The American Library in Paris offers a fairly significant amount of children's programming for its size. There are story times for toddlers a couple of times a month, a weekly story hour for preschoolers (actually there are two of them, but they're the same) and Saturday afternoon activities for elementary aged kids. Three weeks of the month are typically games or read-alouds or something like that, and I generally end up deciding that it's really not worth the hassle of going into the city for it. Once a month though, they do something bigger. In September, they brought in a children's entertainer. In October, it was a Halloween Party. This month they had a magician come and do a magic show for the kids.
Backtracking a bit, I found out about the magic show at the beginning of the month, and had completely forgotten about it when I decided to take the kids to the library on Wednesday. (I normally try not to go twice in a week, since the train gets expensive and it's fairly time consuming.) When I remembered on Saturday morning, I decided that we would only go to the magic show (which the kids didn't know about) if I could figure out a way to combine it with a trip to do something else in the city.
After doing a little bit of thinking and poking through tour books, I remembered that the Musée National de la Marine is located right across the river from the Eiffel Tower, which means that it's only about a 15 minute walk from the library, even at Cherry speed. (And even when being accosted every 10 steps by people who want to sell you key chain replicas of the Eiffel Tower (3 for 1€).) I told the kids my plan, and they immediately announced that it sounded boring and they wanted to go to a playground instead. I observed that it was raining, so all of the play equipment would be wet, and sent them to different rooms armed with tour books so that they could read about the museum. Five minutes later, they emerged. They now wanted to go the museum. (It probably helped that I told them that we wouldn't be going to the magic show if we didn't. There are, unfortunately, no good playgrounds near the American Library, at least so far as I know.)
We rushed a little bit to catch the train (and ended up missing in anyway), and it wasn't until I we were seated on the following train that I realized that I had forgotten to bring my ipod, which meant that we would have no idea what time it was in the museum. Oh well, the magic show was scheduled for an hour, so perhaps it wouldn't be the end of the world if we were a few minutes late? Sapphire quickly disabused me of that notion. We would have to be on time for the magic show.
We got to the museum and headed inside, and then back outside because the vigipirate (security) guy didn't approve of Cherry's stick. Back inside, buy tickets, and into the museum. According to the time on the tickets, we have about 50 minutes in the museum if we're to make it to the magic show on time. Cherry liked the paintings of sinking boats. (She also wants to look at pictures of burned cars on the internet.) Sapphire and Ezio liked looking at the ship models and the figure heads. Our time felt very rushed, because we really didn't have any idea how long we were spending, and we ended up leaving before anyone was really ready. (Except Sapphire, but that was only because she was so worried that we were going to be late for the magic show.)
We ended up getting to the library 10 minutes before the show was supposed to start (should have remembered the ipod) and found seats where we could see. Well, Sapphire and Ezio found seats where they could see. I found a chair in the back, and Cherry sat on my lap. She didn't want to go up to the front unless I went with her, and I couldn't go without blocking the view of the kids, so we sat in the back. She wasn't really in the target age range for the show anyway. Ezio "won" a DVD of the magician because he was the kid with the closest birthday, and then the show began. Sapphire watched the whole thing (though she was bummed at the end because she hadn't been chosen to help with any of the tricks, and some of the kids in the front had been chosen multiple times). Ezio watched about half, then found an Asterix book and came and read by us. And Cherry and I pulled books from the bin of board books that we were sitting next to and read for the entire time. (I am extremely glad that she's past the board book stage. Generally speaking, they are really dull.)
Somehow, all of the kids ended up picking out books to check out, despite having been told that they weren't allowed to, and so we ended up toting books home with us. Fortunately I was able to borrow a bag from a friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment