will WE play in Peoria?

After the sign up, we went to the sporting goods store to buy Kaitlyn ballet slippers. They aren’t required for the class, but you’d better believe that if Kaitlyn is going to ballet class she is going to want to look like a ballerina.

Before we made it all the way to the ballet area, we stopped at the roller skates. All the ones that come with the shoe part attached are too big for Kaitlyn. So we bought the kind that strap on her shoes. She also insisted on getting the set of pink knee, elbow and wrist pads. We figure her bike helmet should work for her head.

In the ballet area, we got new pink shoes, a pink ballet outfit and pink tights. She should at least look the part when she starts her class.

I have had today marked on my calendar for weeks… ever since I got the town bulletin that said today is the Forum des Associations. This is the ONE day of the year when you can go sign up for clubs and activities. If you want, you can drive from town to town to sign up for different things in different places.

I made Bill and Kaitlyn go with me. It probably would have been better to go alone, but the idea of facing something new and in French just was more than I could face on my own today. Although when we got there, we ran into five families we knew; I’m sure I could have gotten some help if I needed.

The real mission was to make sure that Kaitlyn has something to do on Wednesdays. I’d forgotten until this week how hard that day off in the middle of the week can be. And I only imagine it will get worse as the weather does.

Inside was pretty much what you’d imagine. A lot of folding tables set up with signs for each club or class along with a smiling person willing to take your money. Only everything was in French. And everyone else there seemed to know just what they were doing. It must be possible somewhere to figure out who has what classes when… because different people mentioned very specific plans before today. (you know, like “little Jimmy will take soccer at 4 in town A while Sallie is in ballet over in town B, then a different day both will be in swimming in town C.) How do people find this out? I don’t know. Maybe after being here another year I’ll have figured that part out, too.

One of the other moms we ran into pointed us toward the table with ballet lessons. I stood and waited in the non-line (I’d somehow forgotten that there wouldn’t be lines, just mobs of people, since the French don’t believe in queues.) The signs didn’t say anything about ballet. But while I waited, Bill cruised the room and reported that I was standing at the only table with kids dancing.

Finally, it was my turn. Or close enough. I told the man I wanted a ballet class for my 4 year old. He just nodded his head yes. Ok. So I asked if there was something on Wednesday. Yes. 9:30am. Perfect. No lounging around the house in our pajamas. He pushed a piece of paper at me, which I filled out. I even managed to write the check, although I did double check the spelling of the word for fifty with Bill.

Just like that, Kaitlyn is signed up for ballet. Wednesdays. It starts in a week and a half. And I think it lasts until June. There’s even a big recital at the end of it all. I hope she likes it. Turns out, I signed her up for the same class as her friend. That should help.

Then I cruised the room to look for an activity to enroll myself in. I was hoping for something artsy… scrapbooking or painting… something I’ve never had the chance to do before. (well, since junior high) I also checked out the table for the Uriage Tennis Club. (Uriage is our town) The adult classes are on Saturday mornings. The art classes are on Saturday or in the evenings. I’m trying to fill up my weekdays! I guess I’ll just keep on doing laundry, grocery shopping, fumbling through my scrapbook project and otherwise managing to pass the time.

I was surprised that Bill didn’t enroll with the remote control group. Thank goodness he didn’t. He has skiing here. Once it starts to snow, that will take up plenty of his time!

When I checked the headlines online this morning, I saw that Luciano Pavarotti died… another victim of pancreatic cancer. Although his was operable. And he lived more than a year after his diagnosis… an unbearably low number of patients do. (It’s a statistic that makes you shudder: 15%. And that’s number doesn’t reveal anything about what that year is like and whether or not it’s worth beating the odds.)

Pancreatic cancer is simply not a cancer that most people know much about. I knew nothing about it until Mom was diagnosed. And then I got too scared to do much research because I just didn’t want to know.

I’d like to think that Pavarotti’s death will at least bring about some discussion of the cancer. But it won’t. When you read a story about a celebrity diagnosed with breast cancer, it is filled with statistics and information about the disease. What I’ve read about Pavarotti was a dull recap of every note he’d ever sung.

Maybe Pavarotti’s cancer won’t change the big picture. But it did something to me. It made me stop and really think about what the disease took from me and from Kaitlyn. And it reminded me of why I quit working to spend time with Kaitlyn. Yes, I was miserable at work. But part of that was because my mom’s death made me realize how precious our time is and how much more of mine I wanted to spend with my daughter. It sounds goofy and cliché but it’s my story.

It’s a reminder I needed after a difficult day of struggling with one strong-willed four year old yesterday. So today when I picked her up for lunch, it was with a better outlook. Lunch together isn’t taking time out of my day or setting ourselves up for a struggle over the tv, or going back to school. It’s a blessing I’ve been handed… a chance most Moms don’t get to spend more time with my beautiful little girl. She wanted to have a picnic on the floor, using the pillows off the couch for tables. Sure! She wanted to give her stuffed Pooh Bear his own juice box. Go ahead. She helped me make our pizza. We played with her dolls. We ate on the floor. (with a blanket acting as a table cloth) I drew a pretend pizza slice on Pooh’s paper plate. Did Kaitlyn ask to watch tv? You bet she did. Did she fuss about going back to school? Yea, she did that, too. But it didn’t define our time together. Playing and enjoying each other’s company did.

I don’t know how many years I will get to spend with Kaitlyn. Twenty? Forty? Sixty? Maybe. Maybe less. Maybe more. It’s not a question we get to know the answer to. So I’m not going to waste my time. That doesn’t mean I won’t spend some of that time snuggling with her on the couch watching tv. That’s some of the time I spent with my mom that I remember most. It was special to me. And I think to her, too.

Pancreatic cancer is a horrible, horrible killer. I’m not a doctor, I can’t even think about blood without getting grossed out. I’m not going to find a cure. But I am going to find some way to fight it and to help others fight it. I am not going to let my loss be for nothing. I may never even realize the good that will come out of it. But I know this… good will. It has to.

I know that learning French is not a race. But I cannot help but desperately want to be ahead of Bill. And I want to be ahead naturally… without having to pour over books and study for hours on end.

Today my French lesson was with a teacher I’ve only had a couple of times before… and who is frequently Bill’s teacher. At the end of the lesson he told me that he thinks that the week of “intensive” lessons that Bill had this summer helped him to catch up with me and that now we are on the same level.

I should be happy for him that in one week he accomplished so much. And I am. But I’m annoyed that I didn’t accomplish more. While Bill was increasing his lessons over the summer, I had to decrease mine. It just is too hard to have lessons at the house with Kaitlyn around. It’s a little better than it was but it’s still not ideal. So all summer I only had one lesson. Maybe a lesson and a half… because for the 45 minutes that she had a lesson I had one too. But that is no match for a week of three hour intensive lessons.

I suppose I could ask to have a week of “intensive” lessons. But I don’t want that. I just want to wake up one day and be able to understand what they’re saying on the radio, be able to complete a sentence while speaking to Kaitlyn’s teacher, be able to answer the cashier if she asks me anything other than the one question I have come to expect. (“Avez vous un carte fidelite?” Do you have a frequent shopper card?)

I guess right now I should go do my homework.

Because Bill is, well, Bill, he had an extra computer taking up space in our little office. It was hard to even notice amid the plastic boxes of wires and parts.

That extra computer now has a purpose. To connect Kaitlyn with playhousedisney.com, noggin.com, sesamestreet.com, sproutonline.com…. All her favorite sites to play games. She even got to go to the store yesterday and pick out a new, small mouse. It’s pink, of course.

At some point since we moved here, Bill bought a copy of Windows Vista. I don’t remember when or why. But he did. And tonight he decided to load that onto Kaitlyn’s computer. Because he assumed that it would have the option of using it in English. But it doesn’t. (At least not until after he gets it all up and running then he can do something to change it… I stopped listening after he said it was in French)

Good thing that’s on Kaitlyn’s computer. First, she can’t read anyway. Second, she’s bound to pass us in the whole understanding French pretty soon anyway.

So I broke down and booked our weekend at Paris Disney tonight.

Turns out the woman at Carrefour saved us from buying annual passes with a boatload of restrictions… like most of the French school holidays are blacked-out. So then Bill started considering spending a lot more money to get the mac-daddy no-restrictions passes. And we haven’t even been there yet.

I convinced him that the money would be better spent upgrading in one of the Disney hotels. I don’t know if he was totally convinced, but he said it sounded good. So I booked it before he can change his mind. Hey, if we love it, we can always go back. And it will still be cheaper than that pass. How many times are we really going to take the three hour train ride to see Mickey Mouse? There is a heck of a lot more stuff here I’d rather spend my time and money on!

So we went to Carrefour to take care of this whole Disney pass thing. And we left with a bag full of stuff but no passes.

Turns out there are three different kinds of Disney annual passes. And the woman selling them could not tell us the difference between them. She turned her computer screen toward us so we could read the information ourselves, but the French just didn’t make sense to us. Either of us. We think the woman was trying to keep us from making some sort of mistake, which we do appreciate. But now we are still left trying to figure out what we’re going to do.

Maybe we should just pay the bizillion euros it probably costs to stay in the Cinderella suite or something …. and really go nuts.

As a surprise to Kaitlyn, we are considering spending two days at Disneyland Paris. But it seems the only way one can afford the trip is to be independently wealthy.

We’ve struggled to make sense of the website. We’ve read it in English, we’ve read it in French. In English the site quotes prices in pounds, so I switched to French just to get prices in Euros. If you try to say you are from the United States it refuses to quote any stay shorter than three days.

One night in the Disney Hotel right at the park entrance is like 860 Euros. That’s not even for a special room or anything! Even the mid-range hotels on the property is 600 Euros or so. Sure, it includes park admission. But it’s still hard to click on the “confirm” button. I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Bill managed to muddle through the website enough to figure out that it’s far cheaper to buy the annual passport as a resident of France than to buy even two days worth of passes into the park. Especially because right now Kaitlyn’s passport would be free. But good luck figuring out if you qualify for the special deal for residents.

So this morning we gave in and called. Well, I made Bill call because he was the one who figured out the whole annual pass thing. The toll-free number available for people calling from the US was busy. So we wrestled Kaitlyn away from the Slingbox and used our French phone to call the French version of a toll-free number. Here, it is the opposite of toll-free. It’s 15 cents a minute. And that’s not a Disney only thing. The French version of a 1-800 number is that it is an extra charge. I think it’s just to discourage people from bothering to call. It’s easier to enjoy your two hour lunch break if you don’t have pesky work keeping you at your desk.

He found out we should qualify for this special resident year pass. And we can buy them at…. where else…. Carrefour. So now we get to go to my favorite place… the least happy place on earth… Carrefour on Saturday!