Just Call Me Superwoman

My original plan was to complete my application dossier for French citizenship while I was on maternity leave. As in, before the baby was born.

But life, laziness and bureaucracy got in the way and, with my return to work looming, it had to be done this week, as I'm pretty sure that once I start back I will have no spare time to do anything for myself ever again, let alone the brainpower and motivation for mammoth administrative tasks.

And so it was that yesterday I found myself trying to finalise everything at the last minute with a baby and toddler in tow - a situation which really deserves the invention of an extra circle of hell just to accommodate it.

Things started off badly when I popped into my local tabac for a timbre fiscale. You can buy these online now, but for certain procedures you still need the paper ones. Unfortunately the paper ones are being phased out by the end of the year, so hardly anywhere stocks them. I was advised to go to our nearest town centre (a 40 minute walk away with a double buggy when I had a million other things to do and nap times to respect) but luckily along the way I found another tabac which just happened to have the right ones. Another stroke of luck was the lovely HR lady at work emailing me a copy of a payslip 5 minutes after I left a message on her phone, which saved me rushing to go and collect it. Finally, a trip round Monoprix with the buggy and the toddler pushing a mini shopping trolley left me with just the right change for the photo machine (because I had realised the night before that none of the photos I had at home actually conformed to the regulations any more). With those missions accomplished, we fitted in a trip to the park to reward the toddler for her patience, then the baby considerately fell asleep independently in her cot (currently a rare feat for her). Nobody had cried all morning, and I sat down to lunch with the toddler feeling like superwoman.

The last hurdle was to photocopy all the documents (around 50 pages in total). The fact that this had to be done twice was not clear on the original list I had, but was written in big bold letters on the instructions from the préfecture which I came across at the last minute. Except that the printer was running out of ink. A trip to Carrefour to buy more took an hour out of my evening after some very tired children had gone to sleep, and I finally went to bed myself just after midnight with my alarm set for 6:15.

On the excellent advice of a friend, I turned up to queue at the préfecture half an hour before it opened and managed to be second in line to submit my dossier. That took just over an hour and the baby, who had been woken up early for the occasion, managed to stay reasonably cheerful for the duration (luckily the toddler was in childcare, because having her there would have been a challenge too far). And then, having spent the past 48 hours flying by the seat of my superwoman pants, I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief because all that paperwork was GONE.

I would like to say, though, that although the list of documents is long and takes a lot of time (and money) to assemble, the actual procedure so far hasn't been anything like as awful as I thought it might be, and I was very impressed with the staff at the préfecture. Not only did they respond to all my (many) email enquiries within 24 hours, they were also extremely nice in person. When the baby started to get fussy as I stood at the desk while they took my first set of documents, the lady told me to pick her up and she would sort the paperwork. I was offered a room to breastfeed in as I waited to be seen (I have no shame whatsoever about breastfeeding in public, but the thought was kind). At the end, I needed to make an appointment for the interview stage but I didn't have my holiday dates and the man was happy to give me his email address so I could confirm later. Everybody smiled at KB and helped to keep her happy. So maybe the stereotypical unhelpful, grumpy fonctionnaire is finally becoming a thing of the past, or maybe the trick is to always take a baby when you go to the préfecture!

Toddler franglais - c'est funny!

One of the best things about having a toddler has to be watching their language develop (and finally having an idea of what might be going on in their little minds after all those months of guessing).

With a bilingual toddler - twice the fun!

After a slow-ish start, SCT's vocabulary seems to be expanding exponentially, and she is starting to speak in little sentences, which, as adoring parents, we think is very clever.

At the moment, French is her dominant language for speaking, although I think she understands English just as well. To balance out French-speaking childcare, UFM and I have been making an effort to speak English with each other in front of her, and this seems to be taking effect. At the beginning, she would mostly just use the word from whichever language came to mind first, but now she'll say something to me in English, then turn to UFM and repeat the same thing in French. She has also figured out that I'm more likely to give her what she wants if she asks in English, so sometimes I'll see her desperately searching for the English word to couple with a long, drawn out "pleeeease."

One thing I've found interesting is that up until recently, she had absolutely no grasp of grammatical gender and used the feminine for everything. She tends to use French sentence structures and verbs, giving rise to utterances such as, "C'est ma daddy!" and "Nooo, la big!"

It's also interesting to see her figuring out that synonyms in the two languages don't work in every situation.  For example, we are always reminding her to put the lids (bouchons) back on her felt tip pens, so those are words that she knows well, but she was very puzzled when her daddy corrected her for calling the lid of the jam jar a bouchon and not a couvercle. And she attempted to correct my French for the first time the other day in a discussion about which of her cups were tasses and which were goblets.  (My mother-in-law confirmed that we were both right, saving me face ... for now. )

Also hilarious is when she repeats phrases she's heard adults use, so she swats at flies telling them, "File!"and loves to tell us, "C'est pas possiiible!" when something goes wrong. She announced to me recently that she was "pas une petite fille, une lady" but some of her other favourite words of the moment are mess, bêtise, chipie and coquine, which tells you a lot about the reality of the situation.
Nothing illustrates it better than a little conversation we had yesterday at breakfast time when I asked her to stop eating her cornflakes with her hands because she was making a mess and her fingers were all sticky.

"Tant pis," she replied.

Just occasionally, I think it would be preferable if she hadn't learned to say certain things.

Nessun Dorma

(This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a little while waiting for a final paragraph. The 14th July was a while ago now!)

Saturday was the 14th July and to celebrate the fête nationale, as happens every year, there was a concert on the Champ de Mars followed by a fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower. In years past, we have sat on various bridges across the Seine, streaming the concert on the radio and watching the fireworks amongst the ooh-ing and ahh-ing crowds before making our way home through hot streets and on jam-packed metros at midnight. It's an event which, more than any other, means Paris in the summer to me. It's busy but relaxed, and after the 14th, many people leave the city, everything starts to close down and life is mainly to be lived in quiet parks, enjoying the sleepy streets, until the end of August when Paris comes back to life again.

This year, we watched the concert on TV and, as I remarked to UFM, we might as well have been hundreds of kilometres away, like the viewers in Brittany or the Lozère, so distant did it seem.

Then they performed Nessun Dorma, a piece which sends shivers down my spine ever since I saw Turandot performed in the Arena de Verona on a hot summer's night even more years ago. I was working at summer camp, and after a busy morning of lessons, songs and silly games, my fellow tutors and I would soak up all that is wonderful about Italy: strolls around Verona city, bike rides across the hot, sleepy plains to little villages where we would eat gelato and drink Aperol spritz before it became trendy, and family life with our Italian hosts who over the years became dear friends.

And sitting at home on that warm summer's evening with two little ones asleep in the next room, I was grateful in equal measures for the life I have now and the fact that my twenties and early thirties were filled with so many awesome adventures.