Well, we had an uneventful week-end after so much trauma and tragedy on Thursday and Friday.  I spend my week-end reliving middle school by helping Magdalene do her homework, pages and pages of it.  She's having to work so hard, I think she can go straight to college when we get back to the states.  It's funny, actually, because when I came to the states as a Junior in high school, I was used to working really hard, and I've always thought that one and a half years of American high school were what deprived me of those life-long good habits in my later life.  But my hope is that a mere year of hard work in France will cure Magdalene of the bad habits she's acquired in American schools her whole life.  When Sean and I first met, we were in a seminar on Thomas Aquinas in which we argued about just this question: can a single act destroy a long established habit? 

On Saturday, Simeon and I spent a good hour roaming the aisles of the stationary store looking for the very precise list of school supplies he was given on Thursday.  He and Magdalene got fountain pens as well as fountain pen erasers, and then I got to give them a little lesson in how to use those emblematic implements of the french school child.  They put all their writing implements in a little pouch called a trousse, which even adults carry these around like good school-children (e.g., the man who came to fix all the things gone wrong in our apartment so far, and left, having taken his little trousse out to write down a few things, but having fixed absolutely nothing).

All week, we have been watching people setting up, first an enormous ferris wheel (the biggest one any of us have seen) and then an entire fair the size of the NW fair in Lynden, on two courtyards the size of Broadway park (except here they don't even pretend like there's any other motive to have the fair, like showing animals or tomato contests or quilt displays, it's all rides and games).  It's really striking, you have the cathedral, and the old city wall with its gate, and then this garish fair right smack at the foot of it all.  Not only that, but the booths at the fair all seem to be x-rated, not just for nudity (the whole country is x-rated for that, all you have to do is walk by a newsstand to be shocked), but for much more shocking things.  Magdalene covered both boys' eyes every time, but it was useless, they saw anyway.  Funny, because French children seem so much more innocent and younger than American ones, and yet they have this sort of thing to gaze upon at every street corner.  This very tightly packed fair, then, and very inappropriate, was also exorbitantly expensive.  No bracelets allowing all rides for our poor children.  They all got to go on the ferris wheel, from which you could see all of Nantes, with its rivers, its grey slate roofs and its churches, and then they got to pick one ride each (although Matthias had to accompany Mimi on her ride, to keep her safe from the yucky bee, which she is deathly afraid of at school), and they each got a barbapapa (cotton candy) bigger than their heads.  I don't think I've ever seen anything cuter than Mimi biting at this enormous wad of sugar, and ending up with bright pink shininess all over her eyebrows and hair.

And now it's back to the weekly routine: Mimi's heartbreaking howls when we drop her off at school, Matthias's scared and reluctant little face as I kiss him goodbye at the school door, Simeon's stoic frown behind his new French 'NBA' (!) glasses, and Magdalene's anguished questions that I don't know how to answer (what if the Spanish teacher calls on her, when she's only done 2 months of Spanish to the other kid's one year, what if her lunch card doesn't work again, is she allowed to wear her gym shoes for the day, because they won't fit into her backpack crammed with 20 books, notebooks and binders--this is the day she comes out at 5:30, and what if they have swimming today, and not gym? etc.)  I bribed them all a little bit by buying these special kinds of chocolate bars (high in dairy products!!!) for their gouter (the meal every French child eats at 4:30 when she comes out of school) and sending them to school with them for their afternoon recess.  I don't know if it's the sea air, but they're all ravenous all the time, and it's hard to fit even enough food for one meal into our small refrigerator.

Sorry, no pictures today, it sure doesn't look as nice without them.  I'll try to do better next time.