she's gone and done it

It’s July, and we’ve lived in Paris for almost a year now. When we arrived last September, the crowds of tourist were starting to thin; now the first flush of lost-looking people in matching tee-shirts and sneakers – or backpacker gear and dirty Birkenstocks – is starting to make its way along the Champs-Elysees. I’ve given about eight sets of directions to the Arc de Triomphe, but so far it hasn’t really affected our lives much. Being here certainly has, though I struggle to say exactly how. It still seems like a ridiculously good stroke of fortune that we get to live here at all, that we aren’t tourists ourselves – who gets to run away to Paris when they’re boring and old and have a dog and a toddler? And yet I can’t overemphasize the sheer mundanity of most days, where the most challenging cross-cultural thing that happens to me is figuring out how to say “bloody diarrhea” in French before I go to the vet.

Since we got here, G. has learned to walk and talk (well, sort of), and I’ve done a pretty good job of documenting all that on a family website for the grandparents and forbearing friends. But I’ve done a pretty terrible job of documenting anything else. Why not? Well, I didn’t fall in love with a Frenchman, I haven’t launched on a beautiful journey of self-discovery, I haven’t learned to cook, and I’m not (thank god) renovating a crumbling but charming farmhouse in a picturesque part of France. Still, some folks have been kind enough to ask what I/we have been doing in the interim, perhaps on a blog, so I’m starting this one (a bit more anonymous than the pictorial blog, to protect the guilty). Here goes. What else is an overeducated, underemployed, tired mother of a walking id to do?

Image is a cover shot of "French for Dummies" French edition, Editions Générales First, 2001.