Things that have recently happened to me

1) I moved! Freedom from the YMCA tastes sweet! And, it smells less like mildew, which is always a plus in my book. My friend Heidi found us a flat on the top floor of a really adorable old French couple's house (who call us 'eidi and 'annah). There is a garden and we have our own kitchen, and it's just really great. I've been really loving being able to cook in a clean and private space, not to mention the fact that I am now allowed to have wine! To take full advantage of this, my first night I cooked a wine-soaked meal: coq au vin, pears poached in red wine, and Heidi made vin chaud. Yum city.

2) I went to Etretat, which was breathtakingly beautiful. It used to be a fishing village, but I'm pretty sure tourism is the biggest industry now. However, it felt much more real to me than Honfleur did; I could believe that people actually lived in the town. Maybe it was because there was only one postcard shop and only one rack of key chains with names on them. Interestingly, Etretat was made famous by impressionist painters and writers, like Monet and Maupassant. Heidi and I walked around for a while, climbed to the top of the falaises, and had some delicious crepes, to boot. As Heidi put it, it almost made me want to learn about geology. But not quite.

3) I realized how ridiculous so many of my days are. Friday, for example, I spent close to 2 straight hours singing "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes." I was out of breath by the time lunch rolled around and quite red in the face. My strategy with these little ones was to use flashcards to teach them the parts of the body and then move on to singing. I quickly learned that this was not going to work. For some reason, any image I showed them prompted them to say "eye." No, Auguste, it's NOT an eye, it's an ARM. No, Céline, not an eye, a NOSE. When flashcards weren't working I thought maybe drawing would help, but I was wrong. "Draw an arm," I would say pointing to the picture and pointing to my own arm. "Do you understand?" Despite their cheerful "oui, 'annah!"s, I looked around to see them totally confused. "I think she want's us to draw an eye," I heard them saying to one another. "Oh, ok, yeah, that makes sense." One of the kids was deep into a cityscape that centered around an eye before I stopped them and told them to put everything away. One girl stood up to collect all the markers, prompting others to cry out against the grave injustice that had just been committed. "It's not her turn to collect the markers! It's his! It's his!" The class was descending into chaos, as some of them had started standing up to pull on my shirt in an effort to beg me to do something about the marker duty-thief. "I don't care!" I responded, "We're going to sing, and it's going to be FUN!"

In my next class of first-graders, I didn't even take anything out of my bag; I went straight for the song...and I got into it. When I jumped around, they did too, and believe it or not, they were able to learn the song. Well, the rhythm, at least. When their teacher came back, she joked that I was teaching gym class. Little does she know...

Next week, it's going to be all Hand Turkeys, all the time. Whether they like it or not. I was hoping I could combine my lessons on colors and parts of the body for this little project, but I'm less sure now. Only time will tell!