will WE play in Peoria?

I’m not saying the parking spaces here are small… but this morning when I left my French lesson, I had to get in my car in the back seat on the passenger’s side then climb over to the driver’s seat. It was the only way into the car. And I had to leave to get Kaitlyn from school for lunch, so I couldn’t just wait there for the person who parked too close to me to come out. It was probably someone toothpick skinny who wouldn’t have even seen there was a problem anyway.

This morning after getting up and getting dressed and brushing her teeth (but still refusing to brush her hair), Kaitlyn insisted on making a card for her teacher. She sat and very carefully covered a blank card with some of her favorite stickers. Despite my protests, she skipped breakfast for the task.

I don’t know if it’s accepted to be making cards to give to your teacher. It isn’t the first or last day of school. It’s just something Kaitlyn felt the burning desire to do. And since I don’t know if the practice is frowned upon or welcomed, I had no idea what would be appropriate to write inside. Kaitlyn babbled on that she wanted me to write how she wants the teacher to come to her birthday… as her editor I opted to omit those thoughts. I finally settled on a simple “bonne journee,” which is basically “have a nice day.” I wrote it on Kaitlyn’s dry-erase easel and made her copy it. She cried when she messed up a letter, which I fixed with some white-out.

When she kissed me goodbye at the gate and ran off, Kaitlyn was clutching the card tightly in her hand. She wouldn’t let me write the teacher’s name on the envelope; she was adament that she’d hand it to her. I suppose I may never know. Unless I’m scolded for it, I suppose.

Kaitlyn was so excited this morning she couldn’t even sit down to eat the piece of bread she’d finally agreed to for her breakfast. She got up without fussing, put on her new pink (of course) dress, new Hello Kitty sneakers, and had me put a ribbon in her hair. Today was the first day of school. And Kaitlyn couldn’t wait to start in the big kid class. “Grande section.” That isn’t to say she wasn’t nervous. Another American girl who’s a few years older told Kaitlyn what to expect in Grande: learn to count to 100, do mazes and dot-to-dots. Kaitlyn couldn’t sleep last night for fear she’d connect the wrong dots. Despite the looming dot demand, she was in the car five minutes early.

We were among the first to arrive at school. Normally, only parents of the very littlist kids get to walk to the classrooms; today was different. Parents are given two hours this morning to take their kids to school. And they did. (No, Bill did not. And he was not the only CAT-dad to be in the office instead of on the playground.) Kaitlyn said hello to some of her friends, then marched up to her new teacher and said without me prompting her: “Bonjour, maitress.” (That’s literally “hello, teacher.” ) The woman smiled and said “bonjour, Kaitlyn” (I think everyone at the school knows Kaitlyn) and then asked her “comment vas tu?” No answer. “Ca va bien?” No answer. So much for her French. I tried to tell the teacher that I think she understands a lot more than she says.

We went inside the classroom to check it out. Kaitlyn’s class is a mixture of the Grande Section… or kindergarten… and CP…. or first grade. The kids in CP have desks with their names on them. The others sit at little round tables in the back of the room. It could turn out to be a good transition for Kaitlyn from pre-school with the hours of finger painting and play doh and dollies to a real classroom with real work. She won’t have homework this year, but she’ll see what it’s like to be an even bigger kid.

When I picked Kaitlyn up for lunch, one of the other moms was wiping away tears, saying how hard it is to take the kids to school. I was thinking how hard it was to have to drop everything to rush to the school to pick mine up for lunch. Don’t get me wrong, I like spending that time with her. But it still just doesn’t make sense to me. Anyway, the teary mom’s kid cried when she left him in Kaitlyn’s class this morning. Hhhmmm…

When we finished up lunch and we were about to head back to school, I asked Kaitlyn if she needed to go to the bathroom. “Mom! They have toilettes at school.” She must think I’m a real moron. She went on to inform me that now she uses the “big kid” toilette. As long as she uses it, that’s fine with me.

On the way back to school, Kaitlyn and one of her friends ran ahead of we mom’s… into the school yard on their own… without even saying “bye.” They’re so grown up.

At the end of the day, I asked Kaitlyn’s teacher “elle va bien?” (basically, she did well?) The teacher smiled and said “bien!” Sounds good to me. Sounds promising for a good year.

A few months ago, a group of we ISE’s decided to start a book club. We like to read. We like to talk. Seemed like a good match.

If we read another book that makes me cry, I’ll jump off my roof. Ok, I won’t. But I swear I’ll quit and go back to reading travel guides and emails exclusively.

Tonight not even bothering to fight back choking sobs and a flood of tears, I finished “My Sister’s Keeper.” It’s a book about a 13 year old girl who files a lawsuit against her parents for medical emancipation: her older sister has a rare form of leukemia and she’s only been conceived in order to donate needed things to her… and now she’s filed a suit for it to stop before they cut her open to take a kidney.

I saw the ending of the book coming a mile away. Didn’t make me cry any less.

It isn’t just about the death that surrounds the book that made me cry so hard. It’s about being a mother. A daughter. A helpless witness. It’s about watching someone die of cancer. It’s about the moment I sat in the belly of Duke Medical Center waiting for my mom to have a cat scan (the memory of the sound of the automated voice on the machine saying “breathe in… hold it… release… “ still gives me chills) and seeing a child whose head was all bandaged up, wandering the halls holding her mommy’s hand on her way to the next appointment or treatment or bad news or good. Although I felt like there really wasn’t any good news to be doled out within the walls of that hospital. It’s about that feeling when I saw that child that I had to say “better to be here with my mom than with my baby” even though that’s a choice no one should ever have to make. And it’s a thought I’ve never stopped feeling guilty about. It wasn’t that I wanted my mom to die. It was that it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through and the idea of going through it with Kaitlyn was crushing… I was sure it would be a test I wouldn’t survive. It’s about that feeling while you’re watching a person you love more than you can express dying of cancer… and feeling like you’re the only person in the world who’s ever been there. Even though you’re sitting in a waiting room overflowing with people all in the same position. Because in some weird way, each of us who loses someone that way is the only person who’s ever gone through it. Because no one else in the world has experienced your relationship… your laughter… your tears…. your denial… not exactly. And yet there’s still this unspoken bond when you find out someone you know also lost someone… also went to countless appointments… watched pain that cannot be measured on some stupid scale…. listened as people struggled to figure out what to say… and got mad when they said “oh, I’m so sorry,” like it death was the certain end to the story even though you hadn’t gotten to it yet. Even though it was. Even though when they said it you had to know deep inside that was where it was all heading but you were yet to admit that to anyone, let alone yourself.

The book was about the choices we make or want to make. About the uncertainty that surrounds us… always. No matter what we do. How hard we try.

I was telling a friend on the phone today that the hardest part of this ISE assignment is the uncertainty. The idea that we don’t know exactly how long we’re here. Or where we’ll go next. Or, shit, what will happen in between. And after. But that’s the thing. We never know. Sometimes we get to pretend we know. But we never really do.

Today was a girls’ day shopping in Geneva. I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 so I could be ready in time for the short road trip with two friends.

We didn’t really have anything we needed to buy. We just needed the day of window shopping, eating and Starbucks.

Ok, one of us did have a shopping mission in mind. She wanted a watch. She’s done lots of research. She pretty much had one picked out. She really just needed to try it on. So we went from watch store to watch store (easy to do in Geneva) as she tried on four different $5000 watches then would ask our opinion. Our opinion was easy: it isn’t our $5000.

At one point, she talked me into trying one on. Well, she and the salesman who were buttering up we friends with offers of champagne or mojitos.

And after a while of looking at all of these very expensive, presumably very precise, watches you start to not only think “yea, those are pretty,” you start to think “I need one of these,” followed by “$2500 isn’t unreasonable.”

It’s a little bit like when you go to Disneyland and surrounded by Mickey Mouse heads you think to yourself “yea, I could use dishes, socks and towels with mouse heads on them.” Then you leave, glad you didn’t buy all that stupid crap because no one over the age of 6 needs anything with Mickey Mouse on it.

Two chai tea lattes and a lot of walking later, you climb back in the car to drive home. You have your fancy watch catalogs. Back at the house you flip through them and realize “what kind of nut goes around with a watch that cost that much?” Ok, my friend. And I don’t know which is nuttier. The one with the new watch or the one with the $500 shoes… did I mention the shoe store?

I woke up to day two of a migraine… and an empty box of my prescription for it. Not that the prescription works miracles, but it does make getting off the couch possible after a couple of hours of napping. Minus the medicine, the day is pretty much dedicated to lying in the dark. Which isn’t very realistic with a 5 year old home from school for summer.

I managed to eat a little cereal but decided to forgo any coffee… rather than risk it making me even sicker while at the pool for Kaitlyn’s swimming lesson. After she frustrated her teacher for a half hour (she can’t seem to understand that one doesn’t bend her arms while swimming the backstroke)… I dragged her to the pharmacy.

I’d finally found my prescription but was fairly certain that the French scribbles indicated I had one refill for the migraine medicine. (one? What was that doctor thinking?) And I’d filled it. Still, I had to try. So I showed the prescription to the lady at the pharmacy and said I wasn’t sure if I had more. “Non.” So I asked if they have something else I could take. Certainly a pharmacy would be a good place to find something to relieve the pain. Yes, they have lots but she wouldn’t know what to recommend. Since I was beginning to think severing my head was a viable solution, I didn’t care what she recommended. I tried to tell her that I didn’t have anything. Somehow, she thought I meant I didn’t have any money. Maybe poor people go into the pharmacy all the time begging for migraine pills. I assured her I could PAY for the bills… if she would just offer to SELL me some.

I didn’t really understand the next thing she said. But she got a box of the prescription medicine and rang it up for me.

When I go to the doctor I’ll have to ask her just how that happened. And just how it was she thought to only give me one refill in the first place.

We’ve just gotten home from our vacation, and it was great. Maybe one reason is not staying up late feverishly hand-writing tales of each day’s events. Yes, I gave myself my own little blog-free vacation. Still, there are some things I don’t want to entirely fade from memory… so I will try now to relate each before it is too late.

I’d planned a vacation at the Tuscan beach resort of Viareggio. Italy’s biggest beach resort. Beautiful pictures online. Or, at least, I thought that’s where I’d planned the vacation. My exhaustive research on Trip Advisor had actually led me to a hotel just outside Viareggio.

And by just outside, I mean that if you stood on the sidewalk in front of our hotel, you could look down the street and see the sign welcoming you to Viareggio. But the actual charming old part of town was too far to walk with a five year old… so at first I was mad. Then I realized being mad was not how I wanted to spend my vacation. One evening we rented bikes from our hotel and pedaled our way down there. What we found were overpriced stores that had already closed (and it was only a little past 7 at night), overpriced restaurants and, well, that was about it. Maybe the beach by our hotel was a little like the Jersey shore minus the pulled taffy… but it actually had better, unique stores, open later, and was kinda fun.

The beach itself was like nothing we’d experienced before. Only a very small strip of the beach is public. You have to pay to burn your feet on nearly every inch of sand along that coastline. The fee covers something to sit on (chair or lounger… the latter being more expensive) plus an umbrella. There are private changing rooms, but our hotel was only a block away. There’s also a bathroom which was clean. And a snack bar complete with a grumpy waitress. The beach is pretty wide and covered with a sea of umbrellas. Different colors for different “clubs,” I guess you call them.

It was days before we ever bothered with the beach. (Well, our first day we wandered down just to check it out and after Kaitlyn went in the ocean some guy came up and informed us we were on a private beach.) She loved the pool at the hotel. It was very pretty…. lined with and surrounded by marble tiles. Slippery marble tiles. She took a couple of spills, including one smack onto her belly while trying to jump backwards into the pool. (Yes, she’s gotten rather confident in her swimming skills over the past week or so.) We spent one entire day at the pool, which we realized that night was a mistake when Kaitlyn became so tired she was entirely unreasonable and we ended up ordering room service for dinner. She spent a couple of afternoons at the pool flirting with an 8 year old boy from England… Benjie. Seriously, I think he’d have done anything she’d asked him to do. When Benjie’s family left, luck smiled on us and another family with two girls just a bit older than Kaitlyn arrived. They became fast friends. Once the girls got past Kaitlyn’s tendency to ramble on with an impossible-to-follow stream-of-consciousness which I think is partially brought on by the thrill of finding another English speaker to listen to her. We even ended up in neighboring umbrellas at the beach one day.

Besides a beautiful but slippery pool and a short walk to the Jersey shore, our hotel offered an ideal location for a few short afternoon sightseeing trips.

Our first excursion was to Carrara… to see the mountain of marble. It really is something. It looks like it’s covered in snow. But it’s white marble. At the top, you can see where they’re carving it out of the mountain leaving behind giant white steps where ragged mountain tops should be. We’d hired a private tour guide who told us all about the trucks loaded with marble, marble scrap or marble dust, lumbering through town at frightening speeds. Although she was sure to add that the trucks have good breaks… now. We were there on a Sunday… in August… there was no mining going on so no trucks to worry about. We went inside the only mine that’s inside the mountain. Kaitlyn’s favorite part of the tour was the gift shops offering every imaginable marble piece. We hit probably four shops. Kaitlyn picked out a little pyramid made of pink marble. She calls it flesh colored. Bill and I took a little longer to decide, finally settling on some marble dice and marble book ends. Before we left the area around all the quarries, we stopped to take our pictures standing on top of some of the giant slabs of marble slated for a future trip down the mountain on one of those trucks. The slabs are about 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide and solid. Kaitlyn and I managed to climb up a couple for the pictures. Then Bill and I managed to heave a few small scrap pieces of marble into the car… for better souvenirs. Don’t know what we’ll do with them, but they’re cool.

Our next afternoon trip away from the pool was to Pisa. Kaitlyn wanted to see the tower because she’s seen a picture of Scooby Doo in front of a cartoon version of it. Or maybe it was Mickey Mouse. Either way, she was excited. She really liked the “knock down tower,” as she calls it. We stood and took the required pictures pretending to hold up the tower. I hope Bill got a picture of the row of people all looking like idiots standing there with their arms in the air. Kaitlyn didn’t quite get how to pose to make the picture look right, so I’m sure she looks merely like one of those people whose arms are in the air for no apparent reason. And she was a little disappointed that she couldn’t go inside… no one under 8 allowed. But I was relieved. Last thing I felt like doing was climbing I don’t know how many steps inside a leaning tower in the 90 degree heat. We went inside a couple of the other buildings in the same piazza. I’d worn a tank top… which I nearly never do… and was forced to cover up with a crazy paper gown thing in the cathedral. It had a funny smell and made me hotter than I’d imagined paper could do so I was really glad when we escaped that. I had a card with a walking tour “away from the tower”… but it was so hot. And Kaitlyn gets tired of walking rather quickly. So we rented a surrey and biked around town. Pisa’s actually fairly pretty when you get away from the row of vendors hocking leaning tower statues, fountains and shot glasses. We got a little lost, but only a little. It was really a lot of fun, even in the heat. Although maybe the heat did get to Kaitlyn. She picked out a little knock down tower so her dollies could see it. She chose one that’s purple with green glitter. On our way back to the hotel, we spotted a sign for a Chinese restaurant and figured it had to be better than yet another pizza… so we went. It was delicious. The best steamed dumplings we’ve had in ages. And they spoke English. And it was not expensive. It cost less than our lunch of pizza at the beach. So we went back our last night before coming home. They remembered us and gave Kaitlyn a gift: a small fan which she thinks makes her look just like Mulan. (She wrote on her arm in marker to complete the look.)

Our final mini-road trip was to Lucca. It hadn’t been in our original plan. But everyone under the sun (literally… at the pool) told us to go. So we checked the gps, it was only a half hour away, so we went. We rented bikes and rode along the old wall that surrounds the city. We even managed to rent a little tandem bike for Kaitlyn so she could pedal and she just laughed and whooped and had a great time doing that. I found a place selling Tuscan pottery that was actually reasonably priced, so I had a great time. Although getting it from the shop to the bike store on the bike was a bit of a challenge. Kaitlyn’s souvenir is a bunch of plastic dinosaurs… it may not be Tuscan but it was good entertainment while waiting for our meal to be served at dinner. I’d taken along my tour book on Italy with kids and we chose a restaurant from their list. It was very good. And it wasn’t pizza or spaghetti. Bill had steak. I had veal. Kaitlyn had tortellini. (We couldn’t have an entirely pasta-free meal in Italy.)

Florence is only an hour from the shore, but we decided to spend our last two days sitting on our (rented) beach chairs and enjoying the sun. We can always go back. Kaitlyn has already asked us several times if we can. Maybe we will…

Air Conditioning. When it’s 36 Celsius is important. No… vital. (My car tells me it was 36. Google tells me that’s just shy of 97 degrees Fahrenheit.)

That was the temperature at 5:30 this evening when Kaitlyn and I went shopping for her new Barbie (which she earned by swimming underwater again today in her lesson). We went to King Jouet… France’s answer to Toys R Us. It isn’t as big as a Toys R Us. And it isn’t as cool. I mean… there’s no air conditioning. No fans. No windows to be opened. No air circulation of any kind. I had sweat dripping down my back just from standing there looking at every Barbie and every other doll in the place. And there aren’t really that many.

It was so hot, I started to get physically sick. I finally had to tell Kaitlyn she HAD to stop examining every item in the store, we were getting in line to check out (at the one cash register) and getting the heck out of that store. Stepping outside into the 36 degree heat was actually a relief.

I’m sorry. I just don’t get it.

Kaitlyn really surprised me at her swimming lesson today. The teacher told us that she has to put her face in the water to progress. Which she does when she jumps in, and doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening. We’ve been practicing in the bathtub. This morning I even offered up a bribe… put your face in the water like the teacher asks and I’ll buy a new Barbie for our upcoming vacation.

We got to the pool a few minutes ahead of the lesson. Her friend was already there, already in the pool, and already swimming under water! I was stunned.

The lesson started and Kaitlyn refused to put her face in the water. The teacher told her she was done… no more lesson today or any day until she can do it. He took her friend into the big pool and left her with me. Crying.

I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. Her friend can do it; so can she! I told her that she could try or she could go home, but standing in the pool crying was not on the list of options. She decided to stop crying and try harder.

First, she’d put her head under water but be looking up at the sky. The teacher stopped by and told her this isn’t flying lessons… it’s swimming lessons and that means look down in the water.

After a while, she figured out to put her feet out behind her and sort of wiggle and she’d swim. She started jumping up and going under water doing the splits. She started swimming in-between my legs. She had gone from chicken to fish in under an hour.

She has another lesson tomorrow. I told the teacher before she left that I’m bringing her; he agreed she’d made a lot of progress. (He said he thought it silly for a parent to pay for a lesson when the child isn’t learning anything new.) On vera… on vera. *

(*we’ll see… we’ll see)

Now I get it.

Kaitlyn and I spent the day yesterday driving to then through a slice of Provence. We’d gone with a friend and her 2 year old to see the lavender fields. The day was long. Very long. I fell asleep thinking of Provence. I woke up thinking of Provence. I slept so soundly in between; I don’t know if it was because 12+ hours in a car is tiring (I wasn’t even the driver) or if the lingering scent of the lavender helped me doze.

Whatever the case, I came home understanding why Peter Mayle moved to Provence then wrote “A Year in Provence.” We drove through the area where he lives. Or lived when he wrote the book, I don’t know his current whereabouts. The sky was bluer than I’d seen it anywhere but North Carolina. The hills were gentle and rolling yet rocky at the same time. We drove insane winding roads on which you’d turn a corner and…. voila… there was a giant patch of purple blanketing the ground. Grand stone houses with the trademark purple shutters dotted the landscape. And the towns looked like they just grew up out of the cliffs.

Getting to Provence wasn’t easy. We went on a Monday, thinking that even though we went in the midst of tourist season, the traffic on the autoroute wouldn’t be too horrible. We didn’t count on an accident. And, I later found out, that when there’s an accident the rescue crews shut down the highway so they can get it all cleaned up… to prevent another accident. So we sat for about 45 minutes. Sitting in a hot car not moving is a real thrill for two little girls.

Once traffic started moving, we decided to stop at the next rest area touting bathrooms and have our picnic. I’m not good at the whole picnic thing. First: you have to pack something you’ll want to eat later, which means it has to hold up to being in a cooler for a few hours. Second: you have to find a table which will probably be dirty. Third: you are outside, so there are bugs. I did much better than usual and had a lunch worth eating, at a table, covered with the beach towel I’d brought in case we had to sit on the ground. It was even in the shade, so it wasn’t unbearably hot; I’d go so far as to call it pleasant. The girls wanted to play for a while before getting back in the car, but some genius decided to put the metal slide in the middle of the grassy area where not one speck of shade could reach it. And that was the only play equipment around.

We lured them into the car with the promise that the flowers weren’t too far away… only an hour to go to get to the lavender museum. I think Kaitlyn liked it, but she spent about as much time looking at the displays as she does any. Which is approximately .0000001 second per display. She did like the one where you sniffed the difference between lavande… what the Provencial French claims is the only “real” lavender because it only grows there… and the kind that grows just anywhere. Pretty much the displays were just different kinds of contraptions used to get the essential oils out of the flowers. Kaitlyn mostly enjoyed the gift shop. I managed to convince her that she didn’t need the 18 Euro bottle of essential oil. And I convinced her we didn’t need to buy the bundle of dried lavande, when we have a giant lavande bush in our yard (yes, the real kind) and that we can go out some time when the bees aren’t all over it (I suppose that would be at night) and snip off a bunch to dry. She ended up with some lavande spray that I convinced her is perfume. She also bought soap, which I think she only wanted because it’s purple. I figure if it gets her to wash, it’s worth it. She can sit in the tub for an hour playing and not think to actually use soap to get clean.

From the museum, we headed out along what some website dedicated to lavender said would be a good lavender route. It took a little while, but when we finally got to the area with all the lavender, it was worth it. We found one spot where we could park at the end of someone’s driveway, and tromp through their lavender for pictures. Unfortunately, by that time Kaitlyn was sound asleep in the car. She did wake up a little later just as we were coming to an overlook from which you could see the entire valley below sprinkled with the purple blankets of lavender.

Our last stop was a little town with its own spectacular view of the fields. We ate dinner in a bar… because the only choice was the bar for sandwiches or an overpriced fancy restaurant. The bar did include the bonus of having a cat that wandered around, hopping up on barstools or customers’ laps. The cafe with the tables that included a view of the fields didn’t serve food after 3pm. Naturally. That was where we wanted to sit… and enjoy the view of the fields and be able to watch an older couple play petanque in the dirt nearby.

We did learn one very important lesson. You may want to check the route your GPS has planned. On the way home it took us only along winding, narrow back roads through the mountains. It got a little scary. And took a really long time.

We left the house around 9:30 in the morning. Kaitlyn and I got back home around 11:45 at night. It was a long day. But now I’m converted to a Provence lover. I want to go back. Soon. And often.