Idiots!

On Wednesday, we packed up the whole family and headed up to Toulouse to the American Consular Presence to get Aliena's US paperwork done. Basically certify her as a US citizen too and get a passport made. We actually began the process the week after her birth - but the consulate is only open one day a week (at least to the public) and they have a 6 week lead time on appointments. We emailed a few times to make sure I had all the documents we needed -- turns out their web information is not really up to date (from 2004...so they referred me to the more recent..2008...info posted by the Marseilles office - at which point I should mention that Marseilles is known as the most laid-back and unconcerned big town in france...which does not bode well for Toulouse) - but I finally managed to get it all together. One sticking point was that I needed an original copy of our marriage license...and the French one would not work...which meant that I had to get my mom to dig through files in CA to find it and send it out to us. I'm not really sure why we need this document - I mean, you don't have to be married to have kids and since Amy is American anyways, then Aliena gets citizenship regardless of who I am. I suppose that should have been an omen... Anyways, we load up the kids, drive 1.5 hours to Toulouse, park, do the whole metal detector thing (which is squished into a closet meaning that you are cuddling with the security gaurd under the metal detector as he checks your passport before letting you through the bomb-proof door), and get settled in with our pile of documents. First off, the (less-than-friendly) lady helping us did not like the passport photo -- Aliena's head was too wide and probably too big (although she did not have a ruler with inches on it to be able to measure..which I incidentally did in photoshop and know it to be under the max height allowed). I tried to explain to the lady that a baby's head is not proportioned the same as an adult's, so if you scaled the head to the proper height, it would be wider than an adult's head. This approach to scaling the photo worked for Adrien's passport, but apparently our consular 'helper' was having a bad day and thought we should too. Second, she noticed I was born in France - at which point she asked me if I had ever been to the US...which I started to laugh at until I realized she was serious. Apparently the US doesn't bother to stamp passports anymore, so my US passport (issued not from a consulate, but from the US passport office..which means I ordered it from within the US) which I've had for 9 years now does not have a single US stamp in it. This was a sticking point - she had not told me via email that I needed to bring proof that I had ever been to the US. Fortunately Amy was thinking on her toes and pointed out that the marriage certificate that we had to have sent out showed we were married in Watsonville, CA showing that I had indeed been to the US (at least for 1 day). Whew! Not so fast... since I was born in France, where was my consular certificate of birth to prove that I was a US citizen? Uh, I don't have it (and don't recall ever seeing it in my life...)...but the website printout says that a current US passport is sufficient proof of citizenship. So isn't that enough? No, I guess not. I guess as a citizen born abroad, you don't have quite the same rights (like, I can 't be president...although I can be vice-president...which would get complicated if the president died...) - be that should surprise nobody who has been listening to the 'separate but equal' arguments about 'same sex marriage' vs. 'same sex unions'. I still can't figure out why our 'helper' didn't tell us this sort of thing before we took the trek up there nor why its not listed on any of the consular literature that they provided us for preparing the paperwork. I mean, these people deal with FOREIGN BIRTHS all the time -- and really, I bet lots of the consular birth reports they have to prepare have one parent who was a citizen born abroad (the sorts of people who may be disproportionately comfortable living in a different country). And how should we know what to bring if they don't tell us? I was hoping that we could sign all the forms and mail in my extra document (and a new photo of Aliena) to complete the whole thing, but of course that would be too easy. She wants us to come back and sign in front of her when we have the form in hand. Not sure why it makes a difference if we sign now or in a few weeks....except of course that she knows that means another day of work lost for me, 3 hours of driving for the family, added air pollution, etc... Well, at least its good to know that the consular presence is there when you need their help. I'm pretty sure in an emergency I might take a gamble and drive the extra 2 hours to Bordeaux, where if the help is no better, at least I can drown my sorrows in an excellent bottle of local wine!

Uber-nerd

The other day, Adrien was laying out his dinosaur cards (I know...you're all very jealous) when he paused and pointed to one he had just put down (in neat rows...yes, our child is obsessive). He asked me what it was called, so I read it off to him... "Gallimimus" without paying much attention to the image. "Comme une poule" he said ('like a chicken'). "Wow, that's great!" I responded "yeah, the latin name for chickens is gallus, and so..."...at which point I paused and realized that I'm a super-nerd, and my poor child is doomed...! Sorry in advance Adrien! But then I looked at the card and that dinosaur sure does look like a chicken...so I guess he's pretty observant (and probably not a latin scholar yet)...and probably doomed by his genes!

Cows

Yesterday the cows came home....
Amy captured the moment on her phone's camera as they passed in front of our house.
Now we have only the cow pies in the road and the castaway flies to remind us of their passage.
Ah....the country life!

Bonnets

My cousin, Julie, who is two months older than me came to visit us recently with her family - the Bonnets. They have 5 kids including the last two who are very close in age to Adrien (Alexis is 6 months older) and Aliena (Romain is 3 months older). It was lots of fun hanging out with them - something we don't do often enough considering that they live near Toulouse and together we form the Southern Enclave of the family. But we don't make it up to the big city very often and they...well...moving 5 kids anywhere more than a 30min drive is surely a major task! Amy and I were feeling like 2 kids was much more hectic than just 1...but Julie reassures us that from the 3rd one on, it actually gets easier. Not that they take care of themselves (I don't know who started that crazy rumor...but my guess is its either the sellers of baby formula or mini-vans)...but they can give each other attention when you are focused on the current crisis. Anyways...we had a wonderful pic-nick, told them all about our current housing stress (that's for another entry...sigh!), and we took a walk through the woods.
(sorry the photos suck...I forgot my camera and the one on my phone is a POS)

IHOP

As in International House Of Pizza.
This week we met up with the international-Anglo crowd for dinner.
The 4 of us, Felix, Susi, Julius (the Germans who sound Australian), Radika and Lea (Aussies), and Leoni, Anthony and their 3 kids Larry, Isolde, and Persephone (Aussie-French, by way of London, Brussels, and Paris).
We all speak french with accents that vary in quality and we all speak english better than french.
The pizzeria in Moulis (near the lab) is a great place for us to all meet and have a good time being expats - business is not so hot at the pizzeria, so we have the place to ourselves and the kids can be wild, make noise, and have fun. The pizzeria also has a big platform with kids toys surrounding an immense fish tank (that has written on it "Don't tap the glass. It scares the fish and they die"...surrounded by kids toys....and an army of 2-5 year olds...who can't read....and you wonder why they are going out of business?). Good fun!
The kids had a great time and stayed up playing WAY past their bed times (and ours) for a weeknight.

 

 Despite the international influence, Adrien is now speaking more French than English. That means that I have started to reconsider my 'speak to the kids in French' strategy that I adopted in hopes that it would help them be bilingual. But school is pushing Adrien's language skills to new limits. They have this system where 1 or 2 times a week, you write in a little notebook (and/or paste pictures) to tell the teacher what your kid has been up to...and the teacher can use that to coax a discussion out of your kid and work on language skills (at 3 years old...!!). The teacher also puts in information about what the kids did that week with something to get your kid to talk about class a bit - and avoid that "what did you do today?" - "nothing...I dunno"! So with all that extra french input, my bilingual strategy might have to entail English with me!

Little Lambs

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the farm in our village had little lambs - but I just now found the (terrible) photo. The farmer was telling us that they just brought the sheep down from the mountains and a storm broke out on the way down. That storm freaked out a few very pregnant females who gave birth a good week early. We got to see some of the preemies at day 5 of life - just past the bottle feeding phase. YES, bottle feeding! The farmer told us that to save the lambs, she had to bottle feed them -- that means every 4 hours they get a bottle...filled with milk that she had to get from the mom - so every 4 hours (24h/day..for 4 days) it was milk mom, feed baby, repeat... That's dedication! And all that for a little lamb that is likely to end up on a plate just a few months later (we notice the conspicuous decline in lamb numbers in the fields...). Did I mention Adrien loves lamb? And duck (well...magret de canard, which is the breast of a 'foix gras' duck)!