Gimme five!

My papa says he remembers his fifth birthday. He says he remembers what his ato (grandfather) gave him on that day. He says he remembers where he was when he woke up that morning, on his fifth birthday. I think we have a lot in common because I remember my fifth birthday too.

It all started at Ata's house, with cake and presents on a rainy Saturday. Ata gave me the best trottinette I've ever seen. One day, if it stops raining, I'll actually get to use it!

Then today, my birthday, I woke up early. Real early. Mama and papa didn't seemed quite as enthused about my birthday at five in the morning. Go figure.

When I got to school Mme Frankart, my teacher, gave me a kiss. Then, in the afternoon, we all had chocolate cake (thanks mama!) and apple juice.

Do you think that was the end? Think again. Fast forward two days. Saturday was the big day. My big party at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs! Yeap, a whole morning of admiring fine design and making art nouveau jewelry in the Palais du Louvre. All topped off with lunch, cake, and juice. Clara, Tess, Alix, they were all there.

A very memorable way to celebrate my fifth birthday. Maybe I'll still remember it when I'm old like papa.





Check out all the celebration snaps here: I'm 20% older than I was yesterday!

Disturbing the peace

Some borders shouldn't be crossed.

When, in 1985, Luxembourg and four other members of the European Community, signed the Schengen Agreement, a good dose of shortsightedness was on hand. Forget the viability of a single currency with no real fiscal union to speak of. This treaty was a total failure of vision. No provisions were made for a major future calamity: the Gongo.



Yes, some 26 years, 3 months, and 16 days after some very well-meaning and well-dressed Europeans met up in Schengen (which is in Luxembourg no less), we put that Treaty to it's toughest test yet. Euro crisis? That's petit section next to this!

Our trusty Jetta, which just celebrated its 14th birthday, screamed passed the now abandoned border controls. Luxembourg is tiny, we had to be careful not to drive too fast or we'd end up in Belgium, or worse yet, Germany.

I could feel the nervousness of the diminutive population. But I wasn't worried. I knew that if anyone could arrest Gongo's barbarian invasion it was Melina, the master of diversion who, at each moment, managed to amuse the beast and hive off his attention in directions that would reduce damage to the Grand Dutchy.

And indeed, a wonderful time was had by all. There were white wolves and docile goats, ice cream, racing cars (I'm well on my way to a Forumla 1 career), picnics, fine wine, green apples, red apples, apple juice, princess costumes, and that great event that we were all waiting for: Constantios' birthday! Yes, the Lion of Luxembourg gathered his own troupe of high-energy toddlers for a crazy afternoon fueled by baby gym and chocolate cake.

By Sunday night the Gongo was safely back in Paris, eating pizza, and the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg slept peacefully...and largely intact.

I was born in the Euro zone and I'm-a-gonna-stay in the Euro zone 'cause if the EU can pass this test, it can survive anything. Still, Francs are so romantic...

Why not check out all the snaps here: we may be small, but we're not in debt!

As middle age approaches...

Cake...

...finger painting...

...balloons...

...merengue...

...confiture de lait à volonté... 

...fine art...

...expensive presents...

...sister unusually nice?

Good Lord! It must be my third birthday!

Yeah baby, I'm three!!! Yeeeeeeeeehaw!!!!

Check out the great event here: I don't feel a day over two.

Get smart

For some time now, I've been haunted by a seemingly endless barrage of questions. It has dawned on me that, at almost three, I know so little about the world. I felt my entire being (okay, my entire being isn't all that big yet) crushed by a mounting weight of relentless curiosity. What do you do when you simply must have the answers to your questions?

Ask papa!

"Papa, pourquoi?"

"Because Gongo."

"Papa, c'est quoi?"

"It's a banana Gongo."

"Papa, what exactly prevents quantities at the electroweak scale, such as the Higgs boson mass, from getting quantum corrections on the order of the Planck scale? Is the solution supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or just anthropic fine-tuning?"

"Go ask your mother."

I needed another strategy or I would never get answers to my questions.

Another thing that isn't clear to me at this point is whether humans have partial free will or no free will at all. I pretty much ruled out total free will last night when papa told me I couldn't watch yet another Sesame Street podcast. But sometimes, it seems something or someone out there is making things happen just when they need to.

Take Tuesday morning for instance. I woke up a little earlier than usual. Mama and papa seemed excited and brought out a brand new fancy outfit. We then walked Inès to school. But once she abandoned us for the Grande Section, instead of heading back home, they asked me to come inside!

We went up six floors to a classroom. It was filled with all sorts of exciting things. The atmosphere was almost like a carnival (or exoricism). There were very nice ladies, screaming kids, proud parents, screaming kids, desks with games, other desks with puzzles, still more desks with colored pens and paper, screaming kids...

It was my first day at school! Finally, I would have real professionals at my beck and call to answer my now infinite pool of questions!

"Maîtresse, what exactly did Kant mean when he said that space is an a priori form of human intuition?"

"Je n'ai aucune idée mon gars, have a madeleine."

Well it seems I have to start by learning how to write my name. Again, proof that total free will doesn't exist. But since the only argument for predetermination is that there is no argument to prove partial free will, the question itself falls apart. In fact, the one thing I've learned from asking so many questions is that all questions disintegrate when you hold them up to scrutiny. Therefore, there are no answers.

But don't tell my teachers that, I can't wait to drive'em crazy!

Why not witness education in action and check out these snaps: too cool for school

 

  

Cashing in

Not long before school let out, mama and papa took off to Sicily. That's not particularly exciting as a standalone concept except that they did the unthinkable. They went without us.

Don't get me wrong, Mimi and Julio took good care of us; but this presented us with a unique opportunity. School was almost out and summer vacation was upon us. It was payback time. Oh yeah baby. Two months of nonstop guilt trips and putty in our hands.

First it was the usual sun and fun on the Ile de Ré. Uncle Francisco joined us for part of it and sometimes he wasn't even on his Blackberry. But the old beach/ice cream/bicycle/crêpe/shopping/spoiled rotten routine gets stale fast and I needed to try something new. It came to me as I sat pushing all the buttons and pulling all the levers in papa's gorgeous soon-to-be-vintage-collector's-dream Volkswagen Jetta. I was almost four and a half and I still didn't know how to drive!

Time to correct that oversight. "Papa, do you remember when you abandoned us for the sun washed mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale?"


I'm a natural behind the wheel. Gongo said all I was missing was a cell phone glued to my ear. I could feel those insurance companies shudder.


But we're not the shallow types who sit around all day showing off their fancy cars. We're 21st century Parisians, and that means we're in touch with nature, and we are environmentally aware and responsible. Donkeys are one of the more glamorous forms of "green" transport (trendy loser speak) and mama and papa were in no position to say no: "Mama, tell us how you climbed Mt. Etna again..." Before I knew it I was on a first name basis with a donkey named Isolde. Then there was the 173rd ride on the merry-go-round: "Papa, do bald people your age really rent convertibles?"

Back on the mainland we were just getting the hand of this exquisite form of extortion. Nothing could assuage their guilt: "Mama, do you think one day I'll eat pasta a la norma on a terrace overlooking the summer sea? Oh, ice cream, how thoughtful!"; "Papa, is the chocolate in Modica really as good as people say? A new scooter, how did you know?"; "Mama, you look so tanned! Good thing you missed all the rain we had back in Paris! By the way, I'm not sleepy."

Summer sure was fun. We painted, visited throngs of cousins, swam, saw Ata, kissed Ata, exhausted Ata, played piano, consumed vast quantities of sugar, skated, visited even more cousins, stayed up late, woke mama and papa up early, you name it.

Soon school will start. Gongo will follow in my footsteps and destroy the family reputation I've worked on for two long years. It's la rentrée again. Time for puppet shows, ballet, and chinese food. I hope mama and papa go away again sometime soon.

Papa's sneezing woke me up!

I thought I'd seen it all by now. I'm nearly four-and-a-half years old after all. But this Easter I was blown away (gobsmacked as the rain-soaked Brits would say). Will this world never stop amazing me?

We're all pretty happy about the arrival of spring. Papa was particularly happy. Sure, he likes the sun as much as the next Cuban/Texan from Paris but that's not it. You see, since winter arrived I've been asking papa why the leaves fall from the trees when it gets cold. I know the answer by heart: "the trees go to sleep until the springtime then baby leaves, blah, blah, blah". I'm almost as sick of the answer as he is of the question. But I like to drive him crazy. Now the leaves are back I don't ask the question quite so often.

Anyway, I digress. Here's the sun, and the flowers, and the baby leaves, and whatever - this is not my first spring you know; I've seen this before. But then there we were, hanging out with cousins Melina and Nefeli and Constantinos taking in a few rays while the lamb edged its way to medium rare, when I see this shiny object under a bush. It kinda looked like one of those space blankets but with a mauve hew. I decided to investigate.

This was no small alien space ship taking soil samples under the lavender bush, this was an egg, a big egg, wrapped in gaudy foil. I took a chance and picked it up, a fragrance of milk chocolate emanated from the strange object. Ivory coast, before the rains, 55% maybe 60% cocoa, forastero mostly, maybe with a hint of a trinitario mixed in for quality. Certainly no criollo but not bad given it was hanging around under a bush. Was I going crazy? Early Alzheimers?  Was the stress of the moyenne section de maternelle getting to me?

Just then my dear cousins started to scream. There were other eggs, lots of them. All over around the house, in the trees, on the window sills, under the swings. What was going on? I figured some local chicken had swallowed a mercury thermometer in a Hershey factory.

But no. It was crazier than that.

Leapin' Leporids! Can you imagine? Papa said (and he doesn't bend the truth) that these space eggs were left by some philanthropic lagomorpha that has nothing better to do with his trove of chocolate prolate spheroids than leave it's contents lying around so that kids like us can ingest titanic amounts and entertain our weary parents with the tantalizing results of the ensuing sugar high! I mean, are you serious? Maybe this world does hold a surprise or two. After the fat guy dressed in Coca-Cola red who left a bunch of presents after breaking and entering down a smoking chimney I get this? No one told me it was going to be this weird. Next you'll tell me some fairy sneaks under pillows swiping teeth in exchange for a couple of coins!

Cheap fairy! Just in case, I only take Euros.

By the way, thanks to Olivier for cooking my hungry parents dinner and to Dude for organizing a killer start-of-the-season picnic at the Parc des Sceaux.

Check out the pictures of said picnic here: Sceaux sunny

Or, instead of washing your hair, check out these shots of the Chetif Moulin in spring: flower power

Don't believe in the Easter bunny? Check out proof here: The hare raising event

Winter's retreat

I know every kid my age asks the same thing, but if it's a cliché that's only because it's true.

How do they grow old so fast? There is no greater traitor than time. It seems just yesterday mama and papa were young, dynamic, full of energy. Now the gray hairs have set in (or receded a little more) and dark bags under red eyes are permanent fixtures (nothing to do with us I'm sure).

But time flies by. You think they'll be young eternally. Where does the time go?

Oh, I know. That's what's supposed to happen. You don't want them to be drooling, goggle-eyed parents forever. No. They need to get on with life. Maybe even grow up. But we just didn't expect it to go so fast.

Winter is almost over - if that's possible. February passed quickly. It seems only yesterday we were raising a paper cup and toasting to Tess' fourth birthday. Pin the tail on the donkey. Piñata. Those were crazy days.



Then came the cousins. Sensational singing sailors on the Seine, showtime and chèvre at the Chetif Moulin...

But winter gave way to...more winter. Then, after a little more winter came the sun. Warm days. Two of them. Now a little more winter. Soon it'll be spring. Then, in the blink of an eye, it's winter again.

Days pile up like old newspapers.

You just wish they would stay that way forever...



Why don't you check out some snaps of Tess' wild and crazy birthday here: Pass the lampshade

Or marvel at our culinary prowess here: you mean there's no chocolate in boeuf bourguignon? 

Chortle at our family antics here: Papa just left to join the foreign legion

Meander through a simple life here: What do I wear to Will's wedding?!?!?