Booooooooooooonjour France!

A morning of sun following a day of rain is a mandatory morning of fun. You can't not go outside. Ask Noah, he'll tell you the same thing.

We went to the church park again this morning and had fun on the equipment. The only other kids there were 6 deaf kids being watched by 2 nannies...so there wasn't a whole lot of communication. I'm learning French, and I used to know some sign language, but there's no way I'm learning French sign language.

We then went in search of a toy train so that I could make a tunnel and Ben could pretend it's the subway.

We stopped by home to grab some kleenex, grabbed un crepe aux sucre e citron (crepe with sugar and lemon) from the crepe guy, and headed to the shopping area.

Ben got to push the stroller around some of the wider sidewalks, he's getting good at dodging people, but we couldn't find a toy store. We then headed to the good ol' Monoprix, but no luck there either. Grabbed a croissant for Ben and a chicken sandwich on a baguette for me on the way home. Ah well, we'll try heading over to the l'avenue des champ elysees, the big shopping street by the Arc d'Triomphe, tomorrow. I hear there's a toy store over there. An addendum, our washer is broken (remind me to gripe about how the small things add up some time...), so we're getting a new one tomorrow between 8am and 1pm....which means we aren't going anywhere.

Marcia asked how Beth's work is going, so that seems like a point of interest for all.

Spectacular, from what I gather. After all, her work is why we're here! She's learning amazing new things that she's very excited about and she actually helped out the doctor she's working with by telling her of how they do some procedures in Madison. She's getting used to the hospital and how it runs, very oddly compared to the US as it happens.

The secretary to the doctor Beth's working with actually works with the doctor during procedures, so Beth's had some difficulty tracking her down to get trivial things done like name badges and computer codes. She's also working worse hours than in the US, which is amazing because she's not doing any paperwork here. Part of it is the train ride (about 40 min each way) and the starting hours. In the US, she was in at 6am and worked till 6pm. Now she leaves by 8am (not bad really) and gets home around 7 or 7:30. That's not good overall because it basically cuts out any time she has to spend with Ben (he wakes up between 7:30am and 8am and goes to bed about 8pm).

She's doing fine with the speaking French part of it, but she says sometimes it's tough because they use big words.

...Stupid doctors and their big words!