How To Increase Your French Vocabulary At McDonald’s…

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Family, food, France, French, fun, Humor, Language, Learning

We are in the middle of some seriously miserable weather here in our part of France. It’s basically a case of: Monday – Rain. Tuesday – Rain. Wednesday – Rain and wind. You get the idea. So, as crafts indoors will only get you so far before both you and your kids go insane and start trying to make a giant quilt made from string to cover your house or cat (or both), we decide to head to McDonald’s.

And by ‘We’ I mean ‘Me’. Well, until one of them learns to drive and gets a job I’m the dictator of this small state. At least between the hours of 9am – 6pm, Monday to Friday anyway. I then cede control to my other half.

I always bow down to a superior wage.

Especially when I don’t have one myself.

Anyway so I announce my intention to take us off to McDonald’s for a treat, and am met with happy shouts and cries of ‘Yes! Yes!’ ‘No more crafts!’ ‘Let me just finish stitching the third eye on this bird/crocodile thing!’. My daughter puts down her craft implements, and my son stops painting ‘NO MORR CRAfTs My THumBZ HUrT’ on his picket sign, and we head out the door.

I like our trips to the Golden Arches (TM), it’s not something we do often, for financial reasons as well as health reasons. The health reasons are more for me than the kids. There’s been a lot said about the nutritional balance now available in the meals, but at the end of the day it’s still chips and meat, and not much in the way of vegetables.

Unless you count the gherkins.

Also the kids never finish theirs, which means I invariably hoover up the detritus of their meals. I’m from Yorkshire – we don’t like waste.

So we roll up at the restaurant – eating in as usual as buying at the drive-thru, and eating in the car, is a recipe for everybody going insane. Going home with it isn’t an option either, as we are just distant enough for us to return home to some nicely congealed burgers, and some tepid fries.

The kids – as usual – plump for the Happy Meal, and I input their orders at the self-service kiosk. You can say what you want about stuff like this, how it’s detracting from the customer-service experience; how it’s taking people’s jobs. Say what you will. For me, as an Englishman whose grasp of French isn’t quite there just yet, having all these nice photographs to refer to when placing an order makes it much easier, and less stressful. The kids can see exactly what they want to order too.

We sit down (at our set of three couple’s tables, that should seat six, but my children have dominated the area, much to the annoyance of the other people in the rather crowded restaurant) receive our food and tuck into it. Well, after opening up the toys that is. As with any kids, my children’s priorities are: Toys first, food second.

This week’s promotional toy is from the Mr Men range, the Roger Hargreaves designed range of humorous characters. There seems to be 90 in total to collect. I don’t know if that’s more or less than the total Pokemon.The kids have two each. They hastily swap out the lady and man from each of their bags so that my son is left with two Mr Men awhile my daughter has the two Little Missus. Or Little Mrs. Whatever.

My kids don’t go in for all this gender-neutral nonsense. He likes boy’s toys, she likes girl’s toys, and that’s that as far as they’re concerned.

Once we have finished we head on over to the craft station, a great little corner that is – surprisingly – always empty when we go.

This is where I see the following drawings for the kids to colour in:

In case you are thinking ‘But where are all the ladies? Maybe on the other side of the paper?’. The answer is no, there’s nothing but blank space. There was only one lady to colour in – but she was massive, if that helps:

I found this very educational – please bear with me on this – as along with the pictures for the kids to colour in, there were also guides to the names of the characters – both male and female. Now this may sound silly to you, but with my level of French, things like this are really useful.

The Mr Men characters have always been named after everyday feelings, and effects – like Mr Bump, or Mr Angry, Mr Happy etc. So having a guide, with pictures that correspond to the characters, and give you a clue to what the names mean is a fantastic help for me:

 

I take every bit of help I can when it comes to learning the lingo in this country.

But does that mean that I’m going to try and collect all 90 of the characters?

Non.

My vocabulary would definitely increase if I did.

But so would my waistline.

 

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Oh No! It’s The Food Police!

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children, food, food and drink, funny, Humor, kids, Parenting, stay-at-home Dad

 

My daughter looks at me as I step out into the glorious sunshine, I’m eating a lemon-sorbet ice-pop, just the thing to cool me down on a day as hot as this. ‘You’ve had two of those today’ she says to me ‘Why have you had two of those today?’. It’s like this all the time at the moment, my daughter has turned into a food policeman/woman/child (delete as appropriate). You can’t put anything in your mouth – nothing edible anyway – without her noticing and commenting on it.

 

I was making her some food the other day, one of her favourites, sausage and chips, and I – as is customary for me – took a small piece of the second sausage, for what I refer to as ‘Daddy Tax’. This is a tax I levy on all foodstuffs (except cauliflower, bleurgh!) that I prepare for my kids, just a little off the top to keep me sweet (It is not, I repeat NOT ‘protection money’ in the form of food). She noticed straight away.

 

‘Why did you eat a piece of my sausage’ she said, her dark eyes fixed on me from beneath a furrowed brow. Was she in the room when I ate that piece of sausage? I don’t think she was, and as I break her sausages up into pieces, there shouldn’t really have been any way for her to notice. But notice she did.

 

I suspect that at night, when everyone else is asleep, she creeps downstairs and takes inventory of all the food in the house. She notes down all the different foodstuffs, the different quantities and then, if in her eyes you go over your allotted quota for the day, that’s when the interrogation, the questions, the accusations…that’s when it all starts.

 

Or I could just be being paranoid.

 

She’s always there, whenever food is being prepared, and if she isn’t, she magically will be as soon as she smells or hears it. It’s like one of those horror movie cliches, you know when you open the fridge-door, and then close it and there’s a mass murderer waiting, where previously there was nothing. Except it’s not a mass murderer, it’s a two-and-a-half foot tall munchkin who wants to know what you are doing with that pack of ham. And if you don’t respond then the consequences could be as dire as in the horror movie.

 

That’s if you equate being stared at for ten minutes, with the phrase ‘Can I have some’ repeated 278 times, to as bad as being stabbed to death by Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees/Freddy Krueger (delete as applicable).

 

She can also hear packets of crisps being opened from up to a mile away. I once opened a packet, downstairs in our house. I was alone, everybody else was off doing something else (together I should add, we don’t let our three and six year old wander the village on their own – we wouldn’t put the villagers through that). I hadn’t put one crisp in my mouth when I turned to see a pair of dark eyes staring at me through the patio windows.

 

They were my favourite flavour too.

 

I’m in the house on my own now too, and I think I might have an ice-cream. I’ll be ok though, she’s at nursery today. There’s no chance she can get me. Is there?

 

Hang on…I think I heard something….

Cultural French/UK Differences: Salad Cream

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angry, cost of living, food, France, French, funny, Humor, shopping

Tuesday’s discovery on the shelves…

 

 

And Tuesday’s phrase of the day….

 

 

 

The Internal Struggle Of A Six-Year-Old Boy, As Depicted By A Charity-Shop Triceratops

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children, food, funny, Humor, kids, musings, Parenting, toilet

I saw this in a charity shop the other day whilst out brunching* with my daughter:

 

 

Every boy loves dinosaurs, don’t they? The scariness of them, the viciousness, the simplicity of their existence (eat, sleep, reproduce, terrorise Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas-Howard). Show me a young boy without a dinosaur in his collection and I’ll eat my hat.

 

 

What immediately struck me that this toy dinosaur though – aside from the cheap price and bizarre pale make-up of its face – was that it perfectly encapsulates an all-too-common occurrence in our household.

 

 

Note the crossed legs – I don’t believe any toy dinosaur ever represented, so accurately, the internal struggle between my six-year-old boy’s need to go for a wee and his desire to play just one more level on Super Mario 3D World.

 

 

Has anyone in the history of parenting ever asked their child if they needed a wee, and actually gotten the response ‘yes’?

 

 

Every time I ask my dancing, jiggling, shuffling, legs-crossed son if he needs a wee he says, emphatically, ‘no’. He then stops dancing, jiggling and shuffling, and un-crosses his legs.

 

 

For at least ten seconds.

 

 

It seems to me that, right up until their bladder is fit to explode, six-year-old boys NEVER need to wee.

 

 

Then they do and it sounds like someone’s pointed a jet-wash at my toilet and pressed the trigger. Oh to have a young prostate again….

 

 

I must say he is dedicated to his gaming/crafts/whatever else he may be doing while he so clearly needs the toilet. I have timed him doing his little ‘I don’t need a wee. oh yes I do’ dances for up to 30 minutes.

 

 

That must be excruciatingly painful, or maybe at 6 we don’t yet have the receptors ‘down there’ that make these matters that urgent.

 

 

I was once stuck on a train, with no toilet facilities, in London for 2o minutes, with a full bladder. At the end of those twenty minutes I would have happily given all my worldly possessions for a toilet to empty my bladder. Or even a dark alley. Hell, an empty bottle of Evian would have been a godsend.

 

 

So how he can do it for such long periods of time is beyond me.

 

 

Maybe it’s the dancing, jiggling, shuffling and crossing of the legs…maybe that’s the trick to prolong the pain. I will try that next week when I feel the urge.

 

 

Not sure my co-workers will approve though…

 

 

Oh, he also tends to grab his crotch, towards the end of his dance, like this man used to:

 

 

Now I know my co-workers really won’t like that…

 

 

I’m going to do it anyway.

 

 

*Brunching, for the uninitiated, is a meal eaten at around 11-a.m and is between breakfast and lunch – hence, ‘brunch’. It sounds posh but it’s really just me and my daughter eating sausages, beans and toast. Well, I do most of the eating, she tends to wreck the place.

 

 

My Partner Does Strange Things To Cuddly Toys, And Puts Mushrooms In Odd Places…

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children, food, fun, funny, Humor, musings, Parenting, stay-at-home Dad

My son loves his cuddly toys, to an almost scary degree. He looks after them, makes them beds, creates costumes for them, and just generally anthropomorphizes* the hell out of them. His latest two acquisitions are a small bear – who’s called ‘Pinky’ – and a dolphin, that he’s dubbed ‘Sniffy’. It’s cold in the UK at the moment  (not the usual year-round-cold, it’s the December cold-in-your-bones kind of cold) so he decided that Pinky and Sniffy needed clothes.

He’s outsourced this to his mummy, my partner, as she’s a dab hand at most things craft-related. And she’s not missed a step with these two either but, and disagree with me if you will, I can’t help thinking they’re a bit sinister.

Prepare to make your own minds up, ladies and gentlemen, as I present to you:

BANK ROBBER BEAR

‘GIVE ME THE MONEY!!!’ Its beady little eyes now seem to say. What was once a cute and unassuming bear is now filled with menace and the need to get as much money as possible, and make a swift getaway. ‘WE’RE NOT HERE FOR YOUR MONEY WE WANT THE BANK’S MONEY’ look at him, all he needs is a gun and he’s Robert DeNiro in Heat. It only took the merciless carving up of a poor innocent spare sock (we’ve got thousands of them) to turn this once peaceful bear into a potential one-bear-crimewave.

I don’t like the way he looks at me any more either…look at that odd tilt he’s got to his head, like he’s weighing me up. He didn’t have that tilt before I’m sure. I think he’s deciding whether to shoot me, or just knock me out, to make an example of me to the rest of the household.

Also note his right paw, the way it seems to be reaching behind him….I don’t want to know what for….

But if you thought that was bad you should see…

BURKINI DOLPHIN

Alright, alright, you might argue that me bandying around the phrase ‘Burkini’ with regards to a cuddly dolphin could be seen as politically incorrect. I don’t care. Look at it – what else would you call it? Quite why a dolphin would wear a Burkini is wayyyyyy beyond me. Aren’t their sex organs on their rears? So just a small cap would suffice (I could be wrong here, I haven’t looked up dolphin sexual organs since……actually I have never looked up dolphin sexual organs**).

I must admit that when it comes to clothing this dolphin the form certainly dictates what shape the end product is going to be, but the colour reinforces my perception of it. Why couldn’t we have had a bright yellow outfit, maybe with a splash of red? Then I wouldn’t have looked at the dolphin’s outfit in this way. Or pink, pink would have been lovely…

I must say, as my partner is French – and we all know their views on Burkinis – I was quite surprised when this was the result of her busy-beavering with the scissors.

Still, it could have been worse, at least she didn’t make the dolphin look like the getaway driver for bank-robber-bear.

And what did she do next? Why she stored the mushrooms in the pot-pourri bowl in our house…..

See we’ve recently bought a new fridge freezer, due to our old one joining the white-goods death-cult that has overtaken our household in recent weeks. It’s like they’ve all heard I’ve got a job and have decided to top themselves.

So far the death-list includes: Washing machine (the first to die), fridge-freezer, Television*** and the vacuum is effectively on life-support, it’s held together by selotape – that’s not a joke, when I get a minute I’ll upload a photo of the poor little mite.

Well obviously these are things we can’t live without so they had to be replaced, but the fridge freezer, as it turns out, ended up being smaller than our old one. Hilariously so, to the degree that we began to compare it to a doll’s house accessory.

So why are the mushrooms on top of the pot-pourri? Because they wouldn’t fit in our new, snack-size, fridge-freezer, so logically they were placed in the coldest place in the kitchen. This, according to my partner, was on top of the pot-pourri bowl.

The spaghetti bolognaise, with mushrooms, that we consumed the next night had distinct hints of sage, garlic….and also the scents of cedar, jujube and rose…a memorable feast.

*oooh look at me and my big words

** I haven’t and will deny I have if you say I have

*** Funny story, well I think it’s funny anyway. I replaced the TV as it had started slowly dying, taking ages to power on etc. So I bought a 43 inch LED TV, that turned out to be faulty, so I returned it. Then when I got the new one I noticed 43 inch 4K tvs weren’t much more expensive, so I bought a 43 inch one of those. THEN I noticed that the price difference between the 43 inch 4K tvs and the 49 inch 4K tvs wasn’t that great so I upgraded it. I have kept the old TV as I believe it will still work, further down the line. But the remote control is missing. I now believe that it is stuck inside one of my numerous returned TV boxes in a warehouse somewhere in the UK. Oh and yes, my partner did go mental at me for swapping TVs four times.

My Daughter Loves Sole Food

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children, diet, food, Humor, kids, musings, Parenting

Remember the guy from There’s Something About Mary, Dom Woganowski? He was the fella that was obsessed with Mary, despite his protestations to the contrary, to such a degree that when she came back on the scene, he developed a skin condition. He was caught out at the end of the film, sniffing Mary’s shoes.

My daughter is only 20-months-old and, last time I checked, the named father on her birth certificate isn’t Dom Woganowski . It wouldn’t be, he’s fictional.

That being said, she does have some very strange shoe-related appetites.

In what may be a criticism of us her parents, and the diet we are providing her with, she has taken to removing her shoes, taking out the soles and then sucking and chewing on them. Clearly we are failing in our duties, and are not giving her enough ‘roughage’.

She usually does this bizarre little stunt at the end of a long day of running around, falling over and generally working up a sweat. So they have her ‘stank of the day’ on them.

She has yet to fully digest a sole, to my knowledge, and being as I’m generally the one cleaning up her exit I should know. Despite this, there are now several pairs of shoes with soles missing. So either her digestive juices are such that no Clarks’ branded sole can withstand them, or she’s secreting them somewhere, perhaps for a midnight snack.

It’s just a phase, I told myself at first, but it’s been going on for a while now, and she’s even started to branch out. I caught her the other day midway through removing the missus’s soles from her work shoes. Yummy. In another post on here I mentioned how she was watching a guy, who had been sleeping rough at a castle, gather his things and relocate. Now I’m thinking she may just have been hoping he’d leave his shoes, so she could have a mid-morning snack.

This will hopefully end soon and I can breathe a sigh of relief, and her mum can stop going ‘Urgh!!!’ every time she puts her feet inside shoes with slather-slimed-soles. But if it continues where will it end? Will she base her dating decisions on the fetidness of her potential suitors Hush Puppies?

At least we can be confident either way, whether she stops or continues, that she won’t be lonely when she’s an adult. After all, there are thousands of fetish clubs dedicated to all things sweaty-sole related, and she’ll be right at home with all the other shoe-obsessed freaks.