Ouvrez La Voie

We just finished SIX weeks of school today and whew, it’s been a rollllllller coaster. This is a pic of the girls in front of the school. A family owns the building and lives in the left side of it and donated the right half to the school. Kamila’s class is on the lower floor, Zosia’s class is on the second floor, and the third floor is an open space where they do yoga, theatre, and dance. They eat lunch outside on the upper balcony. The school is on the top of a big hill and looks out onto some big mountains. Here is a pic of the girls and the school’s view:

One of the big challenges of the past month has been figuring out how to get the kids from Chamonix up to the top of the hill where the school is. It’s an easy, 20 minute drive if you have a car, which we don’t. We started the year as part of a group of kids who were taken up the hill by one of the parents. It was perfect until a month into the school year the parents sold the van with one day notice. We scrambled and called and texted nearly every parent in the school and have come up with what seems to be the new system, which is a bit more complicated, but works. We walk 10 min to a bus stop, take a city bus a few stops where Kamila’s teacher picks them up and takes them to school. One day a week we take the train to the town of the school and a friend of Anne’s picks up Anne and the girls, squeezes us all into the tiny back seat, and drives all of us up the hill. Most afternoons Kamila’s teacher drops the girls off at our house but two afternoons a week Anne and Dominik take turns taking the train to the town and hiking up the hill to pick up the girls and then we all hike down to the train together. We miss walking 3 minutes to the bus stop at the end of Prospect Street!

Zosia is loving school! Some of her favorite parts are: not having to wear shoes in the building, the forest afternoons (every afternoon is spent in the woods), no school every Wednesday, learning cursive, math, her French class (twice a week she and a few other kids, including Kamila, spend an hour with a French as a second language teacher), and her new friends (Zoe who is French and Russian, Ariella who is British and Australian, Sofia who is French, and Leni who is British and French). This little group of girls welcomed her from day one and have become good pals. She has started correcting my pronunciation of French words and had her first play date with two French-only speaking sisters. When one of the little girls kept repeating a question to me and I had no idea what she was saying, Zosia said “Mamaaaaa, she asked if she could eat the play dough….” So, her French is coming along. She definitely understands more than she can speak, like all of us, I’d say.

Kamila has had a slower start to getting comfortable at school. She went from going to school three half days a week last year to four very full long days a week here so it’s a big shift and a lot of time away from us. Drop offs have been really hard with lots of tears–she misses us and we miss her a lot too. She is a little overwhelmed by the French immersion at school and often comments about how hard it is to not understand what other kids say to her. Her teacher is wonderful and stays in close contact with us as we work through this transition. Things are just beginnnnnning to shift for the better, though. Drop offs are still hard but she’s becoming more comfortable and happy during the school day and is beginning to make some friends. While going to school is really hard, she almost always comes home from school happy, so that is a relief. I often overhear Kamila and Zosia speaking simple French to each other when they play and Kamila loves to speak in “pretend Italian” and other pretend languages. They’re both surrounded by lots of different languages at school and around town. Kamila loves to play “the French game,” which is when all four of us speak only French. Below is a pic from school with Arwen, a little French girl that she’s become pals with.

Every six weeks the kids get two weeks of vacation, so we are now officially ON BREAK! In a few days we’re off to Slovenia for ten days where Dominik will be collaborating with a work colleague and we’ll be checking out the country. Anne is excited to be there for Halloween and Day of the Dead. Pics to come!