Pics, Pics, Pics

Okay, so we've been here 2 weeks already and I'm finally getting around to posting some pics of the place.

The back yard.

You'll have to click on the pic to make it big enough, but there is a deer out in the grass. We could see it out their kitchen window one morning.

Yes, that is Evan running around in her underwear. She ran inside, said "I was out chasing butterflies and I got hot!", and then proceeded to strip down to her skivvies and ran back out to play. This was taken at the end of their "drive way".

Looking up the other way towards their barn and the house behind it.

Oh, gotta add one more pic of Elliot's new favorite "toy"...he's been going to grab it lately whenever no one is watching and then we find him like this...

Happiness is a bowl of flour

Well things have been going pretty well around here. We've gotten some work done...Carter helped knock a hole in a wall for a door, we helped turn an old pig stall into a chicken coop, finished building a playhouse, and other odds and ends.

Before shot of what will be the bathroom...

 Before shot from the other side (the bedroom)...

After from bedroom...

After from bath...

We just finished up the playhouse today and moved it around to the front of the house. The kids didn't waste any time braking it in...

I'm not sure if you can see the flowers on top of the house very well. Melanie, our host, said this is some kind of French tradition: to put a bouquet of flowers on top of a new house. At least that is what her mother told her to do.

You know what else makes kids happy, apparently? Flour. Forget the milk and cookies, just give them a bowl of flour and they'll giggle and lick their hands in delight. I was making some bread, and they were all wanting to eat the dough. When I turned the dough out to knead it and sat the bowl down (which still had a good bit of flour in the bottom), the kids grabbed it and went to town.

It's a small world

So last weekend our hosts took us to a gypsy music festival in Auch. The weather didn't do us any favors...it began to rain shortly after we arrived and continued until we left. Luckily there were tents set up to keep us all relatively dry. There were also yummy crepes to eat! The kids had fun dancing to the music and splashing through the puddles made by the rain.

I should have taken more pictures, but it's not easy when you're chasing 2 little kids around (and it was pretty dark in the tents). But I did manage to get a few of this band that was playing between the acts...the girl playing the accordion was a friend of our hosts.

When Elliot had had enough, I headed over to the crepe tent where there were some comfy chairs and sofas set up to find a place to let him go to sleep. So as I'm sitting there with him asleep in my lap, a man across from me begins speaking to me in French. "Here we go again", I'm thinking, as I embarrassingly begin to tell him in horrible French that I can't understand him. "Oh, what do you speak?", he replies in English. So I say English, and he asks where I'm from, etc... So here we are out in the country in southern France in this little town, and I run into this guy from Massachusetts! What are the chances of that? He has lived here now for ten years or so, but he used to have a sheep farm in Vermont. We chatted for a while, and he was telling me how he couldn't make a living back home farming, so he decided to take a chance and move to France and is doing pretty good here. It was nice to have a chat with another native English speaker for a change...I find myself beginning to speak in broken English (even to Carter and the kids sometimes) when I've been talking to our hosts a lot.

Easter in Montaut

Unfortunately we had no church to go to for Easter service on Sunday...we wouldn't understand a sermon in French anyway, but the only church anywhere close was a catholic church. The kids did have fun finding chocolate and painting eggs though.

Evan and Anna off to hunt for candy...

Elliot didn't waste any time tearing into a chocolate bunny while the girls were still looking for more.

The kids with their spoils.

Here is Elliot, busy at his favorite pastime here: watching tractors.

They started out painting eggs, but ended up having fun just finger painting.

They all had a good time and plenty of chocolate was enjoyed by all. It seems to be Anna's favorite food (she eats a bowl of rice milk with chocolate chips in it for breakfast each morning). That is one thing we've had to deal with on this trip...explaining, mainly to Evan, that just because other kids do something, doesn't mean she needs to do it. "No, we don't eat chocolate for breakfast" has been stated several times. Obviously anyone that takes their kid over to someone's house might encounter the same kind of issue, but it makes it much more difficult when you live with the other child and they see these behaviors every day that you don't want your kids to pick up (like standing in their chairs at the dinner table). So there have been challenges along the way, but Evan has been pretty understanding most of the time. For the most part, I've been pretty proud of our kids so far on our trip. As much as we complain about certain things they do that get under our skin, they really are good kids.

My first ski trip

No, I've never been skiing before. It seems like I am one of the only people I know that hasn't. I'm not great with heights and the idea of those lifts always scared me to death, but today I conquered my fears...well, sort of.

view from the gondola on the way up...

(Evan complained that they didn't go fast enough, but it was plenty fast for me)

 I was still really nervous about it, but as I told Carter, I was going to feel stupid if I had the chance to go skiing in the Pyrenees Mountains and chickened out. So...it wasn't pretty and I'm definitely no natural at it, but I did ski down one tiny little hill...twice. Yes, that was it. Embarrassingly enough, I had more trouble with the stinking lift than I did getting down the hill.

Anyway, Carter and our hosts had a better time skiing and I enjoyed the views and watching the kids romping around in the snow.

 Anna, our hosts little girl.

Pascal and Anna

We all had a good time even though our day was cut a little short when it started to rain for a bit. We had a nice little picnic in their van before we headed home for the day, and all the kids fell asleep on the way home (actually Evan was still asleep in the van for an hour after we got back because we couldn't get her up).

Elliot's booboo...

Carter (to Evan when she runs up): "Are you okay?"

Evan: "yeah.......(long pause and then she remembers) Oh, but Elliot's bleeding"

He was rolling around on Anna's balance bike and fell over and either bit through or bit the outside and inside of his lip pretty good. I was hanging laundry out to dry and heard him cry, and when I turned around, I saw he had a mouth full of blood. He's fine now, but he may end up with a scar to match his sister's.

On the road again...

Wifi again! (or weefee as people here tend to call it) Which means I'm back to using my English keyboard again, and apparently one month on a French one is enough to make me forget how to type properly. This post is going to take me forever with all the backspacing I'm doing.

So we had to say goodbye to our new friends on Thursday, and it really was quite hard...you can get pretty attached living together all day, every day for a month.

Dress up time.

Carter and his long lost brother, Alex, standing beside the completed wall.

Here's the wall when it was still in progress...

When they started on it, the only part that was cleared was around the doors and windows, but I didn't get a picture until it looked like this...

Carter hard at work

Here are a few pics we took before saying good night for the last time...

The whole fam...

Evan and her buddies, Camille and Eloise

Elliot giving "Eoweeze" a big goodbye hug.

So we were off to Auch...the trip was pretty uneventful. The kids did pretty well on the trains and both of the slept on the bus. Once we arrived in town and met our new hosts, Melanie and Pascal, they took us to a great little kid's park/playground so the kids could run for a bit after being cooped up all day. Then we tagged along while they ran a few errands before heading home.

We loved it in Rochefort, but the landscape here is just beautiful with all the rolling hills. The view just out the kitchen window is like a postcard. And once again, we've managed to find some great people to stay with. Melanie and Pascal have given us a warm welcome, we have a nice big bedroom (and the kids have their own beds too), and the kids have a new friend as well, our host's daughter, Anna.

A much needed bath after playing outside all day...(they couldn't be bothered to look at the camera because they were too busy watching Little Bear on the computer).

Oh, and tomorrow we're going skiing :)