In which we celebrate Easter

As I assume all of you realize, Easter was this Sunday. Also, the first Sunday of April was this Sunday. That meant that we had two important things to take care of.

Easter things started showing up at the Auchan a few weeks ago (not the day after Valentine's Day), and naturally the kids were interested in checking out what was there. Easter clothing, of course, though they weren't particularly interested in that. Toys for Easter
baskets, which were more interesting, but which they weren't going to be getting. And, of course, candy. Mostly chocolate (I have now survived an Easter without jellybeans), much of it in the form of bunnies and foil wrapped eggs, but also large decorated eggs, molded bells (which evidently are responsible for delivering the Easter chocolate here in France), chocolate puppies, kittens, and bears, and last but not least, chocolate fish.

Sapphire, in her wisdom, decided that it would be a good idea to remind me to buy Easter candy several times a day, starting weeks before Easter. (In case you were wondering, none of my kids think that Easter candy is delivered by a bunny (or a bell), which makes Easter egg hunts that much easier. "Go in the kitchen and close the door. I have to hide the Easter eggs."). Since this continued well past the point at which the candy was safely hidden in my bedroom, I was forced to tell her that if she persisted in nagging me, I would have to start eating her candy.

Easter morning dawned grey and drizzly. Once everybody was up, and we had eaten breakfast, it was time to hide the chocolate eggs and bunnies. Ezio's eggs were hidden in the kids' bedroom, Cherry's were hidden in the grown-ups' bedroom, and Sapphire got the living
room. (In the States, each kids gets their own colors of plastic eggs to search for to keep things even. Since there don't seem to be any plastic Easter eggs here, I had to divide things up some other way.) Once the eggs were all hidden, the kids emerged from the kitchen and searched for their eggs. Cherry found hers first, then Ezio, and Sapphire at last managed to find the last two hidden on the bottom shelf of the corner table.

Next, everyone had to do a bit of house straightening, and then we were off to the city. We had decided that it would be a good day to go to the Orsay, at least in part because we happened to know that they had strollers available in case Cherry pooped out early. (Since she had finally deigned to fall asleep at 12:45 Saturday night, I was a big concerned about that.)

We arrived at the RER stop and climbed the steps to see a huge line waiting to clear security and enter the museum. So we followed the line back and back and back some more, until we finally reached the end. Then we watched groups of excited looking people carrying tour books rush past heading for the entrance to the Orsay, only to return later, looking far less excited about standing in line for a hour and a half or so. (The line was moving fairly well, but I would guess that if it we stretched out it would probably have been close to a half mile long.) Along the edge of the line, chestnuts sellers had set up with their shopping carts, and after we'd been in line for 30 minutes or so, (and covered perhaps a third of the distance to the entrance), one of them told us, in heavily accented English, that we didn't need to be standing in line. Because we had children, we were permitted to use the much quicker handicapped entrance. We vaguely remembered that something like that had been true 3 years ago, so I walked up to the other entrance to check. The security guard confirmed what the chestnut seller had told us, so I returned to get Blaise and the big kids (we hadn't wanted to risk losing our place in line if he had been wrong) and we all headed in through the handicapped entrance.

Once inside, we headed straight for the bookstore because we thought that we might buy a children's guide book for the Orsay. (We've already got one for the Louvre.) After perusing the selection, Blaise decided to pass on what they had (I was trying to keep Cherry occupied), and we headed out into the galleries. ( I won't bore you with a long list of the paintings that we saw. You can look at many of them on the museum's website. If you don't know anything about the museum, I'll just say that it houses Impressionist works of art, chiefly (though not exclusively) French.)

Not unexpectedly, given the length of the line outside, the museum was packed. At one point I found myself near a group of American high school students who were evidently in Paris on some sort of spring break art appreciation trip. The students were trying to convince their (art) teacher that they had already "sort of looked around a little bit" and that she should let them leave and go shopping. She was not happy about it. As we walked around the museum and ran into them several more times, the students looked mopier and mopier and the teacher looked more and more annoyed.

What else. . .

• As we were leaving, one of the security people stopped us, apparently because he wanted to tell us that we had beautiful children. He didn't seem to believe that they spoke French, but eventually Sapphire managed to convince him that they went to a proper French school.
• Some weird man kept following me around one of the galleries, ranting in French about Napoleon and socialism and hatred of the people and juries. We were very glad to escape to the next room (where we found the whiny high school students).
• Cherry really liked the room with the pink trees.
• Ezio liked the painting of the fight between humans and demons that used to hang on the wall of the French Senate.
• Sapphire seemed to like just about everything, and she decided that she was going to try all of the represented techniques when she got home.
• On the way home, I got to listen to another man tell me that his mother always said, "You get more kids, you get more problems." Since Cherry was bouncing all over the (fortunately almost empty) train car at that point, I'm not sure whether he was trying to be sympathetic or judgmental.