No Problems, Only Solutions

Here I am - I've tidied up my blog and studiously avoided tidying up my home.

Truthfully, I just don't know where to begin. The downstairs is now open for business, but every heavy piece of old family furniture we put in place is laid with the knowledge that it will have to be uprooted as the workers redo the parquet room by room. And why, you might ask, did we not wait to move downstairs until the parquet was completely finished?

Settle down for the story. I think it's best explained by the new, sharp worker who came right before the vacation to install all the locks and doorknobs (ah, if only he were a permanent fixture). He noticed that our usual workers had installed the flush in our toilet upside-down. This represents their work ethic fairly accurately - kind and reliable as can be, but a little slow on the uptake. DH overheard him asking the boss rhetorically (with a snort) if there was a necessary company quota for hiring mentally challenged employees.

Anyway, once our beautiful new tek parquet was flooded and warped, the challenged workers went to town to repair it in order to get our bedrooms ready in time for Christmas - ripping the wood up in places and laying down new floorboards, or putting heavy concrete over the bubbles to get them to lie down flat. This meant that the entire floor in all four rooms downstairs was covered with white plaster footprints, which they insured would remain for all posterity by sanding and varnishing the floors without washing the plaster off first. Now we will know what shoe size to get them for next Christmas (at which point I'm sure they'll still be finishing up one of the projects).

They also came with-pleased-as-punch grins to show us how great the parquet looked compared to post-flood parquet, not noticing that they committed other gaffes like allowing the silver floor insulation to stick out of the baseboards, like someone with toilet paper hanging out of her skirt. Or that they had slopped brown varnish on to the newly painted white walls because it never occurred to them to put masking tape along the border.

Learning that we were not, in fact, pleased, they assured us that there are no problems, only solutions. But I don't think they realize that solutions involve unmounting complicated beds that barely squeeze through the doors with our low ceilings, or that old furniture weighs more than modern Ikea stuff, and is going to involve relieving it of all its contents first. I'm guessing it won't be a problem for them.

So I hesitate to "nest". I don't care if we stick the dryer on top of the washer and leave less counter space to fold clothes on, or if we hide our filing cabinets by turning them into a bench to remove our shoes in the entrance. I don't care if the kitchen is spotless (okay, folks who know me will say that is not unusual) because we don't have enough space to put things in anyway. I don't care if we put a big comfy couch in the living room or a hard leather sofa with matching chairs. We're living in flux anyway - no part of life is tied up in a neat little bow. I just want to be settled. And still have money in the bank. And ... pass my driver's license. And get a spot for Peanut in the nursery. Is that too much to ask?

So DH noticed that I'm a little dark and broody lately. Young Lady patted my head in sympathy and said, "Poor mommy. She's tired!" And Big Boy has been hoping that by raising the frequency and decibel level of his pleas, he will be able to cut through the cocoon of my woes - all to no avail. Until I snap out of my funk (tomorrow, probably, when I have to start thinking of our New Year's Eve party), I'm going to go lose myself in watching something on tv. Where there are no problems, only solutions.

The Boulder of Seeming Impossibilities

The boulder of seeming impossibilities has rolled. And it has all but flattened me in its wake.

During this exhausting past week, in addition to the usual holiday "cheer", we have finally moved into our mostly finished downstairs bedrooms, becoming Task #1 of Seeming Impossibility. After five months of cramped living in little more than a construction site disguised as "chez nous", we have expanded our horizons to include 55 extra square metres of space! We have a real house now! A sound vacuum to send our rambunctious kids into, called the downstairs.

And we use it frequently.

But it has not been all smooth sailing, as forecasted by our earlier flood. In spite of the five huge men - DH and four of his buddies (thanks to Werner, Philippe, José & Roland) serving as all-hands-on-deck for our move Sunday, it was a much bigger hassle than we expected. Even though we were only moving downstairs and therefore didn't have to load up any truck or travel anywhere, we still had to fit furniture in like a puzzle. (i.e. Let's first take this small fridge to the garage so we can bring the bigger one up, and then put the huge armoire in the kitchen, which clears the hallway so we can move the beds downstairs, et cetera). We still had to empty the contents of all the desks, dressers, armoires, and reload them on the other side. We still had to unmount and mount bunk beds, roll rugs, clean under the furniture, and sweep up the debris of forgotten objects into a laundry basket to be sorted at another time. Hopefully before our next move.

I've heard that the secret to a happy marriage is low expectations. I think that can be true for anything, including a move. If you're uprooting house, you expect to be thrown into disarray for weeks and weeks. But when you move into your newly mostly finished bedrooms after months of disarray, you expect it to be a home right away. So part of the exhaustion stemmed from futile attempts chipping away at one pile, while staring at all the other piles yet to be conquered. And on top of that, all this bustle happened to fall on Christmas week, which brings me to Task #2 of Seeming Impossibility - Christmas shopping.

Wading through the crowds the week of Christmas (when you hope that you're the only one not working and at the mall) is like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die. Except that you're engaged in an activity nowhere near as useful as spawning - you're buying plastic toys that will get a short shelf life only to add to the overflowing landfills. Don't get me wrong - I'm on the more moderate end of the environmentalist spectrum, but the Christmas debauch can turn the stomach of even the least sensible.

And then the grocery shopping! I mean, someone has to get the foie gras and seafood, smoked salmon and turkey, the bûches de noels ... and it seems that it's someone from each and every household in Ile de France. My maneuvering the enormously laden cart through the aisles of Carrefour in a desperate sprint to find cinnamon sticks resembled Fantasia's hippopotamus dancing ballet to Ponchielli more closely than I'd care to admit.

We had only a short couple of hours while Young Lady and Big Boy were at the recreation centre to wrap all the presents, and this we accomplished through the deafening noise of workers drilling shutters into each of the bedroom window frames. We also danced attendance on Peanut, whisking away scissors before he could grasp them with his dimpled hands, and giving him his older siblings toys to suck on before they got wrapped (swearing him to secrecy as to the truth about Santa Claus), and we were just in time to fetch the children with only a mere three presents mislabeled.

The preparation leads to Task #3 of Seeming Impossibility - Christmas Eve dinner. It's not a small matter to prepare a dinner for seven adults, six children (and two babies), but to prepare it with clutter still visible from our move, all three children home and underfoot (God bless 'em), the additional holiday decorating to finalize, and ZERO counter space does seem an impossibility. I resisted the urge to use the top of the garbage can as additional counter space. I was also, perhaps, a little overzealous with the meal planning since I wanted our expat friends to experience real french cuisine for their first Christmas in France.

We had three entrées (seafood pastry, mixed greens with cranberries and goat cheese, foie gras served with fig jam and toast) and the main meal (turkey stuffed with foie gras and figs, potato purée and white asparagus with orange sauce) followed by a cheese platter and choice of 4 bûches de noël. The remnants of this feast coupled with ZERO counter space created a terrifying mountain of dirty dishes that .... well, it made me want to cry. We are definitely redoing our kitchen as the next order of business, and it's going to include a dishwasher!

In the end, Christmas was all that it is supposed to be. The Eve was a wonderful dinner with friends, blinking white lights, good food, pretty Christmas music, and children filled with the joy of being alive and the mighty anticipation of presents. The Day itself began with the long-awaited gift-opening frenzy, and culminated with a good, long dinner and time spent with extended family.

Though the boulder of seeming impossibilities moved on leaving behind pleasing reflections, it left my mortal body flat-out exhausted. I am a bit like the stretchy man toy that has been stretched to twice its length so that the plastic is almost see-through; the doll that has had her limbs pulled out by the naughty big brother. Now, if someone would come and roll me back up like a sardine can and stick me in bed for a couple of days with some Desperate Housewives dvd's, I might get my juice back to continue. But, alas, life (and kids) won't wait for me.

Snowfall, Spiders and Snickerdoodles

It's snowing! It's snowing!! It's snowing!!! It's rare enough in France that it's worth mentioning, and it's as pretty as can be outside with the stone gates and laurel hedges covered in white.

Today I bundled Peanut up and we went into the town center to run some errands ("La Poste" "La Pharmacie" and the less glamorous Casino supermarket). The thing that I marveled at as I wheeled the stroller along the snowy sidewalks (mercifully covering the dog poo, for once), was that every single spiderweb was also covered in snow, magnifying its intricate beauty with a thick white coating. And there were a lot of spiderwebs - one or two on almost every grilled entrance! I didn't realize that we had such a plethora of industrious spiders in our little town, and ... weren't they supposed to die or something in the winter?

Anyway (back to business), at Casino I got some books and playmobile sets for Young Lady and Big Boy, as well as gifts for our nieces and nephews to get a head start on Christmas shopping. Walking home with my pack-horse (the Jane 3-wheel all-terrain stroller) laden with treasures, the sounds of footsteps and wheels were muffled by the snow and I was transported by the timeless beauty of our french town blanketed in white. Peanut was fast asleep by the time we got home, tucked safely away in layers and lulled to dreamland by the soft sounds of winter life around him.

Yesterday was our Christmas cookie-making session with friends. There was no snowfall to deter them from coming, only the usual train strike ( we are in France, after all), but the promise of holiday baking is a strong incentive. We made sugar cookies with frosting and sprinkles - the kind that sends your blood sugar level sky-rocketing. The kids were asked to bring a Christmas goodie to school the next day to share and I couldn't resist representing my beloved country by one of its garish colored confections. In the end, Madelyn and I ended up decorating most of the shapes ourselves because the kids could only keep up their interest for so long (their interest extending to the ones they could eat on the spot). Luckily, since the cookies were supposed to be a kids' creation, the bar on beauty was not set very high for us moms.

This afternoon, Coralie came over to help me wrap presents and bake more Christmas cookies for a party tomorrow night. We made snickerdoodles, and the snow falling outside made a sweet contrast with the warm oven-baked scents coming from our kitchen. DH was working from home to oversee the work being done downstairs (a necessary attention after discovering that our majestic main staircase newly installed was little better than a wooden ladder that you had to descend sideways like a crab). So with DH at home to manage the workers and man the fort, Coralie and I were able to leave Peanut happily sleeping in his warm crib as we went to fetch Young Lady and Big Boy at school.

The shouts met us on our arrival. There is nothing like the untrammeled glee of school children unleashed on a sugar high and by mass exodus into a snowy wonderland. YL and BB were no exception. They spent the whole walk home gathering snowballs, planning the snowman they would make with a carrot nose, and throwing themselves down on the ground to make snow angels the minute they walked through our front gate. It's a hard heart that could watch them without feeling a deep satisfaction, knowing that this exuberance would leave a lasting (even if vague) memory of childhood innocence.

Wreathed in Light

This weekend was a welcome respite of togetherness after Darling Husband's week-long absence, and we managed to have two days of light-hearted fun with no other worries than decorating our proud tree.

In preparation for Christmas, our masons had talked about cutting a hole in our living room wall - not the exterior wall, which already has a big gaping hole in it that will shortly lead to the stairwell - but the one that separates the living room from our makeshift bedroom. That way, they reasoned, when we have our guests over for Christmas, we will have one big open space to move about in.

But we reasoned that, since we have no time to move the bed and other furniture into the nearly finished downstairs before they plan to cut the wall, this will lead to an incredible amount of dust all over our duvet cover, DH's suits hanging on the open clothes rack in front of the fireplace, and our myriad of other belongings. With no wall to separate the two rooms, I was also plagued with images of small children careening down the living room runway in order to gain speed and then fly up on the bed (before crashing through the window on the other side). No thanks. We'll wait.

So, our Christmas guests will be entertained once again in our tiny living room with the ugly mustard colored leftover rug and rough wooden outdoor table. We're just going to have to amp up the holiday cheer factor in some other way than having a finished house. For a start we can rely on the pretty Christmas decorations (that were eventually dug out) to spread some color around. And then there's our proud-as-a-peacock tree. Granted, after putting the stout little fellow in place, we almost reconsidered and asked them to cut the hole anyway because he is so FAT! You get deceived by his short stature, but this guy has been priming himself to grace some bigger home for Christmas than our humble house. He takes up half the living room and we need to turn the table sideways in order to move around him.

We spent Saturday decorating him with DH's aunt, after participating in a test-run of our holiday dinner - leg of lamb, twice-baked potatoes, homemade gluten-free bread and green beans. With full bellies we set to work, and she was amazed at the rapidity with which the children put the decorations on the tree. All on one branch. And she was amazed at the rapidity with which Peanut went behind his siblings taking the decorations off the tree. So we were in the process of doing damage control - freeing fragile glass bulbs from little grubby fingers, and trying to spread ornaments around evenly without the children noticing that their work of art was being tampered with - when all of the sudden, the tree started to wobble. Time stood still, and just as our brains were beginning to comprehend what was about to happen, the entire tree came crashing down from its lofty height, vomiting its tree stand of water all over the ugly rug. (We don't mind the rug, but there's oak parquet underneath waiting its unveiling when the work is finished!!)

We eventually realized that this fall from grace was because our stout tree has .... an "embonpoint". One side of his belly is much heavier than the other, and that (unfortunately) was the side we had chosen to face the living room and decorate with heavy bulbs. So we were forced to steer him the other way and hide his belly in the corner, exposing his backside (which is a little bare, like his bald 4-pronged head). But we were prepared for all eventualities. Once we had covered him with a halo of white clustered lights around the head and strategically-placed bulbs around his bare middle, he looked pretty darn good! At least, we thought he looked good, although he might have been regretting his decision to leave the forest.

Sunday gave our tree a chance to parade himself in his newly decorated splendor, never mind that he was bursting at the seams. The visiting friends exclaimed over his beauty as he, oblivious, gazed up at them bashfully. Trees are made to be admired, and this one is going to get his full share throughout the holiday season. Somehow the scent, the color, the beauty and tradition of a beautifully decorated tree does contribute to a season full of joy. As our group of five caught up on each other's lives over coffee, the tree watched over us with angelic benevolence, and we all parted with a lighter heart.

Pining Away

Our tree has arrived, and ah, the pine smells fine!

With Darling Husband away on business this week, I set my mind to be busy so I wouldn't miss him so much (or notice the absence of his help at bath time). It was decidedly time to prepare for Christmas - the purchase of some small gifts, the placement of basic decorations, and the debut of a list for our holiday dinner. The decorations began with a set of lights bought for our beautiful french windows in the shape of clear leaves, clustered in bunches of three. As a surprise for Young Lady and Big Boy upon their return from school, I reached up on a chair, on my tippy-toes, to tape the lights around the window frame and set them aglow. Boy those french windows are tall, and at my height I could just clear the window and tape them right above onto the door frame.

But I forgot that french windows open inwards from the middle, like doors. And I have to open them day and night in order to open and close the shutters. And just clearing the window to tape the lights on is not enough, I found, when the cluster of leaves hang right into the window itself. So now morning and night, I balance precariously on tippy-toe, on a chair that I inevitably have to step down from and adjust because I've placed it too close to the window (so can't open it) or too far from the window (so can't reach the cluster of lights to clear them out of the way). I think I have a stepladder somewhere to adjust the lights permanently out of reach, but I confess to be a living example of the Mexican proverb: "The lazy man always works double".

French primary kids have no school Wednesdays, so after I took Young Lady and Big Boy ice skating, we decided to spend some time getting festive. Considering that all of our decorations are packed away somewhere in anticipation of the completed work (estimated deadline for everything mid-October 2009; revised estimate for 2 projects out of 4 - just in time for Christmas), we had to begin by making our own decorations.

I took some pretty green patterned card-stock and folded it in half and drew a Christmas tree on half of one, which I cut out and then traced the same pattern on the other 3 papers. With four little Christmas trees in front of them, Young Lady and Big Boy went crazy with a variety of stickers, chatting excitedly all the while. And what do you know! When I cut the middles to place one tree on top of another - perpendicular like a pinwheel - it made two of the prettiest little trees that stood up on their own. I felt like such a model mother for doing a craft with them instead of flipping on the television. Well, that is until the model way I started screaming at them "don't touch it! don't touch it! it'll fall down! we're decorating!!!!!" sending them scurrying off (probably to the television).

Swept along by the holiday fever, I got the tree yesterday. With little craft trees on our table as an incentive and the kids getting antsy for things to look a lot like Christmas, I thought - now is the time to order our tree, and then we won't waste time getting it Saturday. (We'll just waste time looking for the decorations for the tree on Saturday). I found "the" tree at the florist located in the town's marketplace. It was short and plump with a long skinny 4-pronged branch for a head, and they delivered for free! The florist was nice and also gave us a hideous mini spray-painted tree with a plastic santa that the children just love, and an amaryllis for me. (And he delivered for free). I tried not to notice the even bigger trees for 20 euros less at the local supermarket - they did not come with plastic santas, and I bet they did not deliver for free. In any case, our plump little tree fits like a charm in our empty big-gaping-holed living room.

Finally, to close the week properly, today I bought a new vinyl tablecloth for the rough outdoor table with metal legs that we've been using to eat on. The wood is too rough to wipe down with a sponge after meals, and the cloth tablecloth I bought lasts all of about one meal with this messy family of mine. So that is my latest addition to the holiday spirit since it's somewhat christmasy-looking. It's a nice beige vinyl one patterned with various green plants, and its chemical smell is only partially offset by the pine. But it does go nicely with the plump little tree, the sprayed santa tree, the two card-stock craft trees and the big-gaping-holed living room rug.

And the best part of the week's festivities is that the house is clean - I kept it clean all week, in spite of being solo with three young children. I'm quite proud of myself. So when Darling Husband comes home, in addition to the chorus of "Papa! Papa" (and in spite of the chagrin he will feel when he tries to close the shutters), he will be agreeably surprised by a tidy house, the model children, and beginnings of the Christmas fever of which he made a timely escape. With all this evidence of my domestic industry, he won't be able to accuse me of pining away!

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

I've been sleeping for the last two weeks. I've been spending long nights happily lost in dreamland, grudgingly awakened by Peanut's incessant, "Mamaaa? Mamaaa?" I've been napping under the pile of clean laundry on my bed that I'm too discouraged to put away, and reading regency novels under my covers since I had nowhere else to go. We'll call it early hibernation and I was in need of a spring.

Well, gone is my excuse to nod off because our big gaping living room hole is FILLED - mind you, not by windows and a staircase getting installed as planned (thus sealing off the winter air rushing into our home from the great outdoors). Not that, but by a puzzle of poly-styrofoam blocks covered in a plastic sheet and stuck in the opening as a temporary measure. You see, (now steady yourselves), the construction work on our house has suffered a bit of a delay.

In this case, we can't fault our workers for the delay because it was due to a flood on our newly parqueted floor that will necessitate them ripping apart the floor boards and lifting the parquet up to let the insulation underneath dry out. Well, truth be told, we can fault them a bit since they were the ones who squeezed the tubes to the water softener as they moved it, causing the reservoir to overflow enthusiastically. (To their credit, they rushed to survey the problem on a Sunday afternoon insuring that they stayed in our good graces, and they have continued to receive their daily carafe of coffee). But it is a little disheartening to walk on the floor and hear "squish squish," and watch the water overflow at the edges and spill back onto the floorboards. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "floating parquet."

In spite of my early hibernation brought on by the big gaping hole, I did manage to notice that our home was lovely to be in, lovely to come home to, especially in the dark grey afternoon light that accompanied the winter drizzle. Cramped and chaotic, it was still home - dry, warm and ours. With the living room sealed off and dark, the only light that reached the outdoors emanated from the large kitchen window, causing the house to wink at passerbys. It winked at the workers as they headed to their own homes at the end of their working day, and it winked at Darling Husband as he came home from his.

Now that the living room is ready for use with light spilling out from both front windows, our house is once again bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for our next endeavor, which is Christmas preparation. Darling Husband is less than enthusiastic about digging through kilos of boxes to fish out our decorations, but once I threaten him with the alternative - snowman stencils sprayed on our beautiful french windows with the fake snow spray - he will reach deep down within himself and find the motivation to unearth our more simple decorations.

We have elected to host two visiting families for Christmas Eve - one from South Africa and one from India who are both spending the holidays here in France very far from their loved ones. This has put a fire under me to start thinking of the holidays. Gone are the illusions of our first Christmas in the new house boasting stockings hung by the chimney with care (our chimney doesn't yet function and is covered by the clothes rack in our makeshift bedroom). I have given up expecting polished hardwood floors or big open living room spaces. I'm even ready to welcome people in our 55 sq metres of space if we are unable to move our bedrooms into the finished downstairs.

All I know is that it's time to spring out of bed, stretch my limbs and open both eyes, as we get exactly one chance to celebrate the holidays with our children aged 5, 3 and 1. We get one chance to celebrate Christmas in our 9th year of marriage, one chance to celebrate with the friends who are here on short stay from far-away lands. We get one chance to celebrate our first holiday in our very own house. Blink, and the chance is gone.