And We Thought Nothing Happened?

This photo is totally random and has no reason for being here. It's just cool and we saw it on our walk today.

We were walking home from music lessons today and my mom said, "What do you think we should write on the blog tonight?" And I said, "We can't decide now; the day's not over." And it really wasn't.

At that point, it felt like we had done nothing today. Nothing really cool. But now I  realize we actually did a lot of exciting stuff.

My mom says, "The great thing about blogging is that no day can go by without us examining it for its 'blog-a-bility.' It's a formality that makes us peer into our days and we hunt for the good stuff.  And it works. We're always finding the good stuff.  Sure, without this blog we might have all been in bed early tonight...but we'd have been thinking we'd done nothing. Instead, we're all awake past midnight (well, Francie's asleep on Jeff's lap), stragegizing how to explain on this blog all we did on this 'nothing' day!"

Because I'm up late blogging and Frances is snoozing, I sleep in really late and Frances is an early bird, reading books in the morning sipping her steamed milk. 

Normally, in the morning we write our stories, play our music, do a little math and take it slow. Today, we did pretty much the same thing but instead of walking in the afternoon when Daddy rides his bike, at 11:30 we all went for a walk on a new trail.

Here are some pictures of what we saw.

My New York City t-shirt is one my cousin Mallory let me have for the trip and I gave her one of my shirts, the one I sewed with Heather. We did that to have a piece of each other.  

After few dead-ends and trails through pastures, we ended up on this walled path.  My dad says, "I love the way there's open trail space in between private property. Walls on both sides but an old path to allow people to be a part of every part of town."

We turned into racoons when we saw this cool gate. We saw someone's backyard with enough olive trees to make their own olive oil, a nice place for a garden and clothes drying on the line.

Frances and I balanced on a chain outside of a hospital. Good thing. If we fell we could be taken right in!

My mom says, "The sneaky thing about Jeff is he holds the girls' hands for the first few spans of chain and then, with no prep, he'll just punch out the line, 'Okay now let go!' And his burst of enthusiasm is enough for the girls to trust him and let go...without even thinking. They love it. Just love it."

More balance tricks.

Just can't resist this shot.  Most of the time I'm around Frances, I'm giggling at her silly moves or the funny things she says, or like tonight, I was laughing when she had her plastic (surgical) gloves on, picking dead flower petals off their stems and putting them in a plastic bag. She never throws anything away.

I know my smile looks really weird in this picture but my mom loves it and so she made me put it on the blog. 

This is a typical -- and cool -- garbage receptacle station...just on a random street corner in town. Instead of ugly dumpsters, they have little garbage receptacles that drop down to underground dumpsters.  Each one is for different kinds of garbage: plastic, glass, food, etc.

Close-up of the garbage cans.

Now, back home for lunch...Ahhhhhhh, Ahi.

BEFORE....

After #1 (Frances wanted "tuna like in Truckee" so Daddy squashed hers)

After #2  (My After: seared ahi sandwich)

Mommy's lunch (Daddy had the same as me):

After music, we came home to Skype Addy and Maia. This is France's BEFORE skype photo...

and this is her DURING Skype photo...Addy had said, "Hey, Francie, you wanna make funny faces?" And Frances said, "Sure, I got one."

The soft, baked potato did it. 

I put the potato in my mouth and it moved the tooth into a stuck position and I could NOT get it out.  So my dad offered to put back in position, but everyone knows him, and of course he shoved it further in the wrong direction and it fell onto my tongue. 

Ta-daaaaaaaa! I set my tooth nicely on the counter.

...but then, five minutes later, while Mommy was quickly rinsing just one more dish before she came back to the table, I heard her suck in her breath and I saw her put her hand to her chest. Daddy said, "What's wrong, what's wrong?" And then she said, "Eleanore, I'm so sorry. I accidently swept your tooth into the drain."

I cried and ,yet again, my Dad came to the rescue...

My dad thinks the tooth fairy is going to leave me US dollars because "just like the oil market, US dollar is still the reserve currency for the tooth market."  I completely disagree. If I'm in France, the tooth fairy will give me Euros.

Frances made up a little game after dinner. She told us all to draw the milk carton with only three colored pencils. I won.

While we were all sitting around the table, my dad asked us what we thought the French did better than the US did.  Here's a small list we came up with:

1. They have huge open markets where most people do most of their shopping.

2.  The put their nouns before their adjectives so we know exactly what they're talking about.

4. Underground garbage dispensers.

5. Big Office of Tourisms in every village.

6. Great street direction signs.

7. Frances says that the kids here know how to speak french so well! Her comment was, "How do they DO it?"

8. Village maps at the entrance of every village.

9. Fewer plastic things.

10. Time: they lock up their shops every Sunday and Monday and between 12-2 all the other days of the week.

11.  France has a lot of ancient, really historical things.  America has historical places but not 2,000 year old Roman Aqueducts.

For the next couple of days, we're going to think what the US does better than the french. My mom will already say, COFFEE.

We finished off the night by climbing out onto the roof to get the place mat that flew off the clothesline.

GOOD NIGHT, ALREADY!

Eleanore