Mom in France

The countdown begins...

It feels like time is accelerating.  I guess it's because December is upon us and there are only a few weeks left until Christmas and Boo's first big trip overseas.  The details of the voyage are hanging over my every thought.  I'm trying to think good, happy, holiday cheer thoughts, but I admit they are suffused with a modicum of dread.  3 flights & four airports.  I try to imagine all the stuff we will have to carry with us.  Just a day out fills up the back of our car -- I can't imagine all we'll need for 15 hour (if lucky) journey x 2 & a week away from home.  If anyone has any advice I'll take it.

have a good one!

                   

To Schedule? and Le Pediatre Militant

It's amazing how quickly we forget.  Boo is only 7 months old and already I have a hard time remembering -- did he start teething at two months? At three? And when was it that he really began to sleep through the night?  Last week I visited two friends who are each new moms.  Their sons, born two weeks apart, are just going on two months old.  We spent an afternoon drinking tea, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the babies and talking about what babies' moms talk about : Sleeping, eating and pooping.  I had to dig deep to remember what Boo was doing at 2 months.  It seems so long ago!

Any-hoo, all three of us share the same pediatrician.  Our pediatrician is an attractive 50-ish year old woman who dresses like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.  I used to arrive at her office, sleep-deprived  and disheveled but proud because I was on time, only to be greeted by Dr. Hepburn, queen in disguise.   Once I got beyond the look, I realized that she is much more harried than I.  She has a single practice and supports population spreading over a 10-mile radius.  Her office is not in a clinic or medical center, and she doesn't have a receptionist.  This means that every two minutes the phone rings with some worried parent (I've been that parent) with their own immediate problems.  The result is that the visit is an unfocused whirlwind of weighing and measuring and vaccinations.  It's up to the parents to be sure no mistakes are made.

Part of the pediatrician's job is to educate the parents when there are questions about sleeping/eating/pooping and other developmental wonders. At two months she gives a standard speech (I know it's standard because my friends all got the same one) about babies eating and sleeping cycles. 

"Babies need to eat at 6-10-2-6 OR at 7-11-3-7.  They will sleep in between each feeding."  She even drew a little chart in Boo's Carnet de Santé under 2 months that described his supposed sleep behavior.

I remember feeling so grateful for instruction and such clear direction. I asked a question about the night time only to be told that we'd cover that at 3 months.  I went home happy ... until I actually tried to implement her instructions. 

Boo absolutely didn't want to eat every four hours.  He wanted to eat every 3 hours. He didn't want to eat 10 minutes one side, 10 minutes the other.  It took him at least an hour to eat.   He didn't sleep like she said:  he generally fought sleep during the day unless he was in his car seat.  I spent many hours pushing him in his stroller in circles around our yard.  I also would go for drives during midday to get him to sleep.

Her instruction seemed so simple and she made it clear that ALL babies need this sleep and will do it. I felt like a failure.  I spent two desperate weeks trying and failing, trying and failing.  Finally a friend lent me a book about putting a baby on a schedule.  I concluded that I simply did not agree with the writer about the rigidity of the schedule, and even she conceded that with breast-fed babies it's a bit more haphazard.  However, I did take some advice to try to implement some routines, especially around night. 

I began to wait until 6pm to feed Boo.  Between 5:30 - 6pm he would begin to get fussy but we would listen to music and dance, or take a walk in the yard.  Just before 6pm we'd go to his cool, dark room (it was summer) and change into pj's.  By 6pm he'd eat, and around 7pm he would finish and be just drowsy enough to get into the bed.

I remember the first day that I tried this and it worked. I was so proud of us!  And so relieved that I could fix and eat dinner with my husband in peace for the first time in 3 months.

In the following months, I've received other speeches from Dr. Hepburn, but instead of blindly following, I take her advice along with the rest that I receive and then decide for myself.

A few random things

• I realize I do the baby sway even if I'm not holding Boo.


• Check out my cool new header. Thanks Cass!  For the record, the 2CV does belong to me.  I bought it when I first moved.  I saw one in our village and thought, Why be mundane?  Now that Boo is here it's our "3rd" car,and we only take it out for special occassions.  I drive the ultimate family car now:  Volvo station wagon.


• I've seen the stats that Typepad provides and know that there are readers out there -- cool!  I was wondering if you had any requests?  Are there things you want to know about living in France ?  Having a dual-nationality kid?  Husband from another culture?  I'm happy to oblige.

Fête des Olives

Over the past week I read Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Barbara Kingsolver's memoir of "eating local" and farming her brains out.  More on the book later.  But it felt good in a smug, cozy way to read the book knowing that we were just days away from harvesting the olives on our 10 trees.

Most of residential, suburban Côte d'Azur is former farmland or mountainous pasture.  Our 50-year old home (not old enough to be cool, just old enough to be constantly falling apart) is set down in a former olive grove.  The rest of the grove lives on, also subdivided among three other houses, and the remaining original owners family maintains three more properties around us.  The trees are far and away older than the houses and people that live among them.  Latest estimate is in the neighborhood of 100 years.

Every year we cultivate our little piece of history.  In the spring, around March or April, we prune the trees before they bloom.  All through the neighborhood you can hear the buzz of chain saws and see branches waving jauntily over hedge-tops as old growth gets pulled out.  The trees bloom tiny white flowers that bring on the hay fever to many (though, luckily, not me.)  The berries, or olives, come out early summer and continue to grow in the summer heat.  They are harvested by birds and people sometime in mid-fall.  Usually it is in early December, but with this year's dry summer the whole regions olive crop is coming in early (as did the grape crop).

We started two weekend ago by putting the nets in the trees. The traditional way is to put the nets on the ground, but we found that many of the berries were rotting.  So E devised a way to attach them to the branches.  With the promise of free, organic olive oil, we invite 10 of our friends for the annual harvest. Each person takes a small rake attached to a long pole and combs the branches of the trees, popping off the olives into the nets.                              

                        

We collect the fallen olives as we go, and put them into a long tray to sort the leaves from the berries.  This is usually my job (along with cooking and general hostessing.  Oh. And child care)  Here I am hard at work:

                        

The sorter is set at an angle and the berries roll down into the crates below -- ready for the mill!

                        

Once we collect and sort them all we have less than 24 hours to take them to the mill to be pressed for oil.  Otherwise they begin to rot under their own weight.  We delivered our olives to the mill this morning and will pick up the finished oil on Wednesday. 

The good, perfect olives we keep to make cocktail olives.  You cannot eat olives straight from the tree -- they are very bitter.   They must be cured, either in a brine (sometimes with herbs added) or in salt over the course of several weeks.

Finally, at the end of a long day's work, we all deserved an aperitif.

                                

Feeling Crafty

I was on medical leave for two months before Boo was born.  The first three weeks I was on sofa-rest, not exactly stuck in bed but not allowed to do anything, either.  During those weeks I worried a lot, and tried not to go stir-crazy.  Finally, I pulled out the knitting needles after nearly 4 years.  I decided to knit a sweater for Boo.

More recently, I've been feeling the creative urge more and more.  I decided to learn to sew!  So I ordered this book (among others from Amazon) and pulled out my machine.

 

I bought the machine in a fit of domesticity.  The immediate project was to make some simple curtains for our bathroom out of some fabric I bought on vacation in Morocco.  I fantasized that I would do all the little fixes needed on our clothes (hem pants, etc) but I have no interest in that.  We have a perfectly good person in the village who hems all my pants for my short legs, and even took in my wedding dress. 
I've nearly finished my first project:  some bibs for Boo & friends.  I know of several babies on the way so if the parents are reading this they won't be surprised to receive a bib and/or baby quilt. Here's the first view:

Why now the sudden urge to create?  Maybe the planets are aligned.  But I think it has to do with the massive change in my life.  At other major milestones in my life I've done the same.  There was the year I had an 8-foot tree brought into my 400 sq. foot apartment (it took over the entire living room).  I decorated it with fruit:  oranges with cloves tied in satin ribbons, white lights & with a pineapple on top instead of an angel.  It was the same year I met my now-husband.  Coincidence?