Our First Weeks in France

These last two weeks in France have been great.  We had a bit of a rockey start with the apartment having an ant problem and not being able to go to the store for necessities until Tuesday evening (we arrived on Sunday afternoon, but everything in France is closed on Sundays and Monday was a holiday).  But now the bugs are gone and we have food in the cupboards and books and toys for Addelyn, so everyone is happy :-)

Addelyn has a couple of new French books - this is one of her favorites - a matching numbers book.

Jake and I got e-book readers before we left - Addelyn likes to play with mine.  Here, she's telling me that the lady in the picture is smiling.

Addelyn likes to play with belts...oh, the things they decide are fun...

Addelyn has been working hard on potty-training.  We started just after her first birthday.  I bought her a potty-seat just so she could get used to the idea, and she's picked it up very quickly.  I didn't want her to forget while we were in France, so we got another potty seat here and she's been going usually twice per day.  She's even told me she's needed to go twice.  The second time was so cute...she signed "peepee", then she signed "come here" and lead me to the bathroom where her potty chair is.

 On our first weekend in France, we went to the African Safari zoo here in Toulouse.  We all had a great time.  The zoo is set up so that you drive through a sanctuary area where the animals (non-preditors, of course) are just walking around freely.  I saw a rhinoceros for the first time...they're HUGE!  Then you park and go through the walking portion where all of the animals are in cages as normal.

Addelyn in her new FOWARD FACING car seat on the way to the zoo

The first animal of the walking portion:  the emus were very curious

Addelyn got to pet a very friendly mini-horse

I feel like I should make some reference to the Black Swan movie here, but I'm not feeling clever enough.

Addelyn and I in front of the macaws.  She didn't care for them as much as the waterfall beneath them.

 We even saw a sea lion show.  Addelyn sat very patiently as we waited for it to start, and then her favorite part was right at the beginning:  all three sea lions belly-flopped into the water making a big SPLASH.  She thought it was hilarious!  We didn't have the camera out at the very beginning, but here's her a couple of minutes later still laughing and talking about the splash:

We've made some friends already which helps pass the days and really helped when we first got here and didn't know where anything was.  There's a nice family from Dublin, Ireland just down the sidewalk from us who have 3 and 5-year-old girls.  The girls adore Addelyn, and Addelyn likes to watch the "big kids" play.  Also, a French family moved in next door a couple of days ago.  They have three kids:  a set of 5-year-old twins (one boy, one girl), and a little boy a couple of months younger than Addelyn.  So we've gotten the 6 of the kids together to play a couple of times.  Even with the language barrier, they have a great time.  Just last night I took Addelyn outside to play and the twins and the Irish girls were outside playing already, so Addelyn and I were of course joined by all of them plus another French boy from the other side of our apartment (it seems like I always attract the neighbor kids whenever I go outside...even back home Addelyn and I can't play outside without attracting at least 3 kids from 3 different families - do parents play with their kids anymore?  because these kids all seem so starved for attention).  I swear the man that walked by and saw me with 5 kids under 5 and a 9-year-old with no other parents in sight thought they were all mine and thought I was insane.

Here's a couple more pictures I've liked of Addelyn the last couple of weeks.  She's looking more and more like a toddler and less and less like a baby every day.

we spend a LOT of time reading these days

One last funny story:  before the French family with the three kids moved in next door, there was another French family with a probably 12-year-old girl and a baby boy living there.  I didn't talk much with them until the day they left, when the little girl decided to steal Addelyn's ball from our yard.  I was doing laundry, so I had to walk back and forth between our apartment and the laundry facility all morning.  At my first pass of the neighbors' apartment, I heard the girl bouncing a ball, looked over, and saw that it was exactly like the one Addelyn has.  I gave her the benefit of the doubt and just thought it was a coincidence.  When she saw that I saw her, she quickly picked up the ball and turned around to hide it from my view.  Okay.  Probably not a coincidence.  So I put the laundry in and walked back.  As I passed by her a second time, the same thing happened:  she's bouncing the ball, sees me, then quickly picks it up and hides it from me.  I got back to our apartment and confirmed that the ball was, indeed, missing from our yard.  The next time I went to do the laundry 45 minutes later it was the same story, except instead of just turning around and hiding it, she picked it up and ran into her house :-)  Well, I would ordinarly have let it go.  Addelyn wasn't using it and I'm sure it would've made its way back to our yard when she was done playing with it...but given that she was being so secretive about it and that I saw that the family was preparing to move out (suitcases etc...on their front yard) I decided to go confront her.  When I walked up to her the next time, I walked strait for her.  For a second, she turned to run, but you could just see the decision in her face when she realized that I was walking strait toward her - she quickly went from "oh no, run away and hide the ball" to "ohhhhh, is this YOUR ball?".  Only she didn't speak English.  I'm so glad I've been learning French.  I was able to understand her and answer in French (I decided to play along with her innocent scheme).  We ended up playing with the ball together and talking for a while, and then she brought out a delicious pastry for Addelyn, so all ended well.  

Stats:

Age: 13.5 months

Weight: 23 ish lbs

Length:  31ish inches

Drinks: about 2-3 8-ounce sippys of milk per day (all of which is regular whole-milk) with meals and a couple of drinks of milk before bed every night

Eats: yogurt, and some cereal for breakfast; leftovers for lunch (spagetti, sandwiches etc...); and a fruit pouch, and whatever we're having for dinner. 

Sleeps: 11-12 hours/night - 10pm-10am (most nights...sometimes she still wakes up in the middle)

Naps: 2-3 hours per day - her nap is 4 or 5 hours after she wakes up for the day 

Awake for:4-7 hours at a time during the day.

Clothes size:  mostly 18 month, some 24 month

Motor skills: spinning in circles, trying to jump (she rarely gets both feet off the ground at the same time), going up stairs well, going down stairs very slowly and with supervision, running, climbling the ladder to her slide, getting down from high places by herself

other skills:Does hand actions to songs like itsy bitsy spider and little bunny foo foo, starting to pretend-play
words:  mama, up, dada, nana (banana), "Aye" (light), "Bah" (ball), and "Ba (bath)" "ah duh" (all done), "buh buh" (puppy), hi, bye-bye, and NO-NO (is her newest), and I'm not even going to try to list all of the words that she tries to say, but doesn't say regularly.  She's getting much  more clear with her talking now.  I think it won't be long before she explodes in her speech.

signs:  around 50-60 that she does herself.  And she makes up signs for words she doesn't know.