Thursday, October 4, 2007

Je suis d'accord

Fluff: to some it invokes a vision of pillows and marshmallows. But according to Pablo, it's actually dental floss. I've recently introduced floss to Pablo mostly because he likes pretending that the container (when empty) is a cell phone. It is so hard for me to contain my laughter when he comes up to me proudly and says that he just fluffed. I keep correcting him, but it doesn't seem to make any difference to him. Speaking of teeth, I can always tell when Elliot doesn’t brush his for some reason. Like last night for example, I heard the electric toothbrush going, but knew intuitively that he didn’t when he came back to his room. I knew it the other night too when he told me he did, but actually didn’t. I must have a sixth sense about clean teeth. Thanks pop, it must be passed on from you.

Kids can be so manipulative. For example, Pablo wanting me to stay in his room last night when I put him to bed because he couldn’t get to sleep. There was no way I was going to, but it just pulls at you and he did get a couple of stories out of me. Then again, I can be pretty manipulative too and to my benefit, I don’t take everything literally and also have the benefit of experience to see their traps. They don’t know that I don’t always mean what I say. Example: "Pablo go brush your teeth. No. Oh man there is something cool in this box. What is it? If I show you, will you go brush your teeth? Ok… And the other day, I said to be nice to me otherwise I wouldn’t bring their rollers to school. Man, you should have seen Pablo. He got into his pyjamas right away and said please and thank you and everything all evening. It was great.

Yesterday AM left for work and isn't coming back till tonight (Thursday). In the morning I woke up to the table all set because Pablo and Elliot wanted to be helpful. I love when they are helpful. I've now started babysitting another little 4 year old on Wednesdays because his parents work and they want him to speak English during the day. His dad is Australian, but Ethan doesn't really like speaking English, so he ends up saying yes, no, right, and okay a lot. Oh well, maybe he will get into the more we hang out. But man, Chloe was being a little jerk yesterday when we were going to watch a video. I don’t really want to get into it, but I think she wanted to watch a particular movie, but I said no movies in French. Then she said that all the movies were in French and that we couldn’t change it cause we lost the remote. True the remote was lost, but I argued that the movies started out in English. She was adamant that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Eventually we ended up watching Saddle Club in English. Whatever, I really didn’t care, but was damn sure we weren’t watching a movie in French. She can be pretty stubborn, but I can be even more. It must be really frustrating to argue with me sometimes.

Welp, I had a great time in Normandy last weekend. I went to visit my friend Ian's cousin and her French boyfriend. Oh, I can't tell you what a great time I had! I forget how quiet things can be when not in the city and I saw stars! And the moon! (which was big and orange, but not quite full) We went for walks in the woods, ate some tasty vegi meals, and had some really great heart to heart talks. I also saw the WWII war memorial in Caen, but was so overwhelmed that I was happy to be on my way to their place in Flers (south of Caen). The clouds parted just as I got there and came back just as I was on my way back to Paris. Perfect. My last day in Paris is the 26th or 27th and have made plans for after, but will talk more about that on my next post.

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