Where does the time go?!?! I know we all feel this way. Sometimes, you just don’t have time to sit down and reflect on things – much less edit pictures and write – but if you can’t find that time in the middle of winter, I don’t know when you can! So this is the first of two retroactive posts (next one will be Vienna). Sorry for writing out of order, and enjoy!
Rowan & Cara are on almost a year-round school schedule (they only get ~7 weeks off for summer), which means we have more long weekends and longer breaks for spring & Christmas. I love it! We used one such 4-day weekend last fall to go to Paris.
I want to pause here and say that the more we travel over here, the more we realize that most European travel guidebooks are written for adults traveling without kids – people who want to have classy dining experiences; who enjoy a steady stream of history, art, and architecture; who are in charge of only their own bathroom and food needs; and who have only their own moods and whims to navigate. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But honestly sort of the opposite of where we are at this point. Sure, we talk our kids into visiting plenty of churches, and we convince them it’s fun to never know the language, and we make them try new foods that look gross. But at the end of the day, our kids just want to have a good time. This means we sprinkle in some McDonald’s any time we go to a new place in Europe. It means we spend time at playgrounds and try not to think about the major sites we might be missing. In Paris, it meant this:
But before I get to Disneyland Paris, let me just say that we enjoyed the real Paris, too. Our apartment was right in the Latin Quarter with a view of Notre-Dame, up four flights of stairs and one block from a daily market:
I’m lucky to have Matt in my life for many reasons, but one great thing about Matt is that he’s an adventurous eater, and he gets the kids to try all sorts of foods while I stick to bread & butter. Here’s some raw salmon from the daily market that everyone is going to town on:
We also got to take the kids to two of my favorite Parisian sites – the Monet museum (l’Orangerie) and the Conciergerie (old French prison):
We had a bit of a hiccup with the Eiffel Tower – apparently it’s gotten more popular in the last 10 years, ha – you have to book tickets months in advance! We hadn’t done that. Nothing like having your whole family stare at you at 8:00pm on a Thursday night as you break the news that no-one will be going to the top of the Eiffel Tower tonight, sigh. Not to be discouraged, we were able to stand in line for an hour in the freezing rain first thing Sunday morning and get standby tickets – I wouldn’t recommend it, but it was worth it for the smiles and the views (and let’s be honest, everyone wanted to say they had done it!!):
Of course, hot cocoas 
We also had some really good food & wine, of course:
And Disney really was a blast. The rides were great, most of the songs and words were in French which made for a fun experience, and the kids loved the feeling of being the ones in the know about where we were, for a change.
They are turning into great travelers – at this point, Cara’s usually the one keeping us on time for trains & planes, while Rowan likes to navigate us through whatever train station or airport we’re in.
Paris was a great time, especially once we remembered that traveling with kids to Paris looks a lot different from traveling with a spouse or friend – we may not have done as many must-see sites as we’d planned, but we had a ton of laughs and made some great memories!
Newmans in a New Land 