The Mommy: “I dont think I’ll go to Peggy Sue’s coffee morning tomorrow”

The Daddy: “Why not?”

The Mommy: “The Wictor has a cold and she is very particular about her kids coming into contact with germs. They won’t be there but I don’t know if she will even want him in her house…”

The Daddy: “Don’t go then”

The Mommy: “I know, I know but Betty Ann will be there and I havent seen her in a while, we lost touch and it would be great to get back in contact…”

The Daddy: “Go then”

The Mommy: “Yeah but The Wictor’s nose is really running…”

The Daddy: “Don’t go then. See, I  have all the answers.” 

(Note: All names changed to protect the innocent…)

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. 

I feel the need to apologise again for the state of this blog. Someday, I promise you, it will be… at least …um…  I would hope fairly attractive.  

The Daddy - who was supposed to take care of all prettifications - has been very very busy at work with a project which has a two week deadline but involves re-writing the web from scratch… or something. I am not too sure because 5 minutes into his detailed explanation I sort of… well… to be totally honest I tuned out. There. I said it! I. Stopped. Listening.

I promise you it was only because I was scared my head might explode and I might become a different person. Forever. 

Also the reason why, when he began to explain to me how I, myself, could beautify my blog, I found myself mentally putting my fingers in my ears while chanting a virtual La-la-la-la-la.

Silly really. I used to be able to do all that stuff. Second nature. Along with a lot of other unrelated stuff which I have also forgotten. 

But it’s all gone now. Because I am the Queen of the Brain Dump. If I need it I can learn it but if I don’t I dump it. Two weeks maximum and it’s gone. Poof! Disappeared into thin air, as if it never was.

I like to call it Selective Retention. You may call it just a Lazy Brain. I maintain that it is just Hugely Efficient. No junk in this brain! 

But that really doesn’t help me because after a few days of waiting, waiting, waiting and no Prince Charming in sight,  I relented and decided to try to work it all out, to do at least some of the work myself.

But …

oh …

so difficult…

Why do they have to make it so complicated?

Groan. What goes where?

The Daddy could do this in three strokes of the mouse or probably even just by muttering Abracadabra.

Damn… 

OK. I admit it. Lazy Brain.  But I am sure, somehow, sometime I will work it out.

In the meantime … really sorry about the Fugly Blog. 

“Daddy uses his liddle eye pooter* to work the big eye pooters.  Daddy needs his liddle eye pooter to tell the big eye pooters what to do. That’s what he does in town. ”

*She can say computer, she just chooses not to. If nothing else, she knows how to work the cute factor.