Carving and Drawing

Last night, with a grand total of two days till Halloween, I sent Shawn and two kids to Walmart to pick out a pumpkin for us to carve.  This year's schedule was just a tad bit off and this was when we had time.  I actually enjoyed waiting till now.  Anyway, he came home with two great pumpkins and got to carving right after dinner.  This year he went with a nice happy pumpkin.  He did a devo using the pumpkin and thought it was best not to give it a scary face this year since we were talking about how the pumpkin is like us and how God's light shines in us....just wouldn't quite have made since if "us" looks mean and mad. lol  Everything we do at this stage in life with our kids is so chaotic.  I wish I could video an entire event and all the things the kids say and do and all the things we are getting on to them for...it truly is comical. 

Kids are oblivious.  Shawn was just about to start drawing the face on and Levi decided to use to pumpkin as a seat.  He was in his own little world.

All hands on deck....except Levi's.  He didn't want to touch that yucky stuff.

He was okay using the ladle and managed to scoop out exactly 6 seeds altogether.

Voila!

Thanks to an idea I saw in the magazine, Everyday with Rachel Ray, I made this pumpkin this morning.  It just seems fitting.  His name is Jacques-a-Lantern.

Day 10: Almost Left Behind

We got up around 5:30 Thursday morning and were out the door by 6:30 for the airport.  The Underground took about an hour to get to the airport.  We were doing great on time.  Our flight didn't depart until around 9:30.  Everything was going just fine until Shawn's carry-on backpack was pulled to be inspected.  That would have only taken about 5 minutes, except for the small fact that another family's bags had also been pulled and they were ahead of us.  They had about 4 bags inside each bag with all kinds of things in each bag.  They were also carrying baby food and baby juice and for whatever reason, the mom had to taste 1/2 of the things she brought as well as take a sip of every drink for the child.  It took FOREVER.  Our chance at getting breakfast in the airport was dwindling with every taste of that baby food.  By the time we finally got through security, we went to check the board to see what gate we were at and saw that our flight was BOARDING!!!  It showed that we were boarding out of gate 36....which was 36 gates away and it even had a nifty board showing the amount of time it would take to walk to each gate...it had ours at a 20 minute walk!!!!!!!!!!!  So I looked at Shawn and said "Start running!!!"  We were those people in the airport!  We were yelling "Excuse me!  Move over please!"  as we ran down the hallways.  Thank goodness for a few moving sidewalks!  All I could think of was the scene in Home Alone when the family is about to miss their flight to Paris and all of them are running through the airport.  We ran the whole way to our gate, directly into the line to board and ten minutes lately, sweaty and out of breath we were sitting on our flight ready to head back to the USA.  What an end to a wonderful vacation....a little wild and crazy, but memorable nonetheless.  All of my neurotic organizing, budgeting for five year, and planning fully paid off.  Everything went so smoothly. 

 Happy 15th Anniversary to Shawn and me! 

Now to start planning #20.......

Day 9: Paris to London

Heading back to London was a smooth ride and truthfully, we were beyond ready to be back where they spoke English!  Paris was amazing, but finding a bathroom and finding something to eat were stressful things!  I wanted to stay somewhere different for our last night in London, just to try something new, so I went on Orbitz and found a studio apartment in Cartwright Gardens.  It was better than we could have imagined!  The best part by far were the floor to ceiling windows that overlooked the prettiest park.  It was wonderful and though we had places we wanted to visit on our last night in London, we spent a good hour and a half just soaking up the Autumn sunshine, and looking at our beautiful view on our balcony.

 

After relaxing for as long as we could stand, we headed for the one last big area of London that we hadn't explored before; Covent Garden.  What a lively and interesting place it was!  This is where you find quite a few street performers, places to shop and places to eat.  We enjoyed meandering around, browsing stores for that last little something to bring home to our kids. 

After nine fantastic days, we were utterly exhausted in the best way possible.  It was time to pack up and prepare for the long flight back and three little ones that were very ready to have mommy and daddy back.

Day 8: Our last day in Paris

We started our last day in Paris with breakfast in our room.  We bought a baguette and some orange marmalade the night before hoping this would work for breakfast...epic fail.  That orange marmalade was super NASTY.  So we went down to the kitchen of our hotel and ordered coffee and apple juice.  We got coffee and grapefruit juice.  Another fail.  We just threw in the towel and figured lunch would be better.  At least the view during breakfast was wonderful.

Of all the museums we went to visit, we were most excited about visiting the Musee D'Orsay.  It had a large collect of Impressionist and Post Impressionist painting on exhibit...which mean lots of what I have in my house and grew up seeing!!!  Seeing a Van Gogh to me was like how others feel when they see a movie star.  I was beyond excited, as was Shawn!  Again we weren't suppose to take any pictures, but we refused to obey this time.  I took a few of the building itself and Shawn very covertly (okay not really, we felt like we were committing a bank heist by using his phone to take a photo) snapped a few of some of our favorites.

This girl was on to us...thank goodness she didn't work there.  I NEED this painting in my house....Dad, are you reading this?

After many hours in the Musee D'Orsay, it was time to walk down the Champs Elysees, the most busy and famous road in Paris and see the Arc de Triomphe.  We did some shopping, people watching and picture taking.

 

Crazy amounts of traffic

I even ate my very first macaroon right in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

Back to the Luxembourg Gardens for one last look.

We decided that we wanted to return to the Eiffel Tower that night to see it all lit up but we had time to kill and pure exhaustion.  So we headed back to the hotel to regroup, find dinner and enjoy the last little bits of daylight on our last day in Paris.  I planned to eat as many things as possible this evening.  We ate a ham and cheese crepe (jambon et fromage crepe), a nutella crepe, and 2 scoops of scrumptious Italian icecream.

Seeing the Eiffel Tower at night was just as magical as seeing it during the day!  It was spectacular!  Every hour on the hour it twinkles for about ten minutes.

 

It was so much fun to be there and night and I was really glad we decided to go back.

We kept getting closer and closer to the tower and eventually stood right under it.  Seeing that the line was pretty short to ride to the top, we decided to go for it!  Spontaneous and unplanned and SUCH a wonderful experience!

It was so great to be there.  After leaving, we crossed one of the bridges and turned around to look and realized that the Eiffel Tower doesn't seem to have a bad side.  It's photographable from every single angle, every which way!

How else do you cap off a wonderful trip to Paris, than french fries on the last night.

Day 7: The Eiffel Tower

It really does deserve it's own post.  It truly lived up to the hype.  It is spectacular in person.

 WE'RE HERE.....WE'RE IN FRONT OF THE EIFFEL TOWER!

 

This truly wasn't a staged picture.  Shawn went to walk around a little bit and it started to rain just enough that I needed my umbrella while I wrote in my journal.  When he came back he snapped this photo.  :)

Saw lots of people doing this exact same thing.

Day 7: Parc Monceau, Montmarte, Sacre Coeur

Today was probably the best day of sight seeing for us...so many iconic things to see!  Such beautiful places.  SO.MUCH.WALKING.  I dubbed today "The Death March" when we got back to the hotel.  I felt like I was walking to nowhere until I dropped dead.  We walked further today than any other day and my legs and feet told me all about it for the rest of the trip!

 We started in beautiful Parc Monceau.  What's special about this park other than that it's gorgeous?  Many famous painters including Claude Monet set in this very park painting scenes that are iconic!

After soaking in that beauty we headed for The Sacre Coeur in the area of Montmarte. What a sight to behold.

 We climbed all 50 bazillion steps, avoiding the guys trying to "sell" us a ring made out of string, and stopped to look at this statue....which was actually a human!  I sure do love the street performers that paint themselves all one color. lol

We climbed tons of steps, thought not quite as many as at St. Paul's to behold the view of Paris! 

More narrow passageways...really narrow.

The streets of Montemarte.  This was probably the most interesting neighborhood in Paris, in my opinion.  We saw one "rock" band performing a song on a side street while their videographer filmed, I'm guessing for a music video.  No one else was on the street but us.  We also saw a male model, modeling on the corner of another street while his crew photographed him.  I guess this was the place to go to shoot photos and videos.  It was absolutely beautiful and if I had one regret about our trip, it's that we didn't spend way more time meandering through these narrow streets.  Next time....

We found ourselves deslunch as I like to call it.  We waited until we got to Paris to indulge in a crepe and we ordered a banana and nutella crepe and it was divine...and it was lunch, even though it was dessert.

Feeling inspired from watching the male models photo shoot, I tried it for myself.  I call this "French Pout."

Day 6: The Louvre, Tuileries Gardens and worship

After declaring our love to the Seine River, we headed to the Louvre.  We had not originally planned on going into the Louvre, but really, you can't go all the way to Paris and not go into the Louvre at least once.

Outside waiting to get in...the line was L O N G.  It did go pretty quickly though and at least it wasn't raining on us!

The Mona Lisa.....seriously, what's the big deal?  I'm sorry if that's "sacrilegious" to art lovers, but seriously, there are so many other painting that I thought deserved this much fanfare.  I couldn't get out of this room fast enough.  Nutso.

 

So I walked to another wall in the same room as the Mona Lisa and made Shawn take a picture of me in front of a "nonimportant" painting since this woman and child are probably sick of being overshadowed by Mona Lisa and I was also hoping to confuse people who would then wonder what painting this was if it was important enough for me to stop and have my picture taken with it.  And, it worked.  A few people stopped to check it out after seeing me take my picture with it! ha!

Also inside the Louvre...GORGEOUS!

After leaving the Louvre, the Tuileries Gardens were very close and we were still able to see it from our vantage point....so pretty.

It's never too late to learn French....

 

Resting our backs and feet...a pastime for all tourist.  Oh and the Lourve was so overwhelming.  We felt like we might never find out way back out!  It was nice to see the sunshine and smell the fresh air again!

The Metro, and a better posing place than the one in London.  No one got upset with me standing here :)

It took us about an hour to reach the church of Christ in Paris.  It was so wonderful to be there with brothers and sisters in Christ who are like minded yet half-way around the world.  We even met people that had friends in common with us.  Small world...and on a little tangent, we had seen so many beautiful and amazing churches in our travels at this point, but during every one of their services, every single thing seemed to be vain repetition, planned out, expected, tradition.  It seemed to be about what was seen and what would impress man more than the heart.  Walking into this very humble building was so reassuring that the Church does not care what "man" thinks about the building.  It is ALL about the heart...no time or money wasted on impressing man who is fickle anyway.  It was wonderful to sing songs together, pray together, and worship God together...and it was absolutely fabulous to hear English being spoken!

After worship it was getting late and again, nothing was open.  In Paris, they seem to open late and close early, especially on Sunday.  So we used our last tiny bit of change, which was all this machine would take down in the Metro, to buy a piece of waffley junk food for 1 Euro.  Would you believe that we pressed the number, the spiral thing went forward and our food hung on.  We were in disbelief!  We had no more change, our train was only about a minute from arriving and a thin piece of glass and dumb spring were all the separated us from a fine gourmet feast!  Then we tried getting our money back, which worked!  So we put the money back in, pressed it again, and TWO waffles came out!  We felt like we had hit the jackpot.  These things were probably so bad for us, but they tasted so so so good and we were so excited to get two for the price of one...and about that time our train arrived!

After coming out of the Metro, still hungry and it being pretty late, the only place we could find open was a Starbucks so we got a sandwich to split and drank our Lemonade that was in our room from the night before.  I remember being beyond exhausted this evening and having to stay up till 10:30 Paris time to talk to our kids after school.  What a day, what a wonderful day!