Every time I am in France (which hasn’t been for a mindbogglingly long time, please feel free to send checks), I eat crêpes. French-style pancakes, lots of them. Sweet or savory, in restaurants as part of a 4 course pancake meal or furtively on street corners, crêpes are one of my many weaknesses. Sometimes I dream of crêpes, and for some reason I am always standing in a dark corner near Beaubourg, hurriedly swallowing great chunks of nutella-laden treat, while pigeons rustle and trash blows around my feet. 

Then at home, every 6 months or so, I get a random mental image of crêpes and start drooling uncontrollably. And the frying pan comes out… Ten minutes later I have before me a mixed plate of burnt and soggy pancake pieces. The poor results may be down to not having the correct equipment. But more likely it is just because I am such an awful, awful cook. 

Still, I never learn. Today, since we had time on our hands (no car line to sit in due to the T-Bot being - excuse me while I stifle a sarcastic grunt - sick) I roped the children into production. With great talk of pancakes! with maple syrup! and we’ll make home made lemonade! 

All I can say is, much fun was had by all. And… the lemonade was a success. 

P.S. See the picture? See that measuring cup? I really and truly bought that because I thought it would make me a good cook.

We are a bilingual family. Less and less a bilingual family as the older children spend more time at school and the english language becomes more and more dominant. But still bilingual enough. 

I hope bilingual enough that they will retain at least their understanding of the french language, even if they have some trouble speaking it. Bilingual enough so that when they reach the age where they realise that, hey, another language could be interesting, or fun, or (gasp!) useful, they will have no trouble picking up where they left off.

I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, and in the meantime I do what I can, and am more or less at peace as I sit witness to the gradual decline. 

But this week I realised with a jolt that I also have a problem. I hardly ever speak french with adults any more. I am getting out of practice. Not because there aren’t like a gazillion French people in this city but more because the friends I have haven’t been chosen according to their nationality. And I have been busy with other things. I have sort of dropped the ball in that respect.

Then yesterday, even worse, my one good French friend dropped in and while excitedly explaining something to me came out with this sentence: 

“Un oiseau, qui flappait des wings”

And I knew I was lost.

…

But No! Here comes Prince The Daddy on his White Steed, laptop balanced precariously! 

(There is an awful lot of princess imagery going on in our house right now) 

I am saved! I swoon in his arms as he introduces me to France 24 . 

They are not paying me to say this (I wish they were paying me to say this), but I am hooked. I am a click-click-click kind of a gal and get really bored waiting for news sites to respond. But this one is blazingly fast and has none of those annoying pop-up ads. Just text and video news, plain and simple. In perfect english too, for anyone who is interested. 

Now they just need to start me up a childrens’ channel.