The Peoples' Birthday Weekend

The weekend was really good and we had most of the grandparents and au pairs across from Biarritz for cheese and chocolate cake to celebrate Maxime’s birthday. In actual fact Maxime’s birthday is today, the 5th, but we told him it was yesterday for the sake of simplicity…such blatant manipulation of the population felt like I was being some autocratic Soviet or Ex-Communist government, but on reflection it definitely served a (worthy) purpose. I hasten to add that I do have the people’s best interests at heart, and this is definitely not a case of me plundering my country for my own ends; in fact the only plundering done this weekend was Maxime who ended up receiving a huge number of presents, (virtually all of which seemed to be related to the Walt Disney Pixar film “Cars”),…hmmm there go our attempts to avoid having a spoilt brat. As it turned out Maxime was an absolute delight with his presents – he took his time opening each, and played with it before opening the next. He also spontaneously went around the house just before bedtime to thank people “for the day”, and give them each a kiss – it was such a good and heartwarming performance on his part, that only now do I realize it was just another delaying tactic to avoid going to bed (with his new “Cars” night light of course). That boy really is nobody’s fool.