French Life-expat France

Chez nous we are just recovering from an excess of children - younger daughter had a sleepover party on sunday night and older daughter on monday night. so we’ve had a house full of young girls for almost 48 hours non stop.

It was strange to see the difference between the two groups. The ‘ten year olds’ were forever charging about, pretending to be animals, playing in the rain and breaking the swings.

The teenagers took a slightly less active approach, and spent more or less 24 hours sealed in a bedroom with a large heap of videos and DVDs. And the obligatory portable phones, so they could phone lots of school friends and tell them what a good time they were having phoning lots of school friends, or something like that.

They giggled a lot and finally managed to get dressed only at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, just before their parents turned up to find them.

So yes, children are the same everywhere.

Food of course was the stress we had to bear, since as I have said before, our habitual bread and cheese lunch doesn’t pass muster with the French childre, who think they haven’t eaten if they don’t have at least three courses.

Speaking of which, I was amused to see the beginning of Portés Disparus on television a few days ago (a US missing people series with Jack Malone and Samantha Spade I think, but I don’t know what it is called in English). At the beginning of the episode, a mother took two slices of presliced type white bread, spread a big blob of jam on one slice and made a sandwich - which she then put in a plastic bag and into her son’s schoolbag.

Why amusing? The average French mum (or dad) would be mystified by this act. The children, at least around here, can’t take in their own school lunches - they either eat the school lunches provided or go home for lunch. And in any event, two slices of white bread and a blob of jam doesn’t look like anything a French person would recognise as lunch. So what could it be for, they must have wondered? A 4pm ‘gouter’ snack perhaps?

Anyway, I’m pleased to report they have all left, life can return to normal, and the school holidays are nearly finished with. We’re almost at the point in the holidays where they both suddenly remember that yes, they do have an important test when they go back to school and no, they haven’t started preparing for it.

Yes, this always happens however many times we ask during the holidays if they are sure they have done all their homework. At 8am on the day of the first day back at school we will see a large selection of maths, Spanish and SVT (Sciences, Vie et Terre if I remember correctly) books strewn around in a panic, while they simultaneously try to learn the first 50 lines of a poem that they have to recite to the class later that morning.

Older daughter is slightly better at preparing for this panic - the evening before she will casually ask me if I can wake her up ‘a little earlier than normal - perhaps 5 am’, while claiming that she needs three hours to brush her hair. This of course is, in reality, a desperate effort to find time to actually do two weeks of homework.

A last and unrelated comment before I sign off. I just noticed I’ve called this post ‘Too many children’ and I just remembered a story that someone sent me, telling of an English family they know in France who keep having more children for the sole reason that the child benefit is so generous, especially when you have four or more. Might I suggest if you are thinking of doing this, it is not the best reason for having children!