Christmas Market 2016

 This weekend, we celebrated Thomas's dad's birthday.  It was also the annual Christmas market with, as usual, free face-painting and pony rides!

Tassia was feeling tired and grumpy and refused to get her face painted.

Alina's 8!

Yesterday, Alina turned 8 for the third time (she may or may not actually be ten, but SHHHHHH!!!).  Here are the present pictures:

 True to my high-school and college habits, we wrapped her presents in newspaper.  OK, OK, so we didn't have any wrapping paper!  I think that this so offended Thomas's wrapping paradigm that he almost refused to do the wrapping. 

 A very enthusiastic hug to say thank you!

 She loves her new parrot from Grandma.  And, the new parrot (who may or may not have been given a name at this point) was happy to make the acquaintance of Enormous Penguin.  Much ado was made out of their difference in size.

Trumpet

School show

The girls' school's show was last week.  Here are Sybille and Tassia in costume.  Somehow, we missed Alina.

Then I found this on my camera.  I'm sure I didn't take these pictures!

Guess what...

made its way into our house?  If you're guessing small child, you're wrong.  If you're guessing animal, fuzzy or otherwise, you're wrong.  Try thinking...

TRUMPET!!!!!

(OK, so it's actually a cornet, but shhhh!)

Guess what woke everyone up this morning who was not up at the same time as Tassia?

Sewing Adventure

Many of my sewing projects tend to have long incubation periods.  For months, I've been contemplating what I wanted:  A long-sleeved, long, full dress.  I had the material sitting in my closet.  I just needed the perfect pattern.  I looked through patterns I already had, browsed the internet, flipped through the library's collection of sewing magazines.  I didn't really find what I wanted.  I didn't even really find something that was easily modifiable to become what I wanted.  I finally decided that I'd just have to make the pattern myself.

A dislaimer:  I've never really done this before.  I mean, I've somewhat modified existing patterns, but I've never really made a pattern from nothing.  And, as I got into it, I realized that I have a woeful lack of experience sewing anything with sleeves.  I mean, I've made tons of skirts, some pants, a fair amount of sleeveless sundresses.  But not so many things with sleeves.  I mean, if I had had a basic shirt pattern I liked, adding a skirt onto it would have been a cinch.  But, I didn't.

So, anyway, after hours of contemplating, some drawing, some sewing, and a few glitches along the way, here is the result.

I'm pretty happy with it, considering I really didn't know what I was doing.  But, before anybody gets too impressed, let me say that it doesn't look quite so good if I raise my arms.  It kind of does funny things, actually.  I'm assuming everyone out there has seen the movie Brave, right?  (OK, so not everyone has elementary-aged girls).  Well, let's just say that if I tried to shoot a bow an arrow in this dress the way she did in her dress of the same color, I would have the same problem.  So, it's almost exactly the dress I was dreaming of, just not quite.  In all fairness, I've tried on store-bought dresses that didn't work so much better than this, and I think I know what I'd have to modify to at least partially fix the problem.

I guess I'll just have to make another one.

Purple sprouting

I just picked this out of my garden.  Purple broccoli.  Who knew?

Better late than never

So, about me always being on top of things?  Over vacation in February, the girls and I spent 2 days in Paris and Versailles.  The excuse was to get all of their passports renewed.  We also got to visit a good friend and do some sight-seeing.  We puttered around the Versailles castle grounds and toured the castle.  Here are some picts:

 Above, this is in the garden at Versailles.  Below is the street where I took the girls for lunch.  Thomas and I used to come to this street a lot to eat in a little restaurant.  And, you're reading correctly.  Harp Street.  Alina thought it was great!

I decided the girls were too wound up for a sit-down lunch at Thomas's and my favorite creperie, but they had their first-ever-at-least-that-they-remember Greek sandwiches in a place across the street.

 On the Seine:

 Here they are in a mirror in Louis XIV's famous hall of mirrors.  They were getting a bit grumpy at this point.

A day early

Tomorrow is Tassia's birthday.  Because I am so organized and on top of things, we decided to celebrate early.  I mean, since everything was ready...  No, actually, present-opening would not have been convenient tomorrow, so we decided to celebrate today.  Don't you just love that feeling when you give a present and you can tell by the light in their eyes that they absolutely love it?  We got her a Bible and I made a cover to go with it, in her favorite colors (you'd almost think she was a Bronco's fan).  And, we got her a scooter.  Tassia's is extremely athletic, but for some reason, she's never really taken to her bike.  She can't quite ride without training wheels.  Almost, but not quite, and seems not at all motived to master it.  But she's been talking about wanting a skateboard for quite some time.  We figured the scooter was a sort of compromise.  I'm not sure she's ready for a skateboard.

She's spent pretty much all day outside with her scooter sootering...um...scooting?  She loves it!

 This is Sybille.

 This is Sybille, a very dirty Jack, and her birthday presents.

 Sybille, Jack, the birthday presents...and Tassia!

 Sybille, Jack, the birthday presents....well, OK, I guess you've understood.  Sybille turned 5 today.  She also marked this week by starting school.  After much thought, Thomas and I decided to go ahead and enroll Sybille in second-year preschool, instead of waiting until September when she would actually be in kindergarten.  (Of couse, the average French child her age has already been in school for a year and a half by now.)  She was very enthusiastic, but this week has still been kind of rough.  Notably because we all came down with the stomach flu last weekend and, although on the mend, at no point this week have all the girls been at school at the same time.  Anyway, here is Sybille sporting one of her birthday presents.

At what point does our catering to her penguin obsession become ridiculous?  For Christmas, she received a playm0bil penguin family, a hand-croched stuffed penguin, and a copy of Mr. Popper's Penguins.  Two weeks later, for her birthday, we added the penguin "costume."  Sunday, her official birthday cake will be shaped like...guess what?

Here she is with (from left to right) Enormous Penguin, Pailletta, Captain Cook (until recently known as Toutes les couleurs), and the paper mache penguin who, as far as I know, does not have a name.  Missing from the picture is Salade and a whole host of small, plastic penguins.