Saturday, June 12, 2010

Of Dinners, Gnomes and Secret Societies

The Longest Dinner.

We had some of Frédéric's cousins and one of his coworkers and their families over for lunch last Saturday. The first guests showed up around 12 pm and the last ones left at 10:30 pm. We stretched lunch into dinner when almost everyone was still there at 8:00. The kids played some in the pool, and the adults played Farkle in between lunch and dinner. We enjoyed the 80° weather, which we have not seen since, to our great dismay but not to our great surprise. The 10 1/2 hour dinner is, if I'm not mistaken, a new record for us. The previous record, attained last summer, was 9 hours.

The Laundry Gnome.

This is for you, Jordan. I have a laundry gnome at my house. He's not the best at folding, but he tries. And he is cute, and I don't even have to say the rhyme to get him to work.

Visiting a Friend.

The boys and I went today to visit a friend of mine who lives near Reims and whom I hadn't seen in over 6 years - not sure how that happened. She had a 5-year-old I had never met before, and she had never met either of our boys. We had a great afternoon catching up, and Benjamin was NOT happy to go home afterwards. Both boys were kind enough to fall asleep in the car on the way home.

The Evening Flea-Market at Longpont

Most flea markets in France are held on Sundays, which means we never get to go, since we are at church if Frédéric is not working. Longpont has the right idea; they have theirs starting on Saturday evening, so we went to check it out tonight. The Abbey makes quite a backdrop to the flea market.

We saw these interesting characters walking around. Some of them spoke English, but we have no idea where they were from, who they were or what they were doing there. I suppose we could have asked, but we didn't. Frédéric and some other people seemed to think it must be some type of "confrérie" (a sort of club, guild or secret society; a term which Wikipedia says can also be used "in a joking manner by an association with a public-relations, folkloric or humoristic purpose").

And Benjamin did not want to leave the flea market without this. We gave in, since it was at least cuter than the dingy, beat-up, orange recycling truck he wanted at the last flea market we went to (and which we did not get for him).

4 comments:

Emiley said...

What is the gnome rhyme?

Ryan said...

I'm guessing it looked like the perfect anti-spider guardian.

Jordan said...

Sorry, I was at camp for a week, but now I can tell you the rhyme is:

Laundry gnomes, laundry gnomes,
come out of your homes.
Come do my laundry
and...what rhymes with laundry?

Then they come out and wash all my clothes, though Kacey prefers to do the laundry now, so sometimes I get them to wash the dishes.

Emiley said...

Awesome! I need to see if I can get laundry gnomes to come to my house.