Chez Françoise

Hugh has started going to a home-based day-care each Monday. He goes to the home of our neighbour Françoise, along with two or three other little boys. He loves to go off with his back-pack in the morning, and he looks forward to it each Monday. I think he would like to go every day if he was allowed to!
When he comes home he starts to speak in a funny imitation of French. I try to speak French to him as much as I can, so i hope he will learn a little bit by the time he starts at Maternelle (kindy) in September.

Odette at School

I took some photos at Odette's school the other day, when I drove her back after lunch.

Odette standing under her butterfly picture in the corridor

Odette's class has been studying butterflies (hence the butterfly picture above). They started with some caterpillars, which spun themselves cocoons and then, wow! Out came some butterflies! One day recently they went on a little excursion to release the butterflies into a nearby garden. Roger went along, as parents had been invited. They walked around and found flowers and bugs and looked at Nature alive in Spring. They each had a special container with a magnifying lid to catch bugs and look at them.

The classroom

Odette is in the class below what she would really be in, but it suited the school best for her to be in the four-year old group (les moyens), and the teacher has been to Australia and speaks some English.

All the slippers on the shelf above, and boots under the bench.

In school the children have to change their boots or shoes for slippers when they are in the classroom. We had to buy school slippers for the kids as soon as they started school. School bags and coats are hung on the wall to the left, just out of the picture in the photo above.

Still Raining

I try to remain positive on this blog, and I have been quite philosophical about the rain. After all, we are farmers and we know how valuable the rain is. But I am sure that all the dams in the country must now be full and every paddock waterlogged. There is no need for more rain at present. So why is it still raining???
Last Friday night was meant to be the grand opening of the Sports et Jeux en famille on Friday nights, with a BBQ and speech from the Mayor. But it rained so it was postponed until next week. There is no sports and games this Friday either because guess what? It's raining!
Sophie has been training for athletics since the beginning of May and the meeting was meant to be on Wednesday. But guess what? It was postponed because somebody thought it might rain! It didn't rain and would have been a great day for an athletics carnival - no rain, no sun, not too hot. Instead it will be on next Wednesday - unless it rains - so we have our fingers crossed!
Bonnie has started doing swimming with her class on Thursday afternoons, for the four Thursdays in June. Can you guess what happened on Thursday afternoon? Well not exactly rain, but the threat of a bit of drizzle, and the sun wasn't shining, so swimming was cancelled...

Soon enough the summer weather will arrive, and I will be complaining about the heat!

The School Bus

Marie-Hélène supervises the young kids on Odette's bus

Bonnie and Odette both go to school on the school bus. "Elles prennent le car". We have to walk down to the Mairie (like the shire office), which is probably not even 300 metres away from our house, and it is all downhill. We have to cross the main road to get to the Mairie, but there are traffic lights and a pedestrian crossing. In the morning one of the shire men stands there and directs the children safely across the road, waiting for the little red light man to turn into a little green light man. When it is safe to cross he says "allez!"
For the pre-school children there is a supervisor on the bus to make sure they are sitting down and that they have their seatbelts on, and also to make sure that there is someone to pick them up when they get off in the afternoon. I think with this system no children would accidentally be locked in the bus all day as happened to our Bonnie when she was in pre-school...
Bonnie catches the bus at about 8:20am, and after the bus has dropped Bonnie at school it comes back to pick up Odette and take her to school, at about 8:45am. In the meantime Sophie has walked to her school at 8:30.

Hugh with his "copains" Noah and Gaspar

Hugh likes to "ride" his bike down to the bus stop. We have to make sure we are holding the handle tightly on the way down, because I would hate to think what would happen if he was let free on the hill.

Our Friendly Neighbours

Eric

Thierry

We are extremely lucky to have some neighbours who are "très gentils". As we say in Australia "they are great blokes!"
Here are two of them!
These photos were taken on Sunday after a lunch lubricated with wine, and after Eric and Thierry had run up to Sainte Marie du Mont from Sainte Marie d'Alloix (notice a theme in the names??). It took over an hour, and up hill all the way. I'm not sure why they didn't invite Roger to join them!!

Montagn'Arts

The herding of the sheep

I think this is going to be a really long post, because Sunday was a really good day.
I have posted lots of photos in a Picasa web album if you want to see more pictures.
Sainte Marie du Mont is one of the villages included in the agglomeration of schools that our girls go to. It is higher up the mountain, at 900 metres, and it was the venue for the festival called Montagn'Arts on Sunday. The rain stayed away while we were there thank goodness, but the clouds kept rolling by and engulfing us so there were periods when it was extremely foggy.
The festival marks the herding of sheep and cattle up onto the mountain pastures for the summer, so everyone was invited to follow the sheep up the mountain. The mob that was taken was not very big, and there might have been more people than sheep in the procession. No cattle went up, as the farmer said there was not enough grass yet, due to the weather we have had lately. Indeed most cattle are nowadays taken by truck.

The shearing demonstration

Roger's own shearing demonstration

We were very keen to watch the shearing demonstration, to compare it to shearing at home. The first sheep shorn looked nothing like our sheep at home, and the wool was more like hair. But there were also some merino sheep, which made us feel more at home. After the official demonstration the shearer continued to shear, and Roger managed to have a chat to him. Roger offered to give him some shearing tips, and told me, when there were two sheep left, that he was going to shear them. Roger had intended that it would just be him and the shearer, but we made sure that there was an audience to cheer him on!

As the event was for fundraising, there was a lunch which we had pre-ordered, and keeping with the theme it was a "shepherd's lunch". We had a salad (of mainly tomatoes and lettuce), ham, pâté, saucisson, three varieties of cheese, fruit salad, and wine. Every meal in France is accompanied by wine.

Our family having our shepherd's lunch

The Three cheeses...

After lunch there were heaps of fun and games for the kids. "La Grande Kermesse" included lots of simple fun activities for the kids, like fishing for a lucky dip, sack races, egg and spoon races, tug-of war, toy tractor driving, and of course pony rides. We bought a lot of sixteen tickets for ten euros, and each game or activity cost one ticket. After each activity the kids got another ticket, which they could exchange for a range of gifts or treats set out on a big table.

Odette and Bonnie enjoying the fun and games for kids

Please have a look at the rest of the photos by clicking here.

Le Serpent

The snake, after being run over on the road.

This is the first snake I have seen in France, and I saw it just before it slid onto the road in front of the car. I ran over it on the way up to Odette's school this afternoon. On the way back I saw it on the road and, being the inquisitive person I am, I stopped to have a closer look. It looked pretty dead to me, with blood coming out of its mouth, and not moving much. I got up nice and close for a photo, and then thought that I should take it home to show Roger, so I threw it into the car.
Roger was down at the school after taking Bonnie and Sophie back after lunch, so I stopped and pulled out the snake. The kids waiting for the school gates to open were all very keen to have a look so I took it over to show them. It was about then that the snake started to move and look around. You should have heard the scream!
I didn't know if snakes in France are poisonous or not, so I asked one of the teachers, who told me that vipers are dangerous, but this particular snake - a couleuvre - is harmless.

Hugh watching me holding the snake

Wet Weather

The clothes line last Wednesday

The clothes line today...

No, I haven't done the same lot of washing twice. These things are STILL on the line, because they haven't been dry in five days. I hung them out on Wednesday when the weather was fine, but it didn't last long enough to get then dry. Since then it has been wet, damp, or humid, for the last week.

It's Raining Mud

Three days after being washed...

This photo was taken last Tuesday. It is a picture of our clean car that we had paid 6 euros to have cleaned the previous Saturday. The young people from the village held a car washing day to raise funds for their school holiday excursion, and we were only too happy to support them and get our car cleaned inside and out. Our cars get pretty dirty because they are kept outside, as the two garages here are too full to fit them in (seems to be a common problem!) But we expected it to stay clean for longer than three days!

When it rained on Tuesday we couldn't believe how dirty our car was. When we drove around we noticed all the cars were the same, and the windows and windowsills of the house were dirty too. Where had the dirt come from? Why didn't the rain wash it away??

A closer view of the dirty car

I was told it was dirt form the Sahara desert in Africa! At first I didn't believe it, but now I understand that sometimes there can be a big dust storm in Africa, and the airborne dust drifts across the continent until it settles somewhere thousands of kilometres away. When it mixes with rain, it becomes mud. And apparently if it happens in winter time then the snow that falls can be pink, yellow, brown, or grey, depending on the colour of the dust.

Do you recognise this girl?

The huge poster at Warwick shopping centre

Sophie had her first modelling job just before her seventh birthday. It ended up being quite a saga as it took more than a year for her to get paid. (It wasn't until we had a story run in the Sunday Times that the money finally came through.) Now three years later we have evidence of the photo shoot. Francine, our last nanny, got a surprise when she saw this huge poster at her local shopping centre in Warwick, Perth. She grabbed a picture on her mobile phone and emailed it to us, so we have evidence, and Sophie can see the results of her work. Who knows where else the photos might be used? Or when her next job might be?