Marching into Spring (See what I did there.)

Happy Saturday, and happy last day of March.  Happy Easter weekend, and surely winter is behind us now?  Here's our family record of this very transitional month.

March 1 - March brought sickness to our house.  It was especially scary when James' fever got up to 104, but we made it through, and I am thankful, especially considering how bad the flu has been this year.

March 2 - We thought this was a pretty grand walkway to our first visit to the doctor in Paris.  It was beautiful, but I did long for the comfort of the colorful walls of Tuscaloosa Pediatrics and the familiarity of the Wal-Mart pharmacy, I must say.

March 6 - Ella did some experimenting with watercolor pencils again.  I guess we were too sick to take pictures for a few days!

March 7 - Notre Dame - I escaped the house of sickness for a nice long walk.  Lately whenever I leave the house and walk 10,000 steps (which is often) I walk a hole into my sock.  I need thicker socks.

March 8 - Vegetable Soup and Baguette - K.J. gets a lot of pleasure in walking down to the bakery to buy a baguette at dinnertime.

March 10 - Part of our walk to the library these days

March 11 - There was a delightful break in the weather on our walk home from church.  We walk by Concorde a lot, and it never fails to take my breath away.  Part of this is because we're hemmed in by tall buildings most of the time, and this is the most wide-open space we see on a regular basis!  

March 12 - Sundays are long days out for us, so reading Monday feels like it should be a thing.

March 13 - McDonald's in France serves Evian bottled water.  I laughed yesterday when we were going out for the day and James asked if there was a bottle of Evian he could pack in case he got thirsty.  Cultural adaptations are fun.

March 14 - Meeting a Friend at the Playground

March 15 - Signs of Spring - I like to walk through parks when I can.  We really miss all the green spaces of North Yorkshire!

March 16 - Pretty Window 

March 17 - Ladies Retreat at EIC - It was a wonderful Saturday.

March 18 - First Sunday Meeting with the Core Team at Ternes

March 19 - The Coldest of Days

March 20 - History begets geography. They were coloring in the countries we've read about so far this semester.  (I started to say "term" English style.)

March 21 - Rabbit Faces - Ella doesn't like creepy mannequins, so I had to take a picture of these for her.

March 22 - Playing Monopoly with the Ultimate Gamer

March 23 - Seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time - Notice this masterpiece opposite Mona Lisa that fills up an entire vast wall.  But everyone kind of ignores it for that Mona Lisa selfie.

March 24 - A Field of Hyacinths

March 25 - They're serious about getting rid of those infamous rats.  And guys, I saw one.  Ella and I stopped at a little garden for me to find our Metro tickets, and what I at first mistook for a squirrel turned out to be a rat creeping through the shrubbery.  Gross.

March 26 - "Oh, no...I forgot to put on clothes again!"  K.J.'s captioning of statues continues.

March 27 - Library Day 

March 28 - A Gorgeous Spring Evening

March 30 - Browsing

It wasn't quite every day of the month, but there you have it.  😊

5 Black + White Pictures

I wrote in my last post that it was my last chance to share pictures of Paris in the snow, but I have just five more from Tuileries.  Last month Ella and I bundled up and braved the cold to see Paris in the snow one more time.  The park was closed off from pedestrians so there was a beautiful, undisturbed blanket of white.

There are always a lot of giant crows in this park, and this week we noticed a few with clips around their feet, so that made us wonder if they were kept specifically or at least kept track of there.  I thought in the mist of a snowy day that these crows looked rather creepy perched in the bare trees.

Let's hope that's the last of the snow pictures because spring is squarely here, and Easter is just a week away!  I highly recommend listening to Andrew Peterson's Resurrection Letters:  Prologue this week and go ahead and pre-order Resurrection Letters to start your Easter Sunday.  I don't think you'll regret it.

An Eiffel Tower Snow Day

Aslan is on the move in Paris, as evidenced by 60-degree temperatures over the weekend.  Ella and I even spotted a couple of daffodils blooming outside the church building on Sunday.  It felt like the last opportune moment to share my snowy Paris pictures.  

The sidewalks were slick and slushy when we ventured out in all the layers we could find.  The boys couldn't even wait to get off the sidewalks before starting a snowball fight.

There are all kinds of physical reminders that give a sense of place and really ground you to where you live, but I wasn't very consciously aware of them until we began to prepare to move to England.  In the light of moving, I was very aware of the intense heat on my skin in  Alabama, even in October.  The endless green hills and dry rock walls placed me firmly in North Yorkshire.  The mossy cypress trees, thick-bladed grass crawling with little lizards when we visited family in Florida are no longer hidden in my subconscious but stand out vividly.  When I look up and see the Eiffel Tower, one of the most iconic landmarks in the world, I say inwardly every time, "I'm in Paris."  And I don't think I'll get tired of taking pictures of this recognizable tower from wherever I catch a glimpse of it in the city.  I marveled a little bit at seeing my family playing in the snow underneath it.  It was definitely a surreal moment to freeze in time.

Ella wanted her "Lucy" moment at this snow-covered lamppost.  

I was playing around with Lightroom presets while watching a movie with the kids, and I liked the old-fashioned postcard look of the above picture.

Whoever created this Snow Yoda could have stuck around and charged money for pictures, because there was a line of people having their picture made beside it.  One of my favorite things that always makes me laugh is when there are words that just can't be translated from English.  I heard a mom chattering away to her young daughter in an unidentifiable to me language explaining who this was.  All I heard were sounds my brain can't make sense of and then, "Yoda."  Similarly, I laughed Sunday with the kids as we passed an advertisement for Burger King written completely in French but then, "Bacon-lover."  Maybe that's just the official name of the sandwich, but it also seems like some phrases probably don't translate the same.

We had the slickest walk back to the metro and our apartment.  We were so frozen by this point, and the best part of the day for me was this sweet moment:

And then the teamwork involved getting our groceries home with no bags along the icy pavement.