Much to write about again this month. Influenced by all our friends here who don't think it's such a big deal to leave their children with friends or grandparents for shortish stretches of time, we accepted my aunt's offer to come stay with the four while Sean and I went away to the

other side of the country, to stay in a friend's house near Annecy. So my aunt arrived from Spain on a Sunday, and on Monday at 6AM, we kissed the children and walked to the train station carrying our backpacks like college students (that's when I realized that being a college professor is really not very different from being a college student: you carry a backpack and depend on the kindness of family and friends for all fun activities). We travelled all day, first on a two decker TGV, then on a really old little mountain train with compartments and curtains on all the windows. Oh, the children would have loved it. But we also loved it without them: we had a compartment just for us, and we stopped at every tiny village along various lakes, and though we arived in the city of Aix les Bains going forward, we left going backwards.

We got to the beautiful city of Annecy at 2pm with lots of time to explore. It's built on a series of canals and along the bottom edge of a lake, with mountains surrounding the lake (Sean thought it looked just like Bellingham!). Unfortunately, we never saw those mountains because thick clouds basically sat on the lake the entire time we were there. We climbed up to more than 2000 meters the first day, and all we saw for our troubles (the French don't seem to believe in switchbacks, they send the trail absolutely straight up the mountain, so that ill-equipped people like me, who go hiking in running shoes, have to hang on to tufts of grass

on either side of the trail to avoid sliding back down to the edge of the lake), were fields of crocuses, fields of snow, and white mist. No Mt Blanc or any other lesser known peaks. 4 hours of straight climbing and no views! No complainers either, though (except for me)!

One of the especially nice things about the French Alps is that even after you've been hiking alone in the mountains for 6 hours, you still find ample signs of civilization: there are the summer pastures (chalets high up in the mountains where the shepherds come to graze the sheep and the cows in the Spring), monuments to WW2 dead resistants, cow patties and cow paths that utterly confuse you when you're trying very hard not to get lost in the fog and the snow. It was the first time in my hiking life that I'd had to reason hard about details of the map and how they corresponded to details of reality so as to find the path on the other side of a field of snow, or from among 10 cow tracks. We must have taken that map out a thousand times in our 8 hours in the mountain, but we did not get lost. When we got back to our village around 8pm, we realized it was movie night there, and we even made it to a 9 o'clock showing of a stupid French movie, which, exhausted as we were, we found pretty funny.

Anyway, with all the cloudiness and the rain, we didn't hike like that every day, but we still had a lovely time. We travelled back on the Friday and found everyone in a pretty good state. My aunt was a bit tired, but cheerful. Simeon had spent a large chunk of the time with his friend Mateo (so as to spare my aunt the dismaying spectacle of the violence of the two boys' fighting), Magdalene had had to do a fair bit of managing Mimi's temper tantrums, and Matthias seemed suddenly to have reconciled with doing his homework. I still don't know what my aunt did, but the good will is lasting.

On the next thursday after that, we had yet another vacation (for the ascension, all you ignoramuses who don't know your Catholic feasts) and we went to visit my uncle in Normandy. For those of you who met my cousin Eve when she spent the month at our house two summers ago, that's her family. My uncle has a big house in the country, where Miriam and Matthias blossomed at the contact of nature. We'd almost forgotten how lovely it is to be far from the city, since we're always stuck here in Nantes, but both Sean and I in the Alps, and then all of us in the country near Caen rediscovered that essential part of human happiness: fields, cows, rivers, grass, the smell of Spring... Actually, Mimi's new passion is picking flowers (even the forbidden orchids that grow plentiful on the sides of paths around my uncle's house, but that are endangered elsewhere. She was careful to hide them behind her back when she went close to him, the naughty one), so she was willing to hike quite a long way in her search for ever new varieties of yellow, white, and purple flowers.

Of course, we also did a fair bit of sightseeing, not at all far from the city and the cosmopolitan crowd. Normandy is completely overrun by tourists, and although it is full of extremely beautiful things, it is also difficult to get anywhere near those beautiful things, so thick is the mass of people between you and the treasures. In our case, the sight-seeing was made all the more difficult by having the dog along, which meant that we had to split up into two groups for every cathedral, church, museum: one group that went to dog friendly places like playgrounds and cafés, and the other that went to sweaty crowded places full of vulgar british and

german tourists (oh, and yes, Magdalene, sophisticated Japanese ones, she's fallen in love with Japan, and so loved following the Japanese tourists around the Mont St. Michel and understanding one or two words of what they said). Above is Matthias waiting outside one of the many beautiful churches in Caen (the abbaye aux messieurs, pictured below), and to the left are Sean and Mimi waiting outside the Bayeux cathedral (in front of a tourist shop that sold thoroughly inappropriate postcards that made me unhappy that these vulgar things were now in my children's imagination).

In Mont St Michel, it was Simeon, Mimi, and me who waited outside the abby and almost got swallowed up by the quicksand of the famous bay while exploring in and out of the city.

At the D-day beaches is was all the children and I who went to play on the beach while Sean and Magdalene visited the cemetery and the memorial. We managed to see a lot, with the impediment of the dog and the various caprices and fits of miss Mimi. The splitting into groups also caused quite a bit of fighting and confusion: we lost each other a few times, and there were a few sore feelings on all sides when one group got stuck in a huge line and didn't see the Bayeux tapestry for long enough, while the other group sauntered through and had time to read the funny latin captions, or when one group got to see the WWII memorial museum in Caen while the other had to stay at my uncle's house and hang out while Mimi had her nap (no, actually, I was happy to do that, I didn't want to go to the museum anyway, but since it was me who got more time with the tapestry, I figured I'd throw a tantrum too to muddy the waters and not let anyone see who was getting the better deal).