"Qu'est-ce qu'ils s'appelle en Anglais?"......"Um, lice."

On the train: It's cute but watch out for that hair, there's lice in it.
Jade et moi au Gare de Lyon
We carved us some pumpkins for halloween day. I also made potato spinach casserole which is about my favorite food ever. The kids wouldn't eat it so I'm crossing my fingers hoping there will be some left for this weekend when I'm home alone.
Versailles: This is the biggest painting ever. Josephine is at least twice my size.


I'm blogging from Ardeche near Montelimar. This morning we got up early to go by high speed train to the central south area of France. There is another family staying with us so there was all kinds of scuffling around in the early morning with coffee and packed lunches and such. We made it to the metro in good time, me with a messenger bag and a back pack plus the kids valise. Taking the kids on the metro can be kind of hard and stressful but it wasn't bad even though we got the morning crowd on their way to work. Sixteen stops later we were at Gare de Lyon and after waiting in confusion for about thirty minutes I found someone to help me find the right train.

The TGV is really nice and I look forward to going on it again on Saturday(even though my metro is closed over the weekend. I'm not excited about taking the bus). The view was beautiful showing all sorts of fall colors that seem to be nonexistant in the north.

The kids Grandparents are really nice and they speak very clear French. I haven't had to speak French out of necessity for much more than directions and monetary transactions so it been an interesting foret into the vocabulary of landscapes, sewing, plants, and social activities. By interesting I mean really frustrating but not all bad. I was looking forward to being in this sort of situation and it's the kind of looking forward that you have to some kind of self torture...like excercise or school or going to a foreign country where they speak the worlds most difficult language. It's incredible how important the most complex sentence structures and irregular conjugations are in the most everyday sort of dialogue. My comprehension of French if spoken carefully is pretty high but even the simplest response is made more difficult by the formal and informal, the feminine and the masculine and countless other intricacies of the language. the gender thing is probably the one thing I find least appealing about this language.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to school and study french for a few more years before immersion. But can't really call what I have immersion. I rarely speak french.

But anyway, it's fairly warm here and the rocky hills and small mountains of the Central Massif are covered in scrubby bushes that include rosemary and thyme and little olive and figue trees and cactus. Its an interesting landscape and i look forward to getting some pictures.

But in reference to the title, the big event is that as I was chatting with the coiffeuse in terrible french about the difficulties of french and she was trimming Noes hair she suddenly froze and picked a louse out of his head. She gave me a lot of advice and the atmosphere immediately changed from convivial trivialities to the grave act of bringing a lice infected child into a respectable hairdressing establishment. I looked and felt very subdued and reprmanded and uttered everything I knew from the ubiquitous "oh la la" to the rare "je suis desolee." Then she gave me directions to the nearest pharmacie.