotism.  She had us all laughing last night at the dinner table doing an imitation, in French, of her history teacher carrying on about the life of soldiers in the trenches in the first world war: "Life for the soldiers was HORRIBLE, they were HUNGRY, they were COLD, they lived in the MUD, you all cannot IMAGINE etc."  She says all her teachers are like that, they get so excited about things and they are too involved in them, which also causes them to yell at her when she fails to do something all the others have known for 10 years how to do.  She keeps coming up against these things that everyone knows but she doesn't know how they know.  For instance, she's not allowed to have both fruit AND dessert at lunch, except when it's melon, then it's considered an appetizer (which they call entree here) and she's allowed to have it.  But to her, it looks completely random, that she gets yelled at for having orange and dessert, but not for having melon and dessert.

I'm going to end on an upbeat note: the boys have finally found something that they positively love.  We signed them up for Judo classes, and they came back just almost too excited to speak.  They've learned to knock each other down, roll over each other, and any number of other exciting things.  Oh, they can't wait till next wednesday when they get to go again.  They even have their little uniforms hanging in the closet, though they really want to wear them all the time.  I guess that's another place where they're happy to have each other and where they're learning to rely on each other.  Matthias, especially, has boundless confidence in Simeon's abilities, and this gives Simeon unlimited courage to do what he didn't know he could.  Good.  Now we need to find similar exciting things to do for the girls.