What we did on a Friday

A fun, full day...

While Eric wrote in the morning, I got the kids dressed and ready, hung out my daily load of laundry and took down yesterday's, vacuumed, and washed dishes.

Yesterday I bought a Bosch kitchen machine (blender/food processor/mixer/citrus juicer), a waffle/panini/croque monsieur iron, and a steam cooker on Leboncoin. So we had to try them out! For breakfast we made waffles.

We bought scooters for the 3 oldest kids, so now they are terrorizing the streets and sidewalks of Nice. We make quite the procession with 3 scooters, 1 stroller, 4 blonde, blue-eyed children, and of course one mama keeping them all in line.

Our first stop this morning was the post office to mail our visa paperwork to the local immigration office. We walked past the fruit & vegetable marché at the Cours Saléya, then bought groceries at Marché U. It's a discount store-brand grocery store similar to Aldi, Dia, Lidl, and Ed. We also bought a baguette from one of our favorite bakeries. I let Ivy hold it, and she had gnawed off the top by time we got home.

Lunch was croque monsieurs (grilled cheese sandwiches, basically) and ripe pears and mini ice cream bars.

I put Ivy down for a nap and took the tram to the north end of Nice to buy a miter saw via Leboncoin. I enjoyed the time by myself. I listened to podcasts and enjoyed walking without having to keep an eye on little ones.

When I got back, I started sautéeing lardons (similar to bacon, only less fatty), leeks, and onions. Dinner was salad, quiche lorraine, quiche aux poireaux, and tarte aux prunes. Eric took Zari and Dio fishing for most of the evening, so Inga and Ivy ate dinner with me.

The three of us ended the evening by going to a playground on the Promenade du Paillon, a large green space created in the last 2 years and only about 2 minutes' walk from our house. Ivy is crazy; she will climb up things that even Dio would hesitate to try, and I have to be ready to catch her when she falls.

(These pictures at the Promenade du Paillon, also called the coulé verte, are from a week or two ago)

When Eric and crew got home from fishing (no luck, but lots of nibbles), Dio refused to touch anything I'd made. This is a regular occurrence at dinner time, and it doesn't really matter what it is. He just wants to refuse. He finally relented after he'd been put to bed, because our rule was he had to eat some dinner if he wanted to go fishing tomorrow morning. Life would be so much easier if he'd just eat dinner right away! But no, he has to complain and moan about it. Then eventually he'll eat it. And often he'll say, at the end of the process, "oh, I actually like this!"