School Matters

After 2 months of holidays for the boys, and more than that for Emily, the children went back to school at the beginning of September.  They are, for the first time ever, all in the same school now - which does make life a lot easier for me, not least because I leave for the afternoon pick-up a full hour later than I did last year.

This week the round of class orientation meetings began with Alex's class.  His year is split into two classes for French and three for English, all children follow the French curriculum for French and maths and are split by ability for English into the 'anglophone' class (which is basically children whose English is better than their French, even if their mother-tongue is another language), the bilingual class and the francophone class.

Alex is, obviously, in the anglophone class and has 5 hours of English a week, with what would have been called 'topic' at our school in England (history, geography etc.) in French, the theory being that they need to do more in French because they're not so strong in it.  So we met, as a group, with the English teacher - the class is made up of 13 children, some of whom have English as their first language, some who speak another language at home but whose English is better than their French and some who are French but have been at school overseas in English speaking schools.  

The teacher outlined what they'll be doing this year, which is "The Big Reading Year".  I'm pleased that they will be having spelling lessons every week and that they will be learning grammar but she stressed the difficulty with trying to teach them reading, writing, spelling and grammar in only 5 hours a week and the problems they may have with spelling when they're also learning to spell in French.

Next we went to see the French teacher.  You'd have thought that the children would be similarly split into groups for French (those who speak French as their first language, the bilingual children and the ones who really don't speak any French) - but no!  In France private schools can keep their fees low because the state will pay the teachers' salaries if the school follows the French national curriculum, so all the children follow the same programme for French and maths as children in any other French school, so they have 8 hours a week of French literacy and 5 of maths, in French.  Last year Alex's teacher had the attitude that he needed total immersion in order to learn French and limited the amount she would explain to him to the bare minimum, this year his teacher has more children in the class who don't speak any French and seems to be more open to translating things for them so they at least understand what's going on in class, it remains to be seen whether this will encourage Alex to speak in French as he's still very reluctant.

Both the English and the French teachers impressed on us how important it was for the parents to be involved in helping the children at home - English teacher "because we only have 5 hours a week", French Teacher "because we lose 5 hours a week to English".  We get home at about 5pm every day except Weds and Alex has 15-20 mins of French/Maths homework a night and are expected to do 10-15 mins of English reading a night plus learning spellings and finishing any sheets they haven't completed in class for English and his French teacher was talking about getting more reading books from the library, oh for the days of St Marks and no homework!

I came away from the meeting worrying that Alex was never going to learn to read, write or spell in either language and thinking that if we move back to England he'll be horribly behind, especially as he is currently in the year below that which he'd be in in England.  

Then I read this article by Clifford Levy, a New York Times journalist who put his children into a school in Moscow where only Russian was spoken.  The opening couple of lines:

"The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice. “Daddy? I want to go home,” said my 8-year-old daughter, Arden."

brought back to me my children's first day at Ermitage when Emily and Kieran arrived on the doorstep at lunchtime vowing never to go back and served to remind me how far they have come in the last 18 months, even though we ended up putting both of them into the anglophone system, and how far Alex has come, surely he'll get there with French eventually....

The Great Lego sort-out

There's rather a lot of Lego in this house, every time you open a drawer or look in a box you find some bits, not to mention all the completed sets which need to be stored somewhere.  This was the trawl, earlier in the year, from some boxes which "definitely had no Lego in them":

So, in the summer holidays I decided it was time for the "Great Lego Sort Out".  

Down came the first box (of 3) 

Which we proceded to tip onto the floor:

and sorted into colours:

The first box sorted and boxed:

and a day or so later we had sorted every piece of Lego I could find:

 The next challenge was to find somewhere to house all the boxes, so I lugged one of our faithful wooden units up from the basement to its new home on the landing (and, yes I do need to take it apart again and fix the middle shelf):

Phase two will consist of sorting the bricks into shapes within colours but I need to find some suitable storage first.  These from Lakeland would be perfect but they're currently out of stock, I love the fact that you can see what's in them without opening them.

One of the great advantages of having sorted all the Lego is that the boys started to rebuild some of the sets which had lain in pieces for ages.  We had kept most of the instruction booklets (over 60 in total) which I have also sorted into themes, and any missing ones are available from the Lego website.

Here is a selection of the fruits of their labours:

More photos to follow.....

Lovely weekend with friends

The draft of this post has been sitting, unfinished in my drafts folder since April!  Finally, here is the finished version.


In April we had a visit from the McIntyre family, friends that we have known since Kieran and Issy were babies.  They arrived on Friday afternoon after having spent a week in Belgium and we welcomed them with a traditional Byrne BBQ.

We were very lucky with the weather and Saturday dawned bright and clear so the boys and I set off into Paris with our guests.  The boys are getting a little bored of sitting on the BatoBus but it is a great way to see Paris if you only have a short amount of time.

Evie wanted to see the Eiffel Tower because she'd been reading Madeline, so we took the Metro to Trocadero and walked down the steps and across the bridge, stopping on the way for photos.

We had lunch at LouLou' Friendly Diner and again the service and the food were good and the adults enjoyed a glass of wine while the children ate their burgers (note the very French ketchup!)

After lunch we went over to the Pompidou centre to watch the street performers and after a "where's Evie" moment:

we all headed back to Maisons Laffitte, where the children had a great time sleeping in Philippa & Stuart's tent - I think this could be the way to go for small visitors over the summer!

A spring day in Amiens

On his way back from England at the beginning of March, Paul's car broke down on the A16, luckily he managed to limp to the services so he wasn't stuck on the hard shoulder waiting for the pick-up truck.  The car ended up in a garage in Amiens, so the following weekend we had a day out there before picking up the car.

We started with lunch by the canal sitting outside one of the restaurants in the picture above.  It was a beautiful day and it was lovely to sit, looking across the canal towards the cathedral, perched on the top of the hill and eat in the sun, feeling that Spring might actually be here at last. 

After lunch we walked up through the town, past the cathedral and other interesting architecture

The last house above was covered with carvings:

Our walk took us to Jules Verne's House, with its distinctive tower, which was fascinating, an amazing house full of artefacts related to his life and work, even the boys, who aren't big on museums, loved it.

Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos inside and there weren't any postcards but there are some good photos on this blog.

We walked back and took a look round the cathedral, which has a memorial to the British soldiers killed on the Somme.

All in all a lovely day out, and one that we wouldn't have done if the car hadn't broken down, so some good came out of it.

Car Trouble

We've been having a bit of a time of it with our cars at the moment.  We're still driving our English cars on UK plates, having been completely scuppered by the amount of paperwork involved in getting them re-registered in France, not to mention the cost of changing the headlights and getting a Certificat de Conformité for each car.  So, in the end we found an insurance company who would cover us over here on UK plates and went with that, although we do have to go back to England once a year to get the MOT done.

Last Friday Paul's car broke down on the motorway on his way back from Calais, this was a bit of a shock as we had no idea what we were supposed to do.  Thankfully a call to the insurance company confirmed that we did have breakdown cover included in our insurance but, because he was on a motorway, Paul had to call the Gendarmerie to send a recovery vehicle.  He had managed to limp to a service area and, with a little help from the woman in the shop, managed to get the woman from the Gendarmerie to understand where he was, she was convinced at first that he was on a totally different motorway! and the recovery vehicle came within half an hour.

Paul was a bit peturbed to find himself being taken to what looked like a tractor repair shed in the middle of nowhere but managed to communicate enough with the mechanic for them to come to the conclusion that the alternator had gone, which meant that the car had to go to the Volvo garage in Amiens and Paul was sent home in a taxi, luckily paid for by the insurance company as it was over 300€, arriving some 4 hours after he should have got home.

In typically French fashion, the garage didn't even look at the car until Tuesday, when they phoned to inform us that it was the alternator! and that they didn't have the part in stock so would have to order it.  We're hoping that Paul can go to Amiens this afternoon to pick it up.

In the meantime, my car has come out in sympathy and developed a problem with the steering which, thankfully, isn't dangerous but needs looking at.  The man in the garage said it was to do with the "couloir de puissance", which translates as the corridor of power, but I presume it has a different meaning over here.  So, anyway, that's booked in to be looked at next Wednesday, by which time I hope we will have got Paul's car back.

School Holidays

View inland from Ilfracombe

February brought two weeks of school holidays.  Now, the February half-term has always been my least favourite holiday, the weather is generally not good enough to go out and we tend to end up sitting around the house getting on each other's nerves.  Last year we had 3 weeks, off as the English half-term and French holiday didn't overlap, at least there was the excitement of the move to France, but I do remember those first two weeks, before school started, as being particularly difficult as we knew nobody and had nowhere to go.

So, this year, I came up with a plan to spend a week in England, most of it at my cousin's cottage in Devon.  Paul's French colleagues thought we were mad to be holidaying in England when we lived in France but at least we would be somewhere different and Paul would get a week off work.

After a night in Winchester with my parents we headed off to Devon, lunching at the Crown and Victoria in Tintinhull and arriving in Berrynarbour mid-afternoon in the pouring rain.

Unfortunately the weather didn't really improve so we wandered round Ilfracombe, Barnstaple and Lynton in the rain with not much to do as all the tourist attractions were closed.  Luckily the cottage was nice and warm and we had games to play and books to read and the cinema was a godsend, we saw Tangled (good) and Gnomeo and Juliet (not good) in Barnstaple where Emily also discovered a New Look and Top Shop, so she was happy! 

On the way back from Barnstaple on Thursday we stopped for supper at The Mudiford Inn.  When we tried the doors they were all locked and the pub looked closed but just as we were turning to go they were opened and we were ushered in, it was a bit odd being the only people in the restaurant area but we felt we couldn't really leave and the food was very nice, with something for everyone, which is always good to find.

On the Friday we returned to Basingstoke and spent a couple of days staying at Paul's parents' house, enabling us all to catch up with friends, Kieran managed to fit in two sleepovers before we returned to France on the Monday.

Once back in France we had two lazy days and on Thursday and Friday we met up with Mindy, a friend from Basingstoke NCT, and her three children who were staying with friends in Le Vésinet.  On Thursday we went to St Germain en Laye and walked in the château grounds while the children let off steam, when they started complaining of getting to cold we went into the museum, in the château, which houses many artefacts from all over France.

On Friday Mindy and her children went up the Eiffel Tower and we met them afterwards.  We went on the Batobus as far as the Ile de la cité, walk down to the Boulevard St Germain and have lunch at LouLou Friendly Diner where we were welcomed even though they were very busy, the food was great, the children enjoyed their burgers and club sandwiches and Mindy and I had salads and a glass of organic wine.

We headed back to the Batobus to go on to the Jardin des Plantes and the dinosaur exhibition at the Natural History Museum but Mindy's middle child wasn't feeling very well so she decided to head back with her children and the boys and I went on alone.  There was a long queue for the Natural History Museum so we chose the shorter queue at the Ménagerie and spent about an hour wandering around looking at the animals.

The dreaded lurgy

aka Le Gastro....

On Thursday 3rd Feb Paul and I went to see The King's Speech.  Before we left Alex had been complaining that he didn't feel well but as he'd spent an hour jumping on the trampoline and then eaten a good meal I thought he just needed to go to bed. However, when we came out of the cinema, intending to get something to eat, we turned on our phones to find messages from Emily saying that Alex had been sick and please could we come home.

We arrived home to find Emily sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework, having cleaned up sick, changed Alex's sheets and moved Kieran into the spare room, we ended up eating omelettes for supper at 10.30pm.

Alex continued to be sick all night so we put him on a mattress on our floor and spent the night stripping sheets, four sets in total before he finally stopped being sick.

By Monday, Kieran and I had gone down with it and Alex proved not to be well enough to return to school, resulting in a phonecall from the school to ask me to come and collect him. The rest of the week followed along the same lines, with both boys off school on Tuesday, back on Wednesday but feeling sick, Kieran off again on Thursday and I kept him at home on Friday as Alex had an inset day. Luckily we were all better by the time we went to England the following Saturday!

It reminded me of when we first moved here, there wasn't a week from the beginning of March to the Easter Holidays when I didn't have one child or other at home for at least one day, and generally more.  As we face the same time of year again I hope they have developed some immunity to the bugs which struck them down last year and that we can avoid illness this year.

Opéra Garnier

On 13th January I went, with some other parents from Kieran's school, on a guided tour of the Palais Garnier, Paris's famous Opera House, organised by the parents' association with a guide from Paris Walks.  I have become a convert to guided tours, you find out so much more about a place with a guide than you ever could from reading a leaflet or guidebook and the two hour tour seemed to race by.

The Opéra was designed and built by Charles Garnier as part of Napoléon III's renovations of Paris in the mid to late 19th Century and is one of the most opulent buildings I have ever seen.

Looking towards the ballroom and the main entrance

The Opera house was built for people to watch people. The foyer has wide staircases to accommodate the ladies' crinolines and lots of balconies from which audience members could watch the people coming into the building below.   

View in the opposite direction towards the auditorium

Similarly, the auditorium is built in a horseshoe shape so that the audience members in the boxes around the sides are on display throughout the evening, indeed in the early days the chandelier in the auditorium was not dimmed during the performance and audience members would come and go from their boxes, visiting friends and paying little attention to what was going on on stage.

On the first floor, above the main entrance is the ballroom, which can be hired for functions and is a favourite venue for Stella McCartney's Catwalk Shows during Paris Fashion Week, it was also used as the Hall of Mirrors in the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette

Christmas 2010

Driven back to England for Christmas by our oven's size, inability to cook evenly, and its all-round inferiority to the cooker I left behind:

French oven                 English Range Cooker

We arrived in England on 22nd December where I immediately began shedding members of my family.  We dropped Paul at the Glasshouse offices in Weybridge for a night out with his colleagues and then Emily in Hatch Warren to see her friends.  The boys and I popped in to see Jackie and Thomas and had a lovely afternoon catching up, me with coffee & chat and Kieran by walking into their pond, which he claims he didn't see as it was covered with snow!

We arrived in Winchester that evening and spent the next couple of days there with my parents before heading off to Paul's parents' for Christmas Day, which was the usual round of presents, food and drink.

Opening Presents  Alex with Buzz   Christmas Dinner   Emily's socks

The week after Christmas passed in a whirl of visiting friends, sorting out the car, which needed a new exhaust, and we give huge thanks to Brett Ruth for coming out on the Sunday morning between New Year's Day and Bank Holiday Monday to fix it for us.

On New Year's Eve we celebrated Kieran's 12th Birthday in Stratford on Avon with pizza and a performance of the Matlida musical and we completed the day, and the year, with a lovely dinner at Victoria and Stephen's.

December catch-up

Life during December was the usual round of Christmas activities for the children, sandwiched between large amounts of snow.

We had our first snowfall on 7th December which resulted in the road leading to Kieran's school being impassable so I had to walk up the hill to collect Kieran and 3 other children.

The following morning the snow had all gone and although more was forecast we made the decision to send the children to school, thinking that if more snow fell it would just be another walk up and down the hill.

How wrong we were!  Snow started falling at around 1pm and by the time Tina left to collect the children the roads were lethal, she managed to get to the house of other parents from the school in St Germain en Laye and holed up there whilst the hero of the hour, Jan Willem, walked the 2.5 miles to the school and returned with 6 children in tow around 3 hours later.  

We were further frustrated by the fact that the mobile networks became overloaded so there was no way for Tina to contact me to let me know what was happening.  Once the children had been fed and watered and Tina's husband had arrived in St Germain they decided to risk the roads, which were a lot better, having been gritted and driven on in the interim, and Kieran finally arrived home from school at 9.15pm. We didn't even bother trying to get him to school for the rest of the week, much to Alex's disgust.

Christmas school activities included:

Kieran's school show, at which he showed off his circus skills

Alex's singing of Christmas songs, in both English and French

and Emily's school Christmas Ball, for which clothes were bought at great stress to Paul who had to brave both New Look and Top Shop when the ones we'd ordered from their websites failed to arrive in time.

After all that we were glad to head back to England for Christmas.

What I read in 2010

I have been very remiss in updating the blog during December, not because nothing happened but because so much did that it will take me a while to write it all down, and then it will probably all sound very banal!

In the meantime, I have been updating my list of books I read during 2010.  I only managed to read 42 books last year, which is well down on my total for the previous few years, for this I blame the move and the fact that I chose Jude the Obscure as my 'classic of the year'.  It took me over a month to read and the unremitting misery really got me down, but at least I'll never have to read it again.

Here then are the books I read last year:

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prudhomme
A Call After Midnight by Tess Gerritsen
Open by Andre Agassi
Dead Souls by Ian Rankin
Scared to Live by Stephen Booth
The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright
Promise Me by Harlan Coben
Echo Park by Michael Connelly
Under the Knife by Tess Gerritsen
Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin
One Day by David Nicholls
Nation by Terry Pratchet
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Falls by Ian Rankin
A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin
The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
Exit Music by Ian Rankin (here endeth the Rebus books)
Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz (read to Kieran)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J K Rowling (read to Kieran)
Found Wanting by Robert Goddard
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Tell Noone by Harlan Coben
Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid
Day after Night by Anita Diamant
A Darkness more than Night by Michael Connelly
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffinegger
The Poet by Michael Connelly
The Narrows by Michael Connelly
One Moment One Morning by Sarah Rayner
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J K Rowling (read to Kieran)
A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling
Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard
Lost Light by Michael Connelly