Dress like Nor Day

Hey guys, remember the good old days when you were rad and dressed up for my birthday?  Some of you blog followers remember.  Welp, it's my birthday again tomorrow.  Those stupid birthdays just keep coming.  So here's my request: for my birthday please wear something you think I'd wear and send it to me.  Take a day off from normal, or at least just put something unconventional on and take a picture and send it to me.  Send via email or text (if you know me for realsies) or comment on fb or post on your instagram.  Whatever, just get it to me.  I am straight up asking for love in the form of a picture gift.  Indulge me.

Here are some wacky pictures for inspiration.  And HERE is a blog I wrote about how I put things together.  

Goth accents, as much as possible:

Accessorize with babies:

If you find it in a deep dark closet, put it on:

Unabashedly match your teaching material just like Ms. Frizzle:

Leather jackets for everyone or bust:

Cheetah, punk bands, gold studded anything (again accessorizing with baby):

Those colors don't match?  Sure they do:

Pink, duh:

Rainbow and tie dye:

Always boots, combat and Docs are best:

Gotta go skiing?  Find a black onesie from the 1980's at the thrift store for $8, wear with cat hat:

Omg this is my new favorite jacket that I bought in Amsterdam but it's too cold to wear it:

So this is Jake and Judy.  Mimi invented an alter ego boy and Jude followed suit.  She calls everybody bro. Gender binaries are stupid and should be challenged when you damn well feel like it, like these silly kids did this day:

And sequins as far as the day is long, any day of the week:

So there you go.  That's how you do it.  Dress like Nor Day begins!!

TRIP 9/9 Wrapping it Up

We left Paris via train and headed back to Amsterdam in preparation for catching our flight home the following day.

On the train I taught the kids the hierarchy of poker hands and the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, fox, golf, hotel, India, juliet, kilo, Lima, Michael, Nike, Oscar, papa, quebec, romeo, sierra, tango, uniform, victory, whiskey, x-ray, yankee, zulu).  We tooled around Amsterdam and tried to see the Anne Frank house but it had a giant line and we could come back some day in the future.  Sadly, it was on the last day of our trip that we discovered vending machine hamburgers.

It was finally time to go home.  By the last day the kids could have navigated to the airport by themselves.  They could find food, they could buy tickets, they could read subway maps.  The learning exhausted all of us, but more than exhaustion I felt great pride.  Traveling abroad with my kids was one of my life goals and I accomplished it all by myself.  I've ignited the travel bug in my kids.  I'm glad that I took them at ages 9, 8, and 7 because they were young enough to be excited about everything we did and we didn't have to stay at any activity for very long.  They were gung ho. They were curious.  They knew somethings and wanted to know more.  I felt they were street smart enough to solve problems somewhat reasonably should I not be able to help them, provided they had their badges with the relevant info.  

We only had one near mishap: Jude lagged behind getting on the Amsterdam subway and I had to throw my body into the doors to prevent them closing on him.  Halfway in and halfway out I grabbed him by the hood of his jacket and pulled him onto the train.  And then I had a heart attack.  

There were few things I would have done differently.  I liked the backpacks but I think roller suitcases would have been easier.  I could also have had everyone wear heelies, that would have been fun.  They each brought two pairs of shoes and we had no issues there.  I might have bought a cellphone while I was there because I had a few service issues right when I needed my phone.  I liked having the city passes in Amsterdam and Paris because they made everything a lot smoother.  All day transit passes are worth it.  I wished I had melatonin and more benedryl, both of which I'd packed but forgotten so we had a lot of weird waking hours.  In the end I was glad I didn't have the babies with me because, though I could have done it because I do five kids all the time, it would have made for a very different trip.  I didn't feel sufficiently prepared for an emergency, but I figured these are first world countries.  As far as money, someone wisely told me that many places in Amsterdam only take cash so when I got off the plane and had 200 euros on me I was glad.  Things got a little touch and go when some funds got tied up in the AirBnB and a double charge for the Paris passes, but everything worked out.  Next time I'll try to go in more temperate weather so that we can enjoy more of the city parks but we were fairly comfortable and warm enough in spite of the weather.  Buying new hats and Silas a new jacket made me more happy than I expected because I was so sick of looking at our jackets by the time we went home.  I want to burn all of our jackets.

And then we were home.  There had been horrible snow storms while we were gone and our driveway would have been coated, but for the snow shovel fairy who came and magicked away all the snow.  But when we got home our house was absolutely frigid and took two days to heat back up.  As I was hustling around doing mom things before I could lay down after being awake for who knows how long I went into the front room to see this:

Mimi and Jude, tired enough to fall asleep in a single chair snuggling by the fire.  

TRIP 8/9 Death Beguiles Me: the Catacombs of Paris

By Wednesday we were all begging to spend a day laying around or at least not taking trains. Mimi and I walked two blocks to E. Dehillerin as a pilgrimage to Julia Child's and every other important chef's favorite culinary supply stores.

Fancy copper pots

Future Martha Stewart

It was a bit intimidating, but of course Mimi charmed the old guys who run the place and they showed her around and gave her a gigantic spoon to pose with. She purchased some crepe making supplies.
Then we did some girl time shopping nearby our hotel and went home to rest.
By that afternoon we were pretty much tripped out. We didn't have one more museum left in us. We'd had enough crepes. We'd seen the major sites and I'd tricked them into believing that I am too scared of heights to go up in the Eiffel Tower (so we just visited instead). There was a science museum that piqued our interest so we trekked over there, checked it out for an hour and resolved to come back when either we knew more French or had a whole day to explore. There was one more place we wanted to visit and at 5pm on a Wednesday night in the rain we HOPED it wouldn't have the typical three hour line.
We headed for the Catacombs. The French catacombs are one of my very favorite places on God's green earth. I don't know why I'm drawn to morbid environments but something about cemeteries and old churches just captivates me. Two of my other favorite dead people places are Kutna Hora outside of Prague where monks have created an incredible chandelier from human bones and the Chapel of the Chimes mausoleum in Oakland built by the woman who built Hearst Castle.

The greatest part about this trip has been all of the questions that invariably come from exposing children to art and buildings reminiscent of great moments in history. At the wax museum they needed to know how many people died of the plague and where it came from. At the Rijksmuseum they needed to know what made Napoleon so important. At Cleopatra's needle where the guillotine once stood they needed to know all about why they were chopping off people's heads. At Anne Frank's house they wanted to know where she was buried. And at the Louvre they wanted to know how and why all of those mummies came to live at the grand old museum.

When you talk about history you have to talk about death and in Europe that means mass death. We're talking 800 people a day dying from plague rats, 20 people an hour by guillotine for years and years, and 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler. That's a lot of dead bodies to manage. These cities are so old that they have body disposal problems. The cemeteries fill up. The grave diggers would try to bury one body and unearth ten people's bones, some hundreds of years old. And when hundreds of people are dying a day the only way to manage them is to dump them in mass graves.
So around 1772 the stench and pestilence around the cemeteries was souring the milk in the surrounding homes and the attic ossuaries around the cemeteries were so overloaded they began to collapse. At the same time Paris was filled with sinkholes caused by the miles of limestone quarries beneath the city from which all of the gorgeous chapels and buildings were built. They had taken the rock from underground and stacked it above ground and Paris was starting to cave in.
The solution presented itself: the support columns would be built in the quarries and the quarries would be filled with the ancient bones from all of the cemeteries. The cemeteries, thus emptied, would be closed and new ones on the outside of the city would be opened.
And so the sifting began. Imagine the morbid process. Because it was distasteful, the whole enterprise was done in the night. The workers would sift the land in the cemeteries and load the bones onto carts. The carts were then covered in black cloth and ceremoniously dragged to the opening of the quarries. Once there they were dumped and then stacked into patterns out of respect for the dead. Once imbedded into the tunnels a plaque saying which cemetery the bones came from was placed in front of the stacks. They are all anonymous. There are bones from every age in the history of Paris, including the French Revolution which took place in the middle of the cemetery relocation. If a grave of a famous person in French history is unknown, chances are their bones are down there -- equal if not in life then in death.
And the volume, the vastness of the ossuary is astounding. You really have to go there to see the magnitude. There are more people buried under Paris than there are living above.
So yeah, I took my little kids there. They were freaked out. We touched some bones and jumped out to scare people and were rewarded with a security tail.

You can talk to kids about history and you can watch rad YouTube videos to fill in the gaps you don't know. They can read Anne's Diary and they can see pictures. But nothing will leave quite the same impression as (illegally) handing your nine year old a human femur from five hundred years ago. That kid has seen what politics, plagues and history can do. And that, my friends, is why it's important to me to drag my kids halfway around the world.