Paris day 3: church, climbing, and a cave

Ok, so during our France trip I am doing my best to write in my journal every night so I can remember as much of our adventure as possible. My journal entries are not always quite as interesting or detailed as I'd like them to be. (travel with kids is tiring!) But there's only so much time and mental energy in the day, so I'm using my journal entries for blog posts, even if they aren't quite as carefully constructed as my usual posts.


It is also weird to be writing about all of our travels real-time. Normally I write about events after they happen, when I've had time to recover and gather my thoughts. But that's not realistic for our month-long trip, so the viewpoint in these posts is more current than retrospective. Oh well! I want to keep up with this blog as best as I can while we're out and about because the blog is what gets me to organize my pictures and I like having all of our memories (photographic and written) in one place. Plus, it is preferable to organize my pictures and stories along the way rather than wait and get so far behind. As much as I enjoy writing and pictures, I dislike having an enormous backlog!

Anyways, that whole explanation was more for me than anyone else an I don't even really need to keep it in this post, but oh well. This whole blog is for me (and my family) after all, so it's fine. I'm tired! And in spite of my best efforts, I am still behind on the blog! Haha. Patchy internet, long hot days, and a bunch of other factors make blogging on the go quite a challenge. It's probably going to be good for me to let go of a little written perfection for the next few weeks.

Journal entry from Sunday, July 21st:

I slept so long and well last night! It was glorious and much needed. Amber slept for 14 hours! She didn't wake up till 10am. It was impressive.

Church was good. When we looked up the meeting time, it said 12:30pm which was different than the 10am Paris ward Jeff and I went to back in February in the same building. When we arrived, we discovered that in the summertime, they create a visitor-ward in English to accommodate all of the many tourists. The room was full of at least 80 people, all visitors. The meeting was conducted by a senior missionary, and we had the sacrament and a testimony meeting: one hour and then done. Jeff was sad not to have church in French, but the rest of us were slightly relieved at the reprieve.

They were out of small sacrament cups so they used regular sized 6 ounce disposable cups and the visitor-deacons (there were six of them, one in a t-shirt and jeans) had to walk back and forth to the table for constant refills (they blessed a pitcher of water) since the trays only held about 6 or 8 cups at a time. It took a while to pass everyone water, but it was also neat to see strangers work together to pass the sacrament. The testimony meeting was good too. I felt the spirit most during the songs we sang. It came to me while we sang, the same feeling as I get during General Conference: this is RIGHT, this is GOOD, this is TRUE.

After church we walked to Les Halles and the kids saw the Lego store's giant Patisserie and Notre Dame creations through the window. Then we wandered around the corner to St. Eustache cathedral and the kids climbed on the large head/hand sculpture (named Ecoute--listen-- with a hand held up to the head's ear, listening) for a while. I kept having to remove the kids from the sculpture so people could take pictures with it. One person even asked me to get my kids off of the statue so they could take pictures with it. Fine.

Eventually we wandered a quarter mile over to a clock that was supposed to have a neat mechanical dragon and knight perform every hour, but it ended up being broken. Oh well. Then we took the metro and walked half a mile home.

After some rest and lunch, Jeff and I took the kids to le Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a five minute walk from our apartment. The kids had fun running and jumping on rocks in the cave there and climbing up and sliding/scrambling down a rocky, root-covered steep dirt hill. It was good to see them having open-ended free play after days of confinement and herding around busy city streets.

Jeff made pasta carbonara for dinner with his beloved creme fraiche.

At the Lego Store. I joked that they should've removed the roof of Notre Dame, or at least put those little Lego flames on top of it. "Too soon," Jeff said, laughing.

Lego Patisserie! We've wanted to show this to our kids for years!

Ecoute.

St. Eustache in the background. The kids couldn't quite scramble onto the top of the head.

The head's plaque.

The clock, probably broken from being clogged with pigeon poop.

Parc Des Buttes-Chaumont! It was quite crowded on the pleasant Sunday afternoon, but there was space for everyone.

In the cave: the kids ran back and forth on the rocks across the little stream over and over.

The irresistible hill. Both Jay and Amber fell and got bruises/scrapes, but they went back for more.

Heading home.

My subtle attempt to show how many people were sitting in the park.

Showing off my maxi-pad knee bandages at church.