In which we celebrate Ezio's birthday

Yesterday was Ezio's birthday. He is now seven years old. For his birthday, he got a package of Kinder Surprise Eggs and a bar of chocolate. Lest you feel too sorry for him, he also got a Disney annual pass from Grandma Arana as an early birthday present (we all did) and he has a big box of Meccano coming by post, but we had to order it from the UK since we couldn't find it here. It should arrive midweek.

Once everyone was awake and Ezio had "opened" his presents, I headed to the bakery to buy viennoiserie for breakfast: pain au chocolat for Cherry, a toursade (filled with cream and chocolate chips) for Ezio, a specialité Bréton (flakey pastry with caramelized sugar glaze) for Sapphire, and pains chocolats amandes (flaky pastries filled with a mixture of almond paste and chocolate chips) for Blaise and me. Oh, and a baguette in case anyone still had spaces to fill. Then thirty minutes of frantic housework, and a desperate attempt to get together a shopping list for the Auchan. (It's closed on Sunday, so I needed to get together two days worth of meals (and bring home the food for them).)

Off to the Auchan with Cherry, her baby, and her baby's doudou, a small pink bear. I manage to locate a shopping cart with surprisingly little difficulty, though it is the last cart in the rack, and we head into the store. I've managed to get shampoo and deodorant and am heading up the dairy aisle when Cherry says, "Where is the pink bear?" It's not in the shopping cart seat, and a quick check establishes that it hasn't fallen into the bottom of the cart. There's nothing to do but retrace our steps, Cherry sobbing the whole time. We haven't found it when we reach the entrance to the store, so I put the cart to the side, and we retrace our steps through the mall and out to the shopping cart rack. Unsuccessfully. Cherry wants to go all the way back to the apartment, but I refuse, and return to the store with a still sobbing Cherry. Perhaps we'll find it on the way home, I tell her, which seems to cheer her up somewhat. The store is crazy busy, but I manage to find what I need without running anyone down (though I come close when a toddler darts in front of my cart while I'm searching for the lettuce, which has been moved), and go check out.

We get home (without finding the bear) and I'm greeted by Sapphire and Ezio, both wearing coats and shoes, demanding to know what's taken so long, and saying that we need to leave right now. In fact, I need to put at least the perishables away first, and then everyone needs to use the bathroom, and then we can leave. We go first to Moussa l'Africain for a 3 course meal. Sapphire and Ezio split a menu, I share with Cherry, and Blaise has his own menu. (A menu, by the way, is not the piece of paper that you use to decide what to order. That is the carte. A menu is sort of a pre-selected collection of dishes, that is usually more limited than the full carte, and generally comes at a lower price. It also generally doesn't include the pricier dishes as options.) For the appetizer, or entrée, the kids had salad with corn and hearts of palm and some itty-bitty shrimp. I had a piece of chevre wrapped in phyllo, and Blaise had marinated salmon, all served over lettuce, of course. We all tried some of everything, though I'm not sure how much of my cheese I actually managed to eat. For our main course (plat), we all inadvertently ordered Mafe Boeuf, which is beef with a peanut sauce and carrots and cabbage, served with rice. (When I say that we all inadvertently ordered it, I mean simply that we had intended to get an assortment of different main dishes so that we could sample each others, but evidently weren't paying enough attention to what earlier people had ordered.) We finished with Crème Brulée au Citron Vert (crème brulée with lime) for Blaise and the kids and Tarte Tatin aux Bananes (typically it's a sort of apple pie type of dish) for me (and Cherry).

After lunch we headed for the Cité des Sciences across the street, with the goal of going to the submarine. Unfortunately, that seemed to have been the goal of many other people as well, and so we couldn't get tickets. Instead, we headed upstairs to a temporary exhibition on using earth as a construction material, where we spent a lot of time watching grains of various sizes run through hourglasses. Sapphire and I watched part of a movie on medical imaging technology. We went back to the room with the green lighting and the mirrors on the ceiling and the floor. And we called it a day and headed for home.

After a stop at the bakery on the way back (Ezio wanted everyone to pick their own little patisserie), we made it to our apartment. (We had a bit of a disagreement over the pastries. Blaise wasn't sure that Cherry should have one, since she'd eating pretty much only the dessert at lunch time, and then been a holy terror at the museum and on the train. We ended up agreeing that I'd buy her an eclair, but that she'd only get a little bit of it unless she calmed down and ate a decent dinner.) By then it was past 6:00, and time to fix dinner.

The first night that we were in the Jura last summer, we were served fondue for dinner (and a cheese course afterwards!), and evidently it made a big impression on Ezio, because that's what he most wanted for his birthday dinner. Sapphire offered to cut up the bread, and I sliced the cheeses (Comte, Tomme de Savoie, and Beaufort, plus Reblochon) and started heating the wine. Twenty minutes later we were ready to eat. Unfortunately we don't have a fondue pot, so we ate as much as we could before the cheese solidified, then moved on to dessert. (Cherry got the whole eclair, which she had nearly finished by the time I'd even had a chance to sit down with my dessert.) We sang Happy Birthday in English and French, and Ezio blew out a tea light since I'd forgotten to buy birthday candles. Then it was bedtime for Cherry and reading time for the big kids and soon they were off to bed too.