Grands

Cheese in a hotel.

The Grandparents arrived in Clermont just as their marriage odometer was clicking over to 40 years.  It was a low-key celebration but the goon and coon were superb, and the company obviously without peer.

Champers in a nearby apartment.

Their arrival coincided with start of semester, which is to say my debut as a French lecturer.  Thus, I could fret comfortably about my grammar without worrying about dinner. 

Incidentally.. My French?  Just precisely good enough.  For instance, it was three weeks before I realised I didn't know the French verbs for 'add' and 'subtract'.  That this is even possible is testimony to how little we use them in mathematics, I guess.  But I had few moments of complete incoherence, so long as I stuck to my familiar abstract territory and didn't wander into the neighbouring minefields of pendulums, shock-absorbers, geological formations, or philosophy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was being a metro train.

A #419 metro train, to be precise.  Actually, this was a little out of character, since usually we were all buses.  He referred to all of us by our route numbers only for weeks.  Gran was particularly amazed at his dedication when Ian cried in bed and Jinu ran in urgently yelling, "the number 5 bus is crying!!"  I think the paediatric OT in her was trying to suggest the gentle end of some kind of spectrum.  Grandpa helped put this in context.

There was considerable discussion about the proper order of the colours.  The only canonical solution, of course, was to follow the optical spectrum, with higher energies towards the top.  For the record, Jinu was in bed through all of this.

Ian has his enthusiasms too.

Like Jinu he seems to be a big fan of Gutenberg technology.  But he has also continued his early sincere interest in face-staring.  Much more so that I remember with Jinu.

His other thing is a constant demand to be involved.  His gaze from his pad on the floor follows us across the room, until he cries when we step out the door.  It's impossible to eat dinner without him.

Cute!

Wearing thin.

It was pretty darn nice to have dinner served for us every evening.  I slowly regained the art of adult conversation in the evenings, between reports of Jinu's idiosyncrasies of the day.

Actually, in looking back through the photos around the house, I started to notice a pattern.

Interesting that they reflect exactly the pairings of HJ and me with the lads.  I'd always assumed that our separation into teams was just a matter of practical necessity -- HJ being the one with the boobs, and Jinu being glued to what's left.  But now I'm starting to wonder if there's something deeper at work.  Could it be that I just don't find babies as engrossing?

But I digress.  Apart from adult conversation, one of the other perks of grandparents was that I drank more wine in September than during my entire time in France to that point.  And that despite my resolution on arrival in wine-land to sink more plonk at home.  HJ took the wind out of that resolution by getting pregnant.  Grandpa, on the other hand, was incorrigible.

Gran whole-heartedly took over Jinu's lunch-time school pick-up, enjoying watching the dynamics of the clusters of French nannies and American Michelin brides who gather outside the school gates at 11:25.  Then, when the teachers went on strike, she joined the army of French grandmothers which is dispatched on such occasions, filling the parks and the playgrounds of France.

Actually, the Grands did pretty well for French clichés, getting a teachers' strike, a public servants' strike, and a week-and-a-half public transport strike in their one month here.  Plus, they got plenty of rude and disinterested service in the shops, which kept them happy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was introducing Gran and Grandpa to the sights of Clermont-Ferrand.

Occasionally, Gran and Grandpa would sneak off to a nearby town alone for a slightly different viewpoint.

Grandpa investigates the spa-town suburb of Royat.

And then before you know it, it's over, and they're gone.  Jinu, forewarned that we'd be seeing off Gran and Grandpa's train at 8:00am the next morning, woke up at 3:00 screaming in fear that we'd missed them.  Or that we'd missed the train.  It can be hard to ascertain his priorities.

But it was great, eh?  Ian turned three months two days later, and the really hard part was over. 

Some random unexplained photos to finish off.