La rentrée is the word the French use for ‘back to school’. But it’s a whole big thing, it’s not just for kids, it’s like everyone has taken August off and everyone is back to school on the first of September.
Last time I blogged I was having a semi breakdown due to not having my own space for 2 months, but we finally moved back into our airbnb a few days before school started. It was weird being excited to have our own space and to be able to get to more of our stuff, but to still feel this is temporary. We were hoping to move to a proper rental house with a nice garden which is available from October but the landlord is terrible at getting back to us, so it seems unlikely this will happen now. We’ve sent him one final message saying we’re assuming it’s a no. Its a bit annoying because we were planning on moving all our furniture out of storage to settle here for a bit longer, and our airbnb landlord agreed to move out his furniture. But because we wanted to be in with a chance of the better house we didn’t and so we’ve payed for another month of storage. I don’t want to be unfair to the airbnb landlord though, so I think we just need to commit to this house now. If we can we will look info buying here, but I need to see if I can make it to at least 100 days in a row of wanting to be in the country before we think about that.
The moving back in day was weird. I was waiting for a call to say the holiday people had left the house, and we were free to move back in when I got a call from the primary school to say Eric was not booked in to have school lunches this term and was that right? This doesn’t just mean you might need to send your kid with a packed lunch (your not allowed to do that) it means you have to pick your kid up at lunch time and look after them for nearly 2 hours. They’ve got a new system and with everything that was going on this admin got missed. The school said it’s too late for him to get hot food but they can look after him and give him sandwiches for the first week. He told me he has to sit in a separate room with eight other kids whose parents are bad at admin to eat his lunch. And next week (and I really don’t know why) he can’t even do that, he has to come home. But from the 3rd week he can finally eat hot food with his friends again.
When we got back to the house in the early afternoon, I was desperate to catch up on sleep, so I was searching everywhere for sheets whereas the boys were desperate for their Pokémon cards. I knew I would not be getting any sleep until I found the Pokémon cards, so I started moving the first boxes I could get to. It was quite exciting, not everything was accessible so each time you took a new bit of furniture out it unlocked a new layer of boxes, until we finally found the box labelled Pokémon. They were like drug addicts fresh out of rehab going out for a big hit of crack, which is exactly what you want for your kids when you’re trying to take a nap.
We gradually started getting our house back to what it was before, swapping out a big double bed for our two desks to make an office room, and getting all our old clothes out. I asked Eric to put some books on a bookshelf for me and he put them all the wrong way round with the spines on the inside and the pages facing out. He also recently complained that there was only room for 3 socks on a radiator because he had put them long ways not hanging down. And he thought that the purpose of ironing clothes was to make them warm. I don’t feel very qualified in anything but hanging out with him does make me feel better about the fact I do at least know some basic life skills.
If you’ve ever read the book ‘squash and a squeeze’, or you know the fable of the woman with a tiny house, who took in all her animals and then after they were gone her house felt big, it’s a real thing. This house annoys me, but it felt so nice to have our own space and to have an actual desk and more than two pairs of trousers. The next day I had two English lessons to teach, but the boys were occupied all day making “the Lego museum” basically filling all the empty storage in their room with a Lego display. If your kids are bored can I recommend hiding 90% of their toys for 2 months and then bringing them out. In fact if you want to do Christmas on a budget start hiding their stuff now and they’ll have a great Christmas Day when you reveal it all again.
We got a long list of things we need for the boys school. In France you have to buy everything, exercise books a lot of folders glue, paint, even tissues. They are very specific about what you need and it’s complicated. In English we just call a lot of different things “a folder” but in french there are several different words for the different specific kinds of folders. It’s expensive but if you are on a low or average income you get a really generous chunk of money to buy all the stuff with. And you get money towards extra curricular activities to do outside of school.
On a Monday Percy is in school from 8:30 - 5pm, and that just his normal school hours not the hours for an extra club. If he wanted to continue with basketball, which he has done for the past 3 years, he would have to stay after school until 6:30 on a Monday. But that seems mental so he’s not going to carry on with it, he’s chosen to do “plein air” instead, which is using an outdoor climbing wall and mounting biking. In primary school he got Wednesdays off, but in secondary school he has to go to school on a Wednesday morning and then the afternoon is optional, but that’s when he’s chosen to stay and do plein air.
The first day of school it was only the year 7s in, and we were told we could bring them or they can go on the bus, and he was happy to go on the bus. It turns out there was only one other kid on the bus with him! Every other parent had taken them in to make sure they were ok. He was fine though, he’s loving it so far. He has 3 hours of English lessons a week and his teacher has already got him to pronounce words for the class, because he can do it better than her. He also does 3 hours of Spanish. They do take languages more seriously in French schools than they do in England. They do quite a lot of sport, too. He’s doing swimming on Monday and he’s joining lunch time ping-pong club. They don’t do so much of the creative subjects though, only one hour of art and one hour of music a week, and they dont do any technology subjects like food, graphics, textiles, woodwork, etc. On my first week of cooking we made a milkshake, we had to bring in milk and powdered flavouring and then somehow spent an hour mixing them together and evaluating our drink. He’s really missing out there.
This weekend we went to watch the sunrise. I think that’s going to be a new family tradition for the first weekend in September, because its not to early (7:20 am) for the actual sunrise but its nice to get there a bit earlier to see it getting light. If you’ve never seen a sunrise it’s like one of the best gradient fill effects from Word Art has been projected on a big screen for you to enjoy.
I guess when God started writing his document “creating a new world” he got inspired. We took hot chocolate and brioche to eat during the main big show and then we went for a little walk round the headland and came back for some swimming.
Thanks for reading.
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