This year, she outweighs it 3x.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Grandma’s rolls are rising, the turkey is chilling, the stuffing will take place tomorrow and Gabriel has practiced his Thanksgiving song on the piano, to perfection.  More pictures soon of the glorious work that Sylvain and the masons are doing for the woodroom/pantry/retirement suite floor.

The work on the retirement suite is proceeding apace, and the bulldozers have left and cleared away more rubble and brambles and mayhem,

and our little barn is starting to look rather dignified.  Sylvain and his team are going to finish up the slab this week and Simon/Olivier/Michel will put in the heated floor coils to keep our wood room (design by Clow) perfectly dry…

Then Jean-Luc and Olivier are going to come by and help me build the door…  and we’ll be cozy warm for the winter.

Jacky Duval and his bulldozers have been here for two days, flattening things and ripping up asphalt and making slopes and digging holes.  And he took out the big lump of dirt in front of the chapel so that it will drain better, and the chapel did not fall down.

It’s starting to look a little bit like a real home here these days… we hardly recognize our humble abode.  The photo below is from yesterday, today in place of the mud and rocks there is a nice coat of gravel.

Happy birthday tomorrow to Cynthia!

And an early happy birthday to Paul and Carolyn!

Rodolphe and Pierre finished off the exterior stucco on Friday and our house is splendid and tighter than a bull’s tuchus in fly season and in addition to being cozy warm, it’s gorgeous.

And Gabriel was a vampire, with the help of a bit of zinc-rich sunscreen, and Julia bean was a pink panther and even had a hand-made tail; in two hours walking around the streets of Feins with the group from school, Gabriel collected just under 500grams of candy, proof that the imported holiday is slowly gaining on the good people of Feins…  next up, bulldozers!  And more slabs!  And a huge barn door that hopefully, hopefully, there will be imported help to engineer…

This is an enigma found at the Gare de l’Est in Paris : amateurs of images and letters, what does it mean?  (Mariel’or, chut…:)

We’re fair to middling on towards fall, and it’s been rainy since July, so we’re not losing sleep over the transition to autumn.  However, in between a quick trip to Switzerland for the SprengerTag family reunion and a lovely stay and Iris and Paul’s home, (Miss Bean learned to get in touch with her Swiss roots by drinking Rivella; a milk-serum drink and Gabriel swam in lake Zurich and decided it is a little deep) and a visit from Aunty Cindy the applesauce queen and Uncle Jim with the blue guitar, i’ve begun to feel a little tired of living in a half-finished house and prompted by a leaky shower, have retiled the bathroom.   The shower is now working again, which is nice, especially for Jane and Ed because we no longer have to go to their house to take warm baths.  Now we just go to their house for poetry night and to get a square meal and solid grammatical advice every now and then.  And Julia’s almost walking; her first step is not one that i’m awaiting with bated breath because it seems like crawling goes pretty fast as it is.

The next house project, besides getting the bathroom really finished off, is rebuilding the barn doors, based on an example found in Switzerland, where we found a surprising  variety in barn doors on the foxtrail scavenger hunt around St-Gallen…

We have monster sunflowers this year at Le Maffay, although they are a little desperate this rainy summer for something, anything, to turn towards.   The children here at Le Maffay are also oversized: Gabriel’s new italian back to school shoes, which were intended for calcetto but he fell in love and decided they would be perfect for the school playground in Feins, are size 41.  Julia is clocking in at 11 kilos and 77cms; at this rate, next year Gabriel will have a bit of difficulty holding her for the  yearly back to school photo in front of the garden, and in the chapel doorway.

Proof positive that his new shoes are indeed highly appropriate for the playground in Feins.

Or, for hanging out in chapel doorways.

And Gramma Sally came for a month this summer and did all the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry so that i was able to finally finish off the downstairs bathroom and build the door for the laundry room and paint the windows and re-do the shower tiles that leaked and put up baby barriers everywhere for a little girl whose main interest these days is taking things apart, pulling clothes off shelves, eating cat food and baby wipes… and we got to go down to Vic Fezensac and see Rubén Blades.  And Marie-Laure and Andrea got married and we got to be there too.

Next week nights will get longer and the days more full, but it has been a wonderful summer.

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!

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!

To celebrate mother’s day (the american one, we transcontinental mothers get to celebrate twice), a small gallery of Eating with Julia pictures, because any parent or childcare worker out there can understand the combination of delight and ennui that a small child’s first forays into food can produce : ennui, because you realize just as you set the pasta on the table that in less than a half hour you’re going to be wiping it up off the shiny red surface of the the lovely scandinavian chair and picking noodles out of your baby’s chin-folds.

Eating is something that we do well here at Le Maffay.  Here is a partial list of things that Julia has eaten, as we approach her 9th monthaversary.

Spinach

Swiss chard with garlic

pumpkin

risotto

peas

corn

pickles

ice cream

chocolate

pineapple

mango

green beans

mushrooms

pizza

applesauce (many times over)

plums (compote)

pears

nettles (soup)

eggs

pancakes (every morning almost)

Nathalie and Laurent’s good bread

carrots

gesiers (digestive part of a chicken, panfried with garlic and served with balsamic vinaigrette on a salad at Pre-Easter by Malin and Simon at K-JJ’s house)

sausage from Jean-Yves’s organic, milk fatted pig

salmon quiche

Jane’s tomato tart

chocolate macaron

banana (many times over)

yogurt (many times over)

swedish pickled herring

lamb

Egyptian green soup

oatmeal

rice and beans and quesadillas

crab

pasta (many times over)

polenta

boulgour wheat

strawberries

artichokes

…

And a picture of one of the aftermaths – just before i kneel down again to wipe off the chair and wonder again, now why do i try encourage autonomous eating?  Because the grin of a baby successfully eating a banana on her own is worth its weight in cleanup time.