September 2006....

The return of Les Enfants to school and the return of Bob the Builder!!

After a blissful 10 week vacation for the children, they returned to school last Monday with their new school bags full of new felt tip pens, pencils and excercise books etc, etc. Matthew is now in CE2, which is I suppose the equivilent to Year 3 in England; and Nathan is still in the Maternelle but with a new teacher. The first day Nathan cried as he wanted his old teaher.... but two days later, he's now in love with his new teacher Madame Baldessar.... or something to that effect!!

The weather has been fantastic, beautiful sunny days... but sometimes, a wee bit hot!!...to the point where you will stand anywhere to get some shade. August was not so nice!! All the locals were saying how unusual it was and that it wasn't good for the grapes to have such cool temperatures!! I was beginnng to think that maybe we should have moved to Spain!!!

Alas, the weather is now lovely again!! but looking at the BBC forecast... so is England today!!

The builders crawled out of the woodwork from their summer vacation, and have been on site for a good number of days. We now have walls!! and we now have holes where one day windows will appear!! We have beautiful skies where the roofs are supposed to be... and in time these will be covered with brick and multi-couloured terracotta tiles.

We have now been in france for 8 months and 12 days... not that I'm counting!!! When I look back as to when we first arrived, we've come so far as the children have settled in really well and we've made some lovely friends. Matthew is still having French once a week; I'm enrolling at a local school for conversation classes, and Nathan ... well he's just getting on with it really!! He now has one other english boy in his class with him now. His name is Jackson and he's 5, and Nathan thinks he's great!! Jackson was born in France and can speak both english and french.

Matthew is the only english boy in his class now. It will be good for his french, and he has other english friends he can play with at break time as well as his french friends. There were two new english children that had started last week, Hamish aged 6 and Hannah aged 9. Matthew has taken Hamish under his wing!!

We have friends (Sue and Gerry) coming to see us on the 17th of September which will be lovely. They are staying at Hotel Vigiers, which is the créme de la créme of Hotels de Golf!! They are here for 4 days, and it will be great to catch up on old times!!! My Mum is travelling from Ireland to see us too on the 22nd of September (touch wood!!). I'm so looking forward to seeing her, as she's been unable to get out here to see us until now!! She has never been to France, (like most of our friends and family), so it will be lovely for her to see for herself why we made the decision to come here.