A week in the life of Us.

A big week in our household this week. School has entered our lives. We are now one of the gazillions of families who juggle the school drop-offs and pickups, exchange pleasantries and sidelong glances with other parents waiting at the school gate and worry about school marks and nits.

Or at least, I am. I get out of bed now at 6am (okay, maybe closer to 6.15am) when Rob leaves for work (he does leave at 6am, or even earlier), so I can shower and get dressed by 6.45 when I get the kids out of bed. All out the door by 7.40am so I can get a decent wheelchair-unloadable carpark at 7.45 when the hoardes arrive for school.

I wrote on Monday about the momentous first deliverance of our son to our local school. And I'm happy to report that, apart from having to work through toiletting challenges, which I believe are now resolved, we've had a pretty uneventful, and in my mind successful, first week.

Yay!
 

Emmanuelle with the kids

We've still to overcome the niggling issue of language, but being only 4 and with the lovely young elastic brain inside Jack's lovely head, and our French tutor, I'm sure we can make great inroads in the next few months. Jack's starting school has also restarted my own bumpy journey into learning French (I really recommend these free podcasts! My saviour!).

Loading and unloading is about a 10 minute event. On Monday Jack will go to school with wheelchair, walker, toiletseat, and possibly a stool. Oh, and schoolbag. We took his customised deskchair last Monday to leave there for the term.

Emmanuelle arrives at 8am after dropping her own girls at school in nearby Koné, and Nellie and I are a girls club for a few hours until 11.30am when we pick up Jack and go home. Jack is a morning-only school kid for the next few months - hopefully he can go fulltime by the end of the year, tiredness and impending surgery-recovery notwithstanding.

 

 

Also this week I started my France has coconuts Facebook page. This gives me a better chance to post little things, especially photos, without doing a whole blog post. With the interwebby thing a bit tenous for me here, what with just me and my dongle, posting can be R.E.A.L.L.Y.S.L.O.W. so actually FB is my friend in this department. I'd love it if you share with anyone you think might be interested as it is a ''blog page not a 'friend page' as such (not that I don't adore my FB friends!).

Also this week we:

• picked tomatoes from the garden
• found a scary red centipede on Jack's bed
• had a frog jump on rob's head as he slept
• had a bulldozer-scoop-load of composted pigpoo delivered for the garden
• started a post school-dropoff ritual of Nellie giving our local boulanger the 100f for our baguette (he thinks she is trés mignonne and riotously funny)
• have discovered previously unknown wheelchair muscles
• made a quick visit to the beach

Bon weekend!