Back from France

Maman and I made it back from Papi and Mamie’s place in France where we stayed for 25 days… and everybody seems to have survived. 

Let me tell you though, I thought it was only in the USA that I was misunderstood, but it seems that in France I have the same problem. People just don’t seem to get me wherever I go. 

 

Take hugging for example. I certainly have a different technique than most: if you are sitting, I find a way to climb on you or most accurately, to jump on you. It’s incredible how people are sensitive and my hugging is met by shouts and screams as I bump in faces, torsos and stomachs. 

People then tend to want to put me down as I pull on every part of their body that I can reach, laughing hysterically while I am at it.

If you are standing, my preferred huggable part is legs. I hold super tight to one leg and in return I get a lot of shaking going on, like people want to get rid of me or something. I even tried this with my cousin who is over 6 feet tall.

My communication style is also totally misunderstood. People can’t seem to decipher my codes. If I am asked a direct question, I will often answer with some made up words like “gagagougou” or my preferred one at the moment “poop, poop, poop”. It’s a code people, it is supposed to be funny. Apparently even Maman is not getting that at all and always gets mad at me. Come on, I know I am not the only one doing that. The other day I laughed so hard reading that Calvin and Hobbes story where Calvin is asked to explain in his own words what gravity is and he answers: “Prot zan cot ra tzigo zo.” I wish I could meet that Calvin kid.

Another one of my attributes that results in a lot of misunderstanding is my throwing of a variety of objects. My intent here is to see people’s reflexes. Believe me, people are no better in France than they are in the USA. Bad, bad reflexes. Take throwing my stuffed animal at Papi while he is having his breakfast dunking his bread into his bowl of coffee. Did he catch it? No; bad reflexes that ended in my animal face first in a coffee bowl, Papi  and the kitchen floor all covered in coffee. And who gets in trouble? ME. Unbelievable. And that’s just one example of a throwing that went bad. 

Meeting a lot of new people has never been my forte but Maman seems to think that if I was not making a big deal out of it, it would go smoothly: just say a quick hi or wave to all and say hi, she would say to me in an attempt to prep me before any new encountering. That is definitely not my style though. I prefer to hide for a while and if you send kids to try to get me to come and meet the crowd, it could be a good technique but not when I find a hose behind the house we are at and I begin spraying whoever is attempting to get me to just come and have fun. That day I got 4 people soaking wet before somebody thought about turning the water off and thus stopping the fun I was having. 

 But what gets misunderstood the most by all I met is what I call opposite language. Sure I don't advertise that I function using opposite language but that's what I do. Let's say you tell me "Come here right now", you know that I obviously heard "Run away in the other direction". If you say "Stop that" I hear "Keep doing this annoying thing you are doing". And so forth. You get it right? So why is it so hard for others to understand that. 

And why was Maman constantly apologizing to people about my behavior during this trip when they are the ones that did not get me? Like you, it leaves me speechless. 

Maman says that luckily I also got to show signs that I can be quite normal (Pfff, whatever THAT means) and we had quite some fun together and with others too.

The weather was super fantastic for our entire stay and we went to the beach countless times, even enjoying the warmish water when it was high tide.

My favorite experience was acrobatics in trees where you get to walk from one tree to the other passing through a variety of obstacles or going down zip lines. Very much fun for me… I needed to keep encouraging Maman who was quite the scaredy cat on that one. 

We visited castles too and I could not get enough of going up and down those old towers and thinking it was a good thing I was not living at that place during night time… too scary for me this time.

We went on a boat to visit an island and walked from one end of the island to the other. 

We visited Le village Gaulois that was super fun and reminded me of the books of Asterix and Obelix: an amusement park with zero electronics but wooden toys and games using ingenious pulleys, gears and other mechanical systems. 

We went fishing with Papi too when the tide was super low and we got crabs, shrimp that we ate and little fish that we would end up putting back in the sea. 

 

We spend a lot of time with Maman’s friends and visited with a lot of family members too. We even had a private celtic music concert by Maman's cousins and their kids. Quite cool!

I had the most fun with my younger cousins as we got to spend nearly 4 days together. They were all older than me and would also wonder if I was always acting this wild, but we still had a good time together. 

So voilà, my trip in a nutshell, and there are some more pictures about it in the little videos we made. 

In the meantime, Papa was busy working his normal hours and working at home on remodeling my bathroom. Yep, he was barely done with the master bathroom when we left for France but still decided to bulldoze the other bathroom and use his time off from me to work nonstop… not that smart of a choice I am telling you because you need a lot of energy and patience when I am around.

But of course there is still a lot to do and more week-ends dedicated to remodeling are on the agenda.

I also just turned 6 and will tell you more about that in another post.

Enjoy the pics and the videos,

Noah

Les plages


Accrobranches


Châteaux et Village Gaulois


En Famille... chez Papi et Mamie


En Famille... Oncles, Tante, Cousins, Cousines