I think today counts as one of the worst since we've been here. The children are now on vacation for the next week and a half (the toussaint, or All Saints vacation), and, like a good city parent who lives with 4 loud children in an apartment, I had planned each day very carefully to give my children entertainment, physical activity, education, nutrition, etc. So Monday went well: the two boys were in a Judo camp from dawn till dusk where they are not able to fight (except in controlled Judo moves), since they are each other's only comfort in a foreign land. I took the two girls to the art museum where the little one lasted about an hour (a little less) so we had to stop at the 18th century, with unbelievable pictures of Adam and Eve that looked like they were taken straight out of The Watchtower or something like that. Anyway, Magdalene's eye had been red and now it became swollen almost shut, so I had to make my first hesitating foray into French medicine and got an appointment for this morning. We went, and met a very nice young doctor who prescribed her some antibiotics (and of course, the necessary painrelievers and cleaners and whatnot that French doctors are forced to prescribe to you, lest you feel that your taxes are too high and are not paying for enough medical care). That was already a breach in my neurotically careful plan, which had been to take all four kids to the swimming pool.
Well, as soon as Magda and I got home, I told the others to get ready, and not 5 minutes later, Mimi fell on a metal tube and opened her neck (I can't tell you all the things she could have hit instead of just skin, and that have been running wildly in my imagination since). So off we went, back across the tram tracks to the nice doctor's again. Mimi was crying on the way there, and in the waiting room, and when we first met the doctor (he has a beard, she hates men with beards, especially doctors). But apparently, she really has grown up and become socialized (thank you French public schools) because after a little while, seeing that the doctor was not pulling out any huge needles, she squeezed her Matthias's hand very tight (she had brought her Matthias with her for comfort) and seemed to decide that she was done crying (the crying was also making her wound bleed more profusely on her pretty white shirt). After that, she was completely quiet, and has been telling everyone since how bave (brave, but she doesn't say 'r' in French or English) she was, and how big. Anyway, he didn't sew her, he said he couldn't do it without giving her gas, and that gas was only available at the emergency room. He just taped her together and we're all hoping it sticks. Each consultation costs 22 euros (we only have emergency coverage, though I'm not sure that would have covered the emergency room), and the doctor, though embarrassed that we weren't being reimbursed, was very proud that it was so much less than in the states. And he wasn't embarrassed at all about taking the money.

Now Mimi is asleep, but otherwise, I'm treating her like a china doll, and everytime she smiles a little too wide, or cries a little too loud, I hover anxiously and tell her her booboo will come open and they'll have to sew her up. Magdalene was remarking that French people don't seem to have a very developed sense of a professional relationship. You always deal with people as if you're meeting them socially, even the doctor, or salespeople in stores, or waiters in restaurants. This is good and bad. It does make those relationships more human, and it reminds both sides of the genuine humanity of the other (people don't tend to be condescending to their waiters, for instance). On the other hand, if your doctor is in a bad mood, or if your butcher thinks you should not cook your pork with tomatoes, they will let you know very brusquely, which is a bit surprising for us.

We had a quiet weekend, no visitors, no trips, no fancy or not fancy dinners. I acquired a bike and took the two boys and the dog on a nerve racking (because so so crowded) long ride along the Erdre (speaking of which, do you remember a very early post about the three rivers of Nantes, the Erdre, the Chezine and the Sevre? Well, I've discovered two more: the Sens, and the Gesvre, both of which have paths running alongside that I've explored running. When I was a kid, I used to study the rivers of France in Geography class, which one threw itself into the sea and where, which one was an affluent of which, etc. Well, now I do it as a hobby, after complaining about it so much as a kid). We went for a very civilized walk in the Jardin des Plantes, bringing with us the inevitable gouter to eat on a parc bench. We shopped for food, both at the market and at the mega super store (a kind of costco of France, only the portions are not quite as big)... Boring. Next week, however, we are going to visit my aunt and uncle in Spain, so I promise many exciting entries then. And I promise to do a better job caring for my children so they stop getting hurt quite so much.

Fall has really arrived here this week. People had been warning us that we were having an exceptionally long summer, and not to get used to the sun, because she was going to disappear for the next 6 months. So, the sun has disappeared, and in its place we have clouds, with a kind of permanent drizzle and three or four times a day the most incredible downpours I've ever seen (yes, worse than Bellingham). Mimi and I got caught in one of the first downpours. We were fooled by the drizzle into thinking we could take a walk with our Bellingham Gortex to protect us, but we clearly did not know what we were dealing with. We were so drenched in about 2 seconds that we didn't even bother trying to jump into our raincoats (we had gotten hot racing back from the park to be in time to pick the boys up from school). The only inconvenience, once I was completely soaked and didn't care about getting wetter, was that I was wearing a black bra under a yellow shirt which is opaque when dry, but, unbeknownst to me, not when wet. So the wine salesguy from up the street who gives good wine advice saw me, and a lot of other people I don't know... Well... French women do go topless.

Fall also has meant discovering one more technologically retarded aspect of French life. When it started getting cold and damp, we started looking for some kind of thermostat or centralized heating turn-on button. At first we looked sort of leisurely, just walking through the apartment, and then, at least for me who spends all my days here, it started to get more urgent and I started actively looking for it, and then finally we launched a full fledged campaign to find the darned thing, with no luck. we pushed various buttons and turned various switches and valves, with the result that one of our hot water heaters (we have three) leaks and we have no hot water in the kitchen (boy, when the house is freezing, it's really unpleasant doing the dishes with cold water). A chauffagiste (a heating person) is supposed to be coming today, only this is France, you know, so he might go have a verre (a glass of something alcoholic) or a café arrosé (coffee with a little smt thrown in) instead.

The last thing I want to write about fall is more poetic, and I promise not to complain about this part. Fall at the market is really lovely. There are dozens of apple varieties with names like reine des reinettes, reinette grises, drap d'or, rubinettes, pilotes, all better one than the next. There are dozens of wild mushroom varieties (mmmm, the girolles are so good, cooked with rabbit), and then there are the chataignes, the chestnuts (the eatable ones, not the horse chestnuts that fall all over Cornwall park, those came about a month ago). The chataignes are everywhere, as decorations in the windows of shops, for sale in the fruit stalls, for sale glazed in the bakeries (boulangeries), pastry-shops (patisseries) and candy-shops (confiseries), and on my running paths, where they trip me with their spiky green shells (not a good idea to fall on them) and their slick brown selves. Old men and women crowd my running paths to gather them. It really feels French. My brother brought us some a couple of weeks ago when they visited, and I duly scored each one and roasted them, and then, when I put the first one in my mouth, it was like going back straight to my childhood, when my mother would take us , every fall to the woods behind my grandparents' apartment outside Paris to gather them. However, my children and husband, who did not grow up with the wonderful tradition of chestnuts in the fall, did not like them. So, I cleaned them and cooked them into a sweet paste according to a recipe Anna sent me from bellingham... and no one liked them still (except for me, but there was no way even I could eat that many chestnuts). So I tried to lighten my chestnut paste with egg whites and whipped cream, which made them quite delicious, but still only to myself. So, well, if I come home really fat, it will be because I like the food too much, what with its reminding me of my childhood and all, and my family likes it too little, its being a bit too sophisticated for them (!).

Oh, yes, and one more thing about fall: the vacherins are out! It's a cheese made in the swiss alps with milk gathered from cows who have just been released into the high mountain pastures for the very first spring grass after a winter eating hay in the lowlands. Somehow, this special grass gives the milk, and hence the cheese, a special taste. Then it takes this long for the cheese to mature, and it's only available from November to March. Sean agrees that it's the best cheese he's ever had. It seeps out of its crust and you eat the soft creamy stuff with a spoon.

One more thing of note, and sorry I have no photo of it, because it really was unbelievable. The farmers of the Pays de la Loire (the area for which Nantes is the capital, something like a tiny state, a county, really, but with much more of a national character) came to Nantes to demonstrate. They had a procession of tractors, a booming canon that roared every five minutes, and they covered the city with straw, chicken feathers, rotting apple mush, and fires lit on the major boulevards. And I'm not exaggerating when I say they covered the street with that stuff, it was really knee deep. I tried to listen to their speeches (they were having their rally right by our house) but it was too boring, all these little details about the price of porc and the usages of chicken in the EU. Also, Tipomme was terrified by the canons. So I can't really tell you what it was this demonstration was supposed to accomplish. I guess in the States, the farmers would get together and pay a lobyist. Here, they stage this complicated production that sets people like Sean against them, because it makes them seem hostile and angry not at the government, but at the city people. But at least the city people know that they're mad, even if we don't know why, so it's perhaps more democratic this way, in a 'knowledge' and not 'power' meaning of democratic.

I went to my first seminar in psychoanalysis yesterday. We discussed several chapters of Freud's Introductory lectures in Psych., but since all the other participants are Lacanians, I was a little lost (I gather Lacan is mostly interested in language and the clues it can give to the contents of the unconscious. But that's about all I gathered. I'm supposed to read more Lacan for next time, but I think for general readability, I prefer Freud greatly.) Still, the members of the seminar are quite nice, not at all pretentious as I'd feared, no one pontificated or gave lessons, and guess who couldn't shut up, despite her rusty french and her complete lack of any expertise? Yes, that's right, the rude American among them.

That's all for now, pictures for next time.

I think this entry should be called: when in Nantes... do as the Nantais. Here's why. On Friday (which is the day this photo was taken, after a baker came into Simeon's class and helped all the kids bake that delicious treat you see him with there, as part of the 'semaine du gout' (the week of taste)--here in France, they think you have to teach kids how to like bread, or else the entirety of French culture will collapse, God forbid, what if French kids start to eat pita instead?), I went to a new pool to swim (all on my own, without any of my friends from the boys's school). Well, in this pool, it isn't just that there's no organisation for the lanes, there are no lanes at all! So everyone swims wherever and there are constant collisions. Now, at first, I was letting my anglo-saxon orderliness rule where I swam: I was trying to swim up one side of the black line at the bottom of the pool, and down the other. But I soon realized that when you are in a messy country, being orderly actually creates more chaos, so I started swimming wherever there was room, and I didn't do too badly. I didn't increase my overall speed, but I did realize that there are skills required for water polo (swerving and turning really fast, for instance) which I could definitely acquire. Hence the conclusion, when in Nantes, in a pool, do not behave as you would in a Bellingham pool!

Here is another example of something I wouldn't be doing in Bellingham: having my 2 year old daughter shell the beans. But really, before you call child protective services (they can't get me here anyway, that's why people like Polanski hide here) she pitches a fit if I don't let her do it. These are called Coco de Paimpol, and they are so good (and only here until November, the vegetable person told me at the market) so I buy them every week despite the embarassment of saying their name. They are amazing cooked for a long time with onions and tomatoes, with a splash of vinegar at the end. A friend here told me to cook them like that.


Let's see, not much else is new. We went back to the Sevre river where we had walked once without reaching the 1000 year old dam we were aiming for. This time, we had the boys on bikes, Mimi in the backpack and a picnic, so we did make it. When we got there, we found the dam (well, it's a thousand years old, built by monks from a monastery established by St Martin, the one who cut his cloak in two when a beggar asked him for alms, he's the subject of many french paintings) not all that exciting. But there was a quite lovely playground near it, and then this old water mill here, and the castle tower you can just make out in the background. Of course, Sean and I were sort of disappointed that, given that it had taken us 3 and a half hours to get there, we had better head back . We both really wanted to go see the tower. I guess everything feels like that when you start to explore. You see some lovely things, but there's always others that you can just make out, or that you know are there from the map, and you always want to go further.

As usual, though, children and parents hold you back: the kids were completely exhausted, and Sean's father, who has been visiting on and off this week, also was pretty worn out. We'll just have to go back and leave the house earlier in the day. Here is Matthias with a water sample he took from the Sevre river below the dam. I don't know what he intended to do with it, but my only thought was, yikes, wash your hands...

There doesn't seem to be much else to report. I was shocked, last week, when Magdalene brought home a bit of homework we had done together, and several of my interpretations of a short story
by Zola were summarily called WRONG and corrected. The pile of manure did NOT represent human affairs, but power (how could I have missed that?) and the woman's fear in the cemetary did not indicate that she was afraid of where her relation with a young man, not her husband, was leading (I guess I was reading too much into it, though a few pages later the adulterous relationship is consumated). Anyway, this led Magdalene to complain once more about the central problem she sees with French education: they don't want you to do any critical thinking, they just want you to copy down what the teacher says and repeat it verbatim on tests. In this case, I'm not sure how you could get the desired intepretations without doing some critical thinking, but beware if your critical thinking leads you in the wrong direction, you can have tone of evidence for your interpretation, but it's not the process that's important (as I assume it would be in the states), it's the end result. Evidence for the wrong interpretation is not something you take into consideration, it's just something you dismiss: it supports the wrong interpretation, therefore, it is not evidence. No wonder the french are no good at science (well, yes, I know that's not right, but if there is evidence to the contrary, I think I will just have to consider it not to be evidence). (We still got an 8 out of 10 and a comment that it was very good work, so don't start worrying about how well we're doing, with our wrong-headed readings of manure piles and little cries of fright in graveyards at night).

Sean's father took us out to dinner on Sunday night to a beautiful 19th century Brasserie across from the opera called La Cigale (you can go to their website and see it, if you like, just look up La Cigale Nantes). The entire inside of the restaurant is painted with very 19th century figurative paintings of Breton scenes (girls fishing for shellfish on the beach, young fishermen in wooden clogs) and whatever is not painted is tiled and carved and mirrored. The food was good, but the service was like a parody of itself, with the supercilious waiter almost offended because only Sean's father ordered an appetizer, and then genuinely offended because though he addressed himself to Sean's father, I was the one who kept answering. Of course, I'm especially sensitive (Sean thinks paraoid) to that sort of thing, but it's really annoying to pay for a meal and then be made to feel like you are somehow trespassing because you don't quite know the important rules of how to order, what to order, who should talk, and whether you should put your elbows on the table or not. Really, after living in America where the customer is a king, it's hard to come back to France were the customer is often a supplicant instead.

Just a short note today to say that I have found the secret route to the heart of the population of Nantes. Yesterday, I went running with Mimi in the jogger for the first time since we've been here (and yes, Anna, I did give her a lollipop, and she did wait until we started running to eat it). I had the scary Tipomme with me, but instead of giving me dirty looks or picking up their children and their dogs to protect them from my poisoned presence, everyone I passed had a huge smile, or even congratulated me on my courage and my perseverance. Runners stopped to see us pass, old ladies who normally mutter after me with disapproval looked at me with eyes shining with love... Nothing happened that wouldn't be routine in Bellingham, but for here, it was the height of public success. And here I'd been dreading it fearing I wasn't in good enough shape anymore. Well, I think it's going to become a daily affair. Only once they get used to us, they won't be so nice anymore, but we can hope it lasts a few weeks still.

I warned you a little while ago about pedantic blogs, and I think this is going to be one... I can tell, it's been building up in me for some time, and now I must let it out. I've been thinking, really, about the nature of personal identity and how much it's related to language. When I speak English here, I have a certain idea of who I am. I'm the one who lived in Seattle and went to grad school at Cornell and met Sean. I have certain commitments and ideals that I'm pretty certain about and it's easy for me to find the right words to describe them, and I have certain struggles also that I know about and can describe with some amount of precision, struggles having to do with eating, and others having to do with accepting my role as a house wife, that sort of thing. But when I speak French, it's as if all those well-formed ideas I have about myself completely disappear. I don't know what I believe, I don't know what I like or dislike, I don't know what my strengths and weaknesses are, it's not clear my personal history has any coherence or meaning, words come out of my mouth that are completely neutral, they don't seem to come from a certain person I know fairly well, they seem to come from a machine. Weird. Maybe it's a kind of mental illness, like some kinds of brain problems that cause people to have different personalities. Maybe when I'm speaking French I do unspeakable things that my English-speaking self doesn't know anything about. I hope not.

Possibly, this is related to the fact that (a) my French is a little rusty, so I'm quite a bit slower in French than I am in English. Words don't come as precisely or easily; a lot of my attention is required to produce the mere language, so that I have no attention left for the content of what I have to say, or to think about what I'm going to say before it comes out; and (b) anyone here that I speak French to knows nothing about me except that I'm an American who speaks quite good though slightly rusty French, and that does seem to disorient me a lot, that I'm speaking to people who don't have of me the conception I have of myself (in English, since I have none in French). Still, the resulting feeling is that English comes out of the person Claudia, whereas French comes out of an automaton I don't consider to be myself.

The result of all this thinking (this is where the really pedantic part comes in, if you want to skip to the next paragraph) is that I am starting to view the nature of the person less as an entity, something like a soul or even like a character, something that subsists, and more as a set of activities. My English personality consists in certain thoughts I have and certain discourses I hold. When I stop having the thoughts and holding the discourses, when I start having different thoughts and holding different discourses, I become something (or someone) different. If I stop having thoughts altogether, I become an automaton. Then there's the more worrisome problem of how much power other people have over the nature of the being I am, not even what people do, but just what they think of me or know or fail to know about me.

On the other hand, it could be that I'm drinking a bit too much wine here.

Okay, now I'm done with pedantism for another month, you can all breathe a sigh of relief. Let's see, the marking events of the past weeks are these: Magdalene has been getting a greater than desired experience of the French tendency to politicize, solidarize and generally get hysterical over nothing. After I successfully changed her from the lame class (with all the bad and unfriendly students) to the good class (with the students of Greek AND the two lovely friends, whom Magdalene has been hanging out with all the time since), the whole of her school erupted in some kind of uproar. All the students in her old class (3e F) as well as their parents were yelled at for harassing her, then all the students came to her to ask who had harassed her, to which she replied that no one had harassed her, and then the teachers asked her who had harassed her... Poor thing. It's a really major scandal. Even the school's principal asked if she was happier and less harassed now that she was learning Greek. Since I never used the fact that she was harassed as an argument for changing her, I assume that the main teacher as well as the administrators were so worried about other parents demanding that Magdalene's precedent-setting change of class be given to their sons or daughters too, that they exaggerated the problem hugely, and then, having exaggerated the problem, were stuck going along with it as if it were a genuine scandal. I hope it dies down soon, so that Magdalene can focus on catching up a month of Greek.

My brother and his family came to visit us this week-end (that's Gabriel with Simeon above, and Nicolas and Ramona to the left). All the cousins got on wonderfully again. Mimi had planned a big outing that included a stop at her favorite bakery to buy the children a gouter, then a walk to the park that has the babybobs and a merry-go-round, and two rides on the babybobs and one on the merry-go-round. Matthias caught the monkey's tail on the merry-g0-round, which entitled him to a free ride, but there was no time, so he generously handed it to a random french child. While the children were riding on the Merry-go-round, my brother and I were sitting on a bench watching them and holding the dogs, and this lady came over to chat with us.

First about the dogs (Oh, what a nice Jack Russell, I see you didn't clip her tail, how good of you, and oh, why on earth do you have a muzzle on your dog, no, it's not a muzzle, it's just a leash, oh, she wouldn't bite, she looks so sweet, I'm telling you, it's not a muzzle, really, poor little beast, I really don't approve of muzzles...), anyway, from the dogs, the talk moved here and there, until she suddenly asked me, after learning I was American, was I also a worshipper of Obama? I should have known, from her using the word 'worshipper', but I didn't really notice, you know, it was my French automaton persona, she's not that smart. So I said, yes, we were really pleased about the Nobel Peace Prize, and she said, "so, are the Blacks going to take over now?" At that point, even my french self noticed that something was weird. My brother had long since left me all alone with the lady, not being as servile or polite as my french self is (whereupon the lady had promptly criticized his dog for being badly behaved as compared to my exemplary one). I said I didn't think blacks wanted to take over, just have the same privileges as everyone else (I was speaking French, mind you, so I had to keep it fairly simple). And just when things were about to get really sick, Sean came to get me because the kids were done with their ride. That was interesting.

Sean's institute has been decidedly eating up his time (both literally and by overfeeding him and giving him wine at lunch all of which make him sleepy). He has to have 2 hour lunches twice a week, and a 4 hour dinner once--unfortunately on the night I used to go swimming, so no more swimming in a sea of human flesh for me. On top of which, on Sunday, he went on a lunch boat cruise (organized by the institute) with Magdalene, Simeon, and Matthias, which they all said was stressful: the older academics at their table were completely uninterested in the children, the food was bad, and they couldn't explore the boat, they were stuck sitting at lunch for 3 hours looking at derelict chateaus out the window and listening to a loud french tour guide. I'm glad I got to walk around the city with my brother, and then babysit Miriam during her nap, so that I could read Freud in preparation for a seminar in psychoanalysis that I will be attending starting next week. Better than a three hour bad lunch with pretentious french academics.

Let's see... Many things happened this weekend. On Friday, we were invited to dinner at the home of the historian whom Sean has been wanting to work with here in Nantes. He's the same guy who let Sean know about the Institute (that goose with the golden eggs that never seems to run out of gold), and has already invited him to a conference in Barcelona and asked him to write a paper for some sort of anthology. Anyway, since he's American, we thought it would be an informal affair, and made the enormous faux pas of arriving right on time, and with a bottle of medium expensive wine (15 euros, that's about $22 , not bad for here). Oh, was it ever NOT an informal affair! There were two other couples there, in addition to the couple whose house it was at, all academics, all very interested in talking about modern art and all the exhibits they'd been to, and the various academics they liked and didn't like from various universities in France, and the concert cellists they liked and didn't like... It wasn't all that different from American Academics, except that in this case, we knew nothing and could in no way participate. There were many complicated dishes on different plates and with different cutlery, very good wine (you understand, from the great wineries, but sold under a different label because of the quotas, and my brother has an in, so he gets many cases of it with cash when he visits... not 22 dollar wine in any case). There were rules, too, that we didn't know but all the others knew, like that you cannot sit down when the hostess isn't sitting (only what do you do when you were sitting and she stands up?). And there were also silences in the conversation, where I thought I really ought to say something, since I had not been doing my duty all evening, but where the more I felt that I ought to say something, the more completely incapable I became of coming up with anything at all. Anyway, at around midnight, as we were drinking tea back in the drawing room, one of the silences was interrupted by a phone ringing. Everyone looked astonished, except for me and Sean, we looked at each other with a marked lack of astonishment. Indeed, it was Magdalene, who was babysitting for us for the first time. She had not heard Mimi's cries to go to the bathroom (Mimi still wears her bar on her feet, and so can't walk), so Mimi had had to drag herself to Magda's room and had not been able to make it without peeing in her pyjammas. Magda wanted to know what to do (she handled everything beautifully, but she was relieved when we finally made it home). Then we had to tell that fancy company all about it, and though it was our first and only entrée into the conversation, it wasn't the brilliant one we were hoping for.

On Saturday, my high school friend Alexa and her family arrived for a visit. Alexa is an art historian and has been in Italy and Paris all summer and fall doing manuscript research. She's staying until December, and we hope we get to see more of them. That's her son Asher on the photo with Mimi, on the banks of the Erdre (it's the side opposite the one I normally run on). Simeon had his first playdate with a boy named Matteo. I wondered about how they would communicate, but as it turned out, they only played soccer, for four hours straight, so communication wasn't key.

Matthias became best friends at first sight with Alexa's daughter Annika (pictured here). The two of them spent the weekend perched in the tree that Matthias goes in when he's sad (that's what Mimi calls it). Asher and Mimi sort of turned around each other suspiciously, while at the same time pretending to ignore each other, just like little dogs (so much for her socialization, I'm going to have to complain at school). Anyway, the children got a lot of social contact from the weekend, and so did the parents. What a relief and pleasure to speak with other Americans, without worrying about forgotten or unknown rules of politeness, or about how slowly one is speaking when everyone else speaks at a rate of 1000 words a second, or about their judging us or anything. It's hard to live somewhere where no one knows you and you know no one. It's always hard to remember who you are without the help of a kind of mirror from others who actually see something you recognize as yourself (frankly, I really don't know what the French see when they see me, not anything even in the same species as what I imagine as myself, I expect).

Other news: Mimi has aquired a new Papou! She was very grown up and tried very hard to like that goat I got her (who went successively by the names chèvre, horsie, and chien), but when she felt Papou's ears under her nose, oh, she couldn't contain her joy, and there's been not another look at anyone else since. Let's hope we can hang on to this one. She still comes up with elaborate theories about where the old one is, how someone found it and put it in the garage sale, and then someone bought it and brought it far away, but they are soon coming to give it to her, maybe it was her French cousins Josephine and Gabriel... In any case, Mimi has gotter happier (if sucking her thumb with a faraway look in her eyes more counts as happier, I don't know for sure). Magdalene has been really unhappy in school, as everyone knows. She's been unable to make any friends in her class, she's complained that the kids in her class are unfriendly, disrespectful to the teachers, unwilling to work, and sometimes downright mean. I was disappointed when they put her in a class with all the kids who are having to repeat the year, and and I've been less than impressed with the generally low standards in her class. Well, after a few judicious phone calls and appointments, I have accomplished what I thought was completely impossible (with the very welcome help of Magda's main teacher). I have managed to get them to change her to a better class where she already has friends. The cost, to her (but I assume also to me in an increased homework load and in a tired grumpy girl), is going to be that she start Ancient Greek, a month behind the others, and that she get up every morning for an 8AM start and end almost every day at 5:30. She's going to be exhausted, the work is going to be difficult, like it was for me--let's not let our children have an easier middle school experience than ourselves, it would not build character--but at last she will be with kids that she can make friends with and who can help her navigate French culture a little better (I dare not say like, after all, what have I been doing about French culture ever since we moved here, I ask you, complaining, so why should I want her to like it? Except that I do, for some reason.)

Tomorrow another wednesday to fill! Shall we take another trip to the library? Or to a playground where they can ride their bikes on some dirt hills covered with horsechestnuts? I'm not taking three small children to a museum, and they're all done with the castle and the cathedral, and none of the pools are open.

I made rabbit for the first time in my life to welcome Alexa's family... now I'm going to have to try hare, or partridge, or duck, or brains and other offals. I'll try cooking something brand new for every visitor. Better come soon, the dishes are going to get stranger and stranger as the year goes on.