Places to Go (Vacation) - PARIS (Days 1 & 2) - Dragging Our Kids Through Europe, Part II

As I mentioned on Friday, here are some photos from our Paris trip.

I had hoped everyone would sleep on the overnight flight, but the plane's air conditioning malfunctioned, causing the back of the cabin to become crazy cold. I watched a passenger in front of us put on a jacket, a stocking hat, and finally (around 2 am) gloves, the fuzzy kind. The stewardess kept apologizing, but it made for a long night.





Anyways, when we arrived at our rental apartment, on Rue Montmartre, in the Grand Boulevards neighborhood (click here for the link, I'm completely enamored with airbnb after this trip), we existed in some odd middle-land between exhilaration and exhaustion. So Dan grocery shopped while I tried to convince the kids to nap. After about four hours of failed attempts at sleep, we wandered out and see the city. First stop - the Eiffel Tower (of course), about a 2.5 mile walk.









At first, everything amazed us - the old old buildings, the signs in a different language, the bakeries, the cafes with their black and yellow wicker chairs, etc. So much wonder. I've visited Paris twice before, but this time felt totally different, seeing everything through the kids eyes.



I assumed that once we reached the Eiffel Tower the girls would want to climb to the top (T's afraid of heights), but exhaustion finally set in, so we admired the view from the sidelines and then began the long(ish) walk back home. We hadn't realized that in Paris, dark doesn't set in until 10:30, so we all felt a little bummed that we didn't see the Tower light up for the night.

Oh, well, I assure you, on our first night, we slept. And slept. And slept.



On Day 2, we began the morning by walking to the Louvre, stopping along the way in various super cheesy souvenir shops so the girls could buy their friends a rainbow of mini-Eiffel Towers. T, on the other hand, purchased a super generic pocket watch, which he then proceeded to check every five minutes.










We spent the morning wandering around the Louvre's grounds, hence spotting the carnival that would become the bain of my existence on Day 3 (actually, it was sort of cute for awhile).











In the afternoon, we booked a family friendly private tour of the Louvre through Context Tours and I cannot say enough good things about Isabel, our guide. The Louvre was huge, crowded, and somewhat intimidating, but she managed to make the tour special both for the kids and us - exploring a medieval underground castle (the original Louvre), checking out the Botticelli fresco, watching Mona Lisa's eyes following us throughout the room, and seeing the crown jewels - we learned a lot and had a fantastic time.




Our first cafe crepes in Paris. Yum.



I love that Paris's public bikes come with baskets.




Of course, we NEEDED to stop at the bakery on the way home.



Some much needed downtime before we began our walk to Sacre Coeur.







Once we reached the top, the view terrified T. Luckily a super cheesy light-up Eiffel Tower made everything better (I learned this trip that almost all my children's woes can be solved with ice cream and/or crap souvenirs).





HAPPY MONDAY EVERYONE!! I'll post more photos from Paris on Wednesday, I hope you all had a great weekend! I've had a lot of work lately (which is awesome, but exhausting), so I'm not quite back in the swing of things post-Europe. The kids still have THREE WEEKS LEFT before school starts and I'm ready for summer to wind down.

Things to Do - Cherish This Day & Random Links

We spent a morning in Paris at this cheesy little carnival, right next to the Louvre. I took this picture on the swing ride, flying over the city. After which I became crazy motion sick and decided to photograph the rest of the rides from ground level.

HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!!! Don't forget to click over to Cherish This Day to see everyone else's weekly awesome.

RANDOM LINKS:

* I love these date night out ideas, esp. appetizer hopping.

* For Lightroom geeks like me, it's pretty cool to see every VSCO preset compared.

* I like these posters.

* Human's of New York's Pakistan photos and stories are wonderful, take a look if you have a chance.

* Funny. Really really funny.

* LOVE!! "Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage “To Be Seen and Not Heard”, a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger, path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also exists a distance inherent between two different individuals."

* Piper Anne Photography (love her work) has some great tips on photographing teens and older kids.

Places to Go (Vacation) - Dragging Our Kids Through Europe, Part 1

Hi everyone!! We just returned last night after 3.5 weeks in Europe and I can't wait to share some photos (once I download everything). The whole trip was somewhat last minute. This year is Dan and my 10 year wedding anniversary, to celebrate we originally planned a hiking trip in Turkey (just the two of us), but then Dan's big case settled and his workload was much lower than usual, so we decided to spend the summer bumming around France, Italy, and Spain as a family.

Every guidebook we read said that when traveling with children you should always choose a few cities as home bases and plan daytrips from these, which seemed like practical advice. But once we had a map out, Dan wanted to go certain places and I wanted to go others. Plus, we don't know when we'll be back, so we didn't want to miss anything. Anyways, we finally settled on staying in nine different cities, traveling (mostly by Eurorail) with backpacks, just like college kids (perhaps this is my mid-life crisis), only staying in each city for a few days at most.

And it was exhausting. And amazing. So many highs. Just a few lows (my baggage appears to be lost forever).

Anyways, I'm glad to be back to lazy days with no translation problems, but still miss traveling as well.

HAPPY WEDNESDAY EVERYONE!

Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on Ben and Jen's divorce, Kalief Browder, Advertising, How Doctors Die, Early Memories, and the Life of a Refugee)

1. (The end of Ben/Jen) - Why Do We Care So Much About Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's Divorce? (link via Cup of Jo) Because I really care. As in really really really care.

"Whereas most celebrities choose to paint a picture of domestic bliss in interviews and profiles, Ben and Jen didn’t shy away from confessing that maintaining a long-term relationship doesn’t always come easy. Affleck famously acknowledged that their marriage was a product of hard work during his acceptance speech at the 2013 Oscars when Argo won for Best Picture. “I want to thank you for working on our marriage for ten Christmases. It’s good. It is work but the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with.” They both even poked fun of the mass speculation his speech sparked during an SNL opening monologue skit, leading us all to mistakenly believe that a couple who makes fun of each other together, stays together."
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2. (Kalief Browder) - Kalief Browder, Rachel Dolezal, and Race in America in the Atlantic. If Kalief's Browder's story doesn't make you angry, then I don't know what will.

"By some cosmic coincidence we are confronted with the death of Kalief Browder at exactly the moment American media is obsessing over the life of Rachel Dolezal. Coincidental as it may be, it is also instructive. Through duplicitous means, Dolezal was able to masquerade as a member of the black race. Such masquerades are neither novel nor original. What fuels the fascination is the way in which it taps into one of America’s greatest and most essential crimes—the centuries of plunder which birthed the hierarchy which we now euphemistically call “race.”

Kalief Browder died, like Renisha McBride died, like Tamir Rice died, because they were born and boxed into the lowest cavity of that hierarchy. If not for those deaths, if not for the taking of young boys off the streets of New York, and the pinning of young girls on the lawns of McKinney, Texas, the debate over Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade would wither and blow away, because it would have no real import nor meaning. It is the killing of John Crawford III and the beating of Marlene Pinnock which elevates this charade beyond what Jeb Bush calls himself or what Elizabeth Warren called herself.

“I think race is oppression,” writes Richard Seymour, “and nothing else.” Indeed. It is the oppression that matters. In that sense, I care not one iota what Rachel Dolezal does nor what she needs to label herself. I care solely, totally, and completely about what this society does to my son, because of its need to label him."
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3. (Advertising) - Stop Trying to Convince Me I'm Beautiful (link via Cup of Jo).

It’s insulting because it assume beauty is something I mourn for and desire. Honestly, it’s something I give very little thought. And when I see it constantly referred to, it makes me feel bored and ask if my sex really seems that one-dimensional. Advertising to men plays on the desires to be powerful, admired, respected, and even feared. For us girls, it stops at small pores and doe eyes.

. . . .

I don’t like it when adverts attempt to enter my life and my mind. To pretend they know me and my insecurities. I don’t want them to pose as a knowing friend who loves me, but also want to correct me and tell me I’m wrong all the time. To blindly insist a woman is beautiful when she isn’t isn’t comforting, it’s creepy. If a person walked up to me and congratulated me on my conversational Korean I would think they’re crazy (FYI I’m regrettably very unilingual)—so why should I embrace them when they congratulate me on another quality I don’t have."

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4. (How Doctors Die) - NPR published a short piece on how doctors choose to die.

"It was about 10 years ago, after a colleague had died swiftly and peacefully, that Dr. Ken Murray first noticed doctors die differently than the rest of us.

"He had died at home, and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember any of our colleagues who had actually died in the hospital," Murray says. "That struck me as quite odd, because I know that most people do die in hospitals."

Murray then began talking about it with other doctors.

"And I said, 'Have you noticed this phenomenon?' They thought about it, and they said, 'You know? You're right.' "
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5. (Early Memories) - Where Do Children's Earliest Memories Go? on Aeon. We shred them? Isn't that terrible? Just like Bing Bong in Inside Out.

"Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. A recent study by the neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto suggests that this process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.

. . .

Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present, according to Bauer. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.
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6. (The Life of a Refugee) - Finally, last but not least, Clemantine Wamariya's essay in Matter - "Everything is Your's, Everything is Not Your's" is the most powerful piece of non-fiction I've read lately. Wow, just wow.

"One day, in a philosophy seminar, I sat around a table with my fellow students, the boys in sports jackets, the girls in sweaters. It was a beautiful, crisp fall day. The professor gave us a thought experiment: You’re a ferry captain with two passengers. Your boat is sinking. One passenger is old and one is young. Who do you save?

With this, my veneer of decorum started to crack. Before I arrived on campus I asked the headmaster not to share my history. Nobody knew who I was. “Do you want to know what’s that really like?” I blurted out. “This is an abstract question to you?” Everybody stared."

Things to Do - ThinkFun's Compose Yourself GIVEAWAY!! (NOW CLOSED)

As frequent blog readers probably already know, we're big fans of ThinkFun's educational games and activities. But lately we're especially big fans of their new Compose Yourself music cards. The thick plastic transparent cards each have a set of musical notes on them. You then go online and enter a series of cards to make a song or melody. Flip them. Reverse them. Repeat them. It's shockingly fun.

And this has become our go-to downtime activity this summer. Whenever the kids say, "I'm bored." I reply, "then go make a song." And they do. Over and over again. Even I can't stop fiddling with them. If you listen carefully you start to understand how music and notes work (I never learned to read music, so I'm a somewhat fascinated by this).

The super easy computer interface makes parental involvement optional, so this is the perfect summer activity for children when you need some time by yourself (perhaps a nap?). I can't say enough good things.

Think Fun has offered to giveaway one set of Compose Yourself cards to a No Monsters reader (US addresses only). To enter, just comment on this post. Please include your email address in the body of the message (so I can find you). This giveaway will close in one week at 10 pm on August 10th.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED, A RANDOM WINNER HAS BEEN PICKED AND NOTIFIED. THANK YOU!