Fête de la Bastille

Nursing mothers have limited options for mood-enhancers; here is one that is acceptable.  With a jigsaw, a piece of wood and some plastic tablecloth from our friends down at Marchand in Montreuil sur Ille, i made a tabletop for Julia’s stokke highchair.   This has reduced the amount of cleanup time by 50-75 percent, unless she eats quinoa or rice in which case there is no remedy but elbow grease and a good broom.

Also we have seven six new baby chickalicks, delight of our days and testament once again that you just leave the broody hen alone and everything will turn out fine.  This one actually disappeared, and we were distraught and cursed the perfidity of Le Renard, until we noticed that she seemed to come back every day stealthily around 10am to drink water.  Roughly two weeks later she came back to show off her baby chicks…

And, Rodolphe and Pierre are mudding up the pignon and fixing the horrible divots on the east end of the house, and will do the courtyard side as well once i get the old stucco scraped off.  They’ve taken the famous maffaien mud, sifted it in the concrete mixer after soaking it in water, and made a stucco out of that and hay.  They’ll do two more coats and our house will have a lovely warm (tone, and temperature) coat.

And we have monster dahlias in our ciderpots, Pierre-Yves and Yves and Pirouette stopped by to move them with the tractor for our mudding work.  Otherwise in the garden we have great artichokes, too much dill (but it’s so beautiful), amaranth, the first tomato as of July 13, and the plums are starting.  Raspberries are winding down, we’ve finished off the apricots and the beet crop will be perfectly timed for gramma Sally’s arrival.  The corn, for fg Cynthia and Jim in September…

In other news of mud, let it hereby be known that diaper liners are not compatible with sewer pumps.  Gabriel and i got to clean out a backed-up sewer pump today, and fished out 11 months worth of diaper liners.  I dug a hole and planted them where next year’s corn crop will be.  No pictures, with good reason.  As miss Bean’s diaper changer and laundress i’m a little distraught because diaper liners are a great invention.  But this dark cloud has a silver lining for our dear Malina and Marie-Laure whose new babies’ bums will benefit from the stock of boxes of diaper liners that are no longer a possibility for us.

Also we had the greatest Fourth of July ever with Jane and Ed, ’nuff said.  Happy Bastille Day!

July-a

The absence of photos is once again evidence that we’ve been out doing things.  Gabriel is now on summer vacation and Julia is now creeping and has teeth and is waving and clapping.  Gabriel had an end-of school party with a spit roasted pig and apricot/port stuffing (if there’s any question why we have adopted Feins as our home, let this be a partial response), a piano recital and has also learned the trick of the laundry game that i learned from the amazing Christine in Burkina many years ago now : lining laundry up in order of hues on the rack to dry.  You’ll note that this implies that he is also sometimes hanging up laundry to dry, which is much appreciated, and has also begun mowing the lawn and weedwhacking, under supervision.  The other great news is that we’re now able to bike again as a family because miss Bean is able to ride in her bike carriage.  We’re looking forward to a great summer, and will try but cannot promise to put up pictures because the to-do list that we made this morning after pancakes is rather daunting; we’re buried under a pile of zucchini.  Happy summer!