The Wayfaring Wordhack

 Today, my daughter turned 12.

Wow, that went fast.

And after having 6 other girls over for a sleepover last night, I love my daughter all the more.  It is just a mother's love/pride/familiarity speaking, but she really is a great girl.*  <3<3<3



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*which is not to say that the others aren't, but , you know, all that mother stuff mentioned above. ;)

FYI: Today is not my birthday, Wed was.


Since buying our home, we have seriously cut down on travel and days-away-from-here, mostly because of having animals. 

However, we have been wanting to take to the kids to where we lived after leaving Paris and decided my birthday would be a good occasion/excuse to do so.

Being self-proclaimed freeloading plebeians, we decided to picnic, cookout, and camp as we visited our old haunts. For the occasion, the unseasonably warm temperatures and lack of rain turned out to be blessings.

We first drove to La Borne, a potter's village some 20 minutes from Sancerre. Here is a link to a French Wikipedia article for anyone who reads French. A record of the oldest known pottery oven existing around there dates from 1260, just to let you know the heritage of the place. Today it has ceramists and potters from all over the world living there and in the environs. While it was nice to revisit it, this trip was not our best experience there. Many things were closed, and I got an overall dilapidated feeling from the village.  While there were some truly gorgeous and fresh pieces to be seen at some of the ateliers, many artists were still doing the same things from 10 years ago.  Pottery can have a timeless feel, but certain glazes, forms, and colors become quickly outdated, to my taste at least. Still, we were happy to offer the kids commemorative bowls* for my birthday, and I found a water pitcher that was both practical and pretty enough to come home with me.  J got a couple of bowls to match those the kids picked out and some new raku espresso cups. Here are a few of the pieces:

As you can guess from the subject line, Sprout is still crazy in love with dinosaurs (at this time in her young life she says she'll be a paleontologist when she grows up), so dinosaur fun it was.

A peek at the preparations and some party photos.

I made my first ever pinata, a triceratops that I failed to get a picture of before it was smashed to pieces. Huge Fail. Especially since it was finished days before the party. Have some production shots:


My mil tactfully said, "That's not a dinosaur. It's a rhinoceros." And then wisely--since she'll be the first to tell you she isn't really "up" on her animals, much less dinosaurs--added, "Or maybe not." LOL

OK, I lied. I pulled a stillshot of the finished pinata from the video of the kids smashing it, but it was filmed at night and doesn't do it justice. If I do say so myself.


Out of salt dough, I made four dinosaur skeletons, one for each team of mini paleontologists to race to assemble. Here is part of the pterandon, drying:


Each dino had 45-50 "bones"  and measured one meter long. That's a lot of salt dough. I assembled and photographed them so the kids would have a "cheat sheet."  I had to use it myself to double-check the spinosaurus.


I would have loved to have the kids excavate the "fossils" and then put them together, but a) we don't have the room in our yard, and b) I didn't think the fossils would survive that. :P

Since this wasn't a surprise party, Sprout and Junebug got in on the decorations:


I got the idea for this cool banner off Pinterest:


Instead of cutting out each letter, I drafted the whole on three large sheets of paper, which I taped together.

I made dino eggs out of salt dough and coffee grounds with a small (not as little as I wanted, actually) dinosaur figurine inside. I was going to make one for each kid, but Egypt is not the US where one can find any little trinket one wants, not even in the Egyptian Toys-R-Us. So the eggs, which looked very much like rocks, doubled as decor, holding up an ostrich egg as a centerpiece. You can barely see them in the photo above, but I'll post another. There where just enough eggs that I could give them out to the members of the winning team in the Great Dino Games. But we played those after snacks, which were:

Herbivore Munchies, Cretaceaous Chips, (GF) Carnivore Chicken Bites, (GF) Pterosaur Tuna, Dino Tails (baby corn), dinosaur eggs, dino DNA, Fruitivore salad, Marshosaurus Molars (large and small marshmallows; I was pretty chuffed to find a dinosaur called Marshosaurus); dinosaur fossils (huge pain in the butt; will never make again), dino print cookies, and prehistoric popcorn.


After snacks, the kids divided up into their herds: Triceratops, Stegosauruses, Spinosauruses, and Pteranodons.

Then they played Dino Stomp, which consisted of a timed race to pop all the balloons tied to J's ankles and wrists while he did his best to escape them. Next was Pterosaur fishing, at which the Pteranodon team exceled, clenching their victory of the games since they were able to catch the "special" fish, worth ten points. :P Then came the fossil puzzles, and finally the naked egg spoon race. That didn't last long, as you can imagine with small children, but it was OK because it was getting late and time for cake.


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Last week, we celebrated Sprout's fifth birthday. All parents say this, but, Wow. Where did the time go?  A little update on the not-so-little Miss:

( Read more... )

To paraphrase from The Princess Bride, There is too much; I'll sum up...about our trip to Oklahoma, that is.

For three weeks:

We rested, following the sun's rhythms pretty closely, not bothered at all by the yapping of coyotes, which is so much more melodious as it rolls down hills and creeks, echoing off oaks than is the barking and snarling of the wild dogs that run the concrete labyrinth of this city.


( Rest of the trip, this way... )

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* Has anyone else been in proximity to an armadillo? There was one funky smell in its wake, and we don't know if it was the creature itself or something it had come in contact with. It smelled like skunk and wild garlic/onions.

By exactly one month. 

One month ago today, I celebrated my birthday. In Denmark. With my dear sickpea, frigg. Here is our Denmark trip in photos and a little video featuring a charming Danish birthday tradition.

Jelling Stones, rose bushes with enormous rosehips lining the roads, very cool Danish cemeteries, enough hay bales to make any Impressionist painter swoon, and churches with model ships hanging from the ceilings, these are a few of the things we saw...


as well as the impressive sand sculptures in Søndervig.



We really enjoyed our time with frigg and C.



But if ever you celebrate your birthday with frigg, be warned: She has a big knife!

  

 Today is sartorias ' birthday.  She's doing something neat on her blog; she's inviting people to help her celebrate by sharing beautiful/inspiring things.  So, I'm putting up some prison graffiti photos from our trip to Loches that I didn't use the other day because she mentioned liking such stuff.

( big photos (the better to see the writing) )
Go wish her a happy birthday, too, if you haven't done so, and while you're there, take time to read through the comments and check out people's photos, links, and poems. There is some good stuff to be enjoyed...and some weird, like funky crochet exhibits. o.O

 Hello, all.

Julien and I have complete the "tourism" part of our USA visit and are now visitng with my family.  Because my grandmother does not have the Internet (we had to drive 7 miles to find a motel with wi-fi we could bum off), so I'll be silent for the next week or so.  I'll try to find the time to write up a post about our last few days and will put it up when the next net opportunity presents itself.

Hope you are all well and...

HAPPY BIRHTDAY, kmkibble75!!!

 for the birthday wishes. I had a fantabulous day. I'll do a picture/write up post tomorrow. For now, I must get some shut eye. Apparently old people tire easily.

:D

So, a little less than a week ago, I added another year to my count.  I'm creeping on up there, let me tell ya.  Julien  "kidnapped" me Wednesday night--yes, the same day as my seasick episode. :-/ but I was feeling better after a siesta--and took me to a bed and breakfast on Grande Terre.  

Suppers at the Gîte du Mont Combani are convivial affairs, and the guests all eat together at the same table. We started with papaya soup, followed by rougail saucisse (sadly for the restaurant experience, Julien's is *much* better) with gratin au betsaï (kind of like Chinese cabbage). The gratin was good.  We had a banana dessert that I don't know the name of. :P All in all, aside from the delicious breakfast breads and homemade jams, the food was not up to par. However the bungalows were charming and the grounds were beautifully landscaped, giving me the opportunity to...yeah, you guessed it...turn my birthday into a photo safari.  Because I have quite a few pics to share, I'm going to break the posts up by subject.


( snip, snip )Come back to see the bats and lemurs and...well, lots of other things. :D