Top and Tail

Overall the weekend was good. Events with Maxime topped and tailed the weekend nicely….

On Saturday morning I was taking inordinate amounts of time to wash my hair during a nice long hot shower back in our house in Biarritz where we hadn’t been for a few weeks. After a couple of minutes I opened my eyes and I was somewhat taken aback when I saw the blonde hair of a little naked boy who had decided to sneak into the shower as well. His cheeky little grin as he looked up made it impossible to do anything other than accept that the weekend was well and truly en route.

On Sunday night I put Maxime to bed. I tend to lie next to him to say his prayers and sing a couple of lullabies which he takes great delight in finishing off. He typically asks me to stay for a few minutes afterwards by saying, “a cote de moi papa, cote de moi”. Once you’re in situ, he then applies some form of reverse head lock which tightens as soon as you think about sneaking out of his bedroom. After lying next to him for a couple of minutes all I remember was when his arm suddenly fell down alongside my back releasing the head lock and signaling the fact that he was now asleep. When I went downstairs I was somewhat annoyed that Sandie hadn’t waited for me for dinner….but then she told me I had been upstairs with Maxime for over 40 minutes – his flailing arm seemed to have woken me!

In between these two Maxime episodes we had the first birthday of the twins. We celebrated in true French fashion which basically means that we spent all of Saturday afternoon sitting and eating extremely good food…I say we but worth noting that the twins still had to make do with their normal unappetizing baby stuff, although Gaston did seem to quite like the French patisseries that were on offer. Sunday and a trip to see Pich at the stables gave me the opportunity to burn off a few of the Saturday’s newly acquired calories, and I am sure the incoming week in India will also help because I’ve yet to find any good purveyor of fine chocolate in Bangalore. All in all a good weekend and it was nice to be back in Biarritz with the whole family. I’m already looking forward to going back for another couple of weeks at the end of October.