In which we spend Sunday at the Cité

For the last several weeks, Sapphire has been begging me to set up an outing with the Avigads. Busy schedules on both of our parts, as well as illness, intervened, and so it wasn't until this weekend that we were actually able to get together. Elinor asked if I minded if we invited the Gelmans (another American family that is here for the year, with sons the same ages as Ezio and Cherry), and so they joined us.

The original plan was to meet at the Jardin des dunes et des vents (garden of dunes and winds), an (evidently) very cool playground at the Parc de la Villette. When we arrived, however, we discovered that the playground was closed because of technical difficulties. Apparently there are a bunch of inflatable toys there, and they couldn't get the inflater to work, so they didn't open the playground. This was a problem, because while there are lots of other playgrounds in the Parc de la Villette, none of them (at least of those that we've found) is particularly large or cool, and we had eight kids to keep happy.

Since the weather forecast for Sunday was a bit iffy, I had packed our passes for the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie. As it turned out, the Gelmans also had passes for the Cité, and the Avigads had been contemplating buying them, but had never gotten around to it. So we headed over to the museum, and I put reservations for the two parts of the children's museum (depending on the ages of the kids) on our passes and the Gelmans passes. (They had ridden their bikes, and so had to deal with locking those up.) Meanwhile, the Avigads bought their passes and made reservations for themselves at the children's museum.

Our reservations were for 4:30 (I won't do that again. Everyone (my kids, and all the other kids) was cranky by the end. Tired and hungry does not make for good sharing.) and so we had about an hour and a half to spend before going to the children's section. The Gelmans and Avigads took their kids and Sapphire and Ezio to see a 3D movie, while Blaise and I took Cherry (and the Avigads middle daughter) upstairs to the science museum. We had agreed to meet them in the mathematics section, so we spent the next hour exploring that part of the museum. (It's very nicely done. Some calculus, statistics, differential geometry, topology, etc.)

Then we headed down to the children's museum. Most people headed for the big kids' (five and up) section of the children's museum. Cherry and I, together with Caroline and their younger son, headed for the little kids' section. The idea was that we would spend time together in the museum, and I think that was true for the group at the older kid's section. Cherry, however, decided that she must start in the water section. Caroline's son decided that he must start in the building section. After 20 minutes, they simultaneously switched rooms. And so it continued through our 90 minutes in the museum. We rolled balls down ramps, tried to identify smells, and waited a long time (by three year old standards) to use the lightwriters.

We finally made it home around 7:15, absolutely starved and completely worn out.