Il ne chant pas

Maddox at age 4, just received his first report card. I kid you not. I think I may have said this before, but wow, the French do seem to take their early schooling very seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids in the petit class (Maddox is in the moyenne class) get report cards too! They actually judge to what extent they colour in the lines and are able to make a squiggle design just so. Anyway, it was of no surprise to either Mark or me that on most things Maddox didn’t even rate an “in progress”. You know, in minor things such as speaking. The teacher did admit that he will now repeat some words, and communicates with friends during play.

One of the phrases that caught my eye was this: “il semble s’ennuyer pendant les histories”. In other words, he seems bored during story time. Not a surprise, but while “ennuyer” simply means bored in French; in English, at least to me, it connotes something a little more tragic and soul-weary than just bored. It cracked me up to imagine Maddox suffering from ennui during storytime. Oh, and then there was the final line on the report card, "Il ne chant pas." Coming on the heels of the whole of the ennui deal, it just killed me.

Maddox’s class went on a field trip the other day. Literally. They went for a day-long walk, pique-nique lunches in their little sac à dos. I thought it was a really great idea – getting kids walking in the great outdoors for the whole day. Any parents who could attend were invited to come. Given that I am not working, of course I went. It sounded so sweet, you know, a walk in the provençal countryside with a bunch of cute kids. Riiight. What was I thinking? Of course what this meant is I spent the day trying to do the equivilant of herd kittens. French kittens. Non-english speaking French kittens. French kittens who speak super-fast in high fluting voices. Sheesh. I felt like I was an extra on a French-dubbed version the new Chipmunk movie – "the squeaqual" (a movie I made the mistake of going to with the kids in an effort to get more practice understanding French). Not exactly relaxing. I did learn some new phrases and got very proficient at shouting out imperatives: “Avance!” “Arrête!” “Allez!” “Restez avec nous!” Every once in awhile I would get a chance to look up and enjoy the scenery and the jewel-like sky. It was a gorgeous day, but exhausting!

Along similar lines, it had come to my attention that l’école maternelle was looking for more parent-helpers to assist with swimming outings. I was impressed that they were willing to undertake something so ambitious. I mean yikes! Taking a bunch of non-swimming kids into a pool? They do require enough parents for a 6-1 ratio in the pool, and these parent helpers need to have a basic certificate in swimming proficiency. Again, since I am not working it seems wrong not for me to help with stuff like this. So I signed up for the proficiency ‘test’ at a pool in the near-by town Sillans la Cascade. I had quizzed a couple of parents I knew who had done this test previously to make sure the test was not likely to be too complicated linguistically. They both assured me it was easy, as long as I could swim. And I figured when in doubt I could make sure I was never the first to do any particular task.

The written instructions I received ahead of time established that there were 3 basic proficiencies:
1) To be able to enter the pool (dive or jump)
2) To be able to swim (any form) 20 meters
3) To be able to retrieve an item off the bottom of the pool.

That all sounded quite easy. And for the most part it was. There were 2 aspects of it that were a wee bit more daunting than I anticipated. Firstly, the dive into the pool was to be from a racing stand. And I will tell you, for a woman who hasn’t dived(?) (dove?) (or as Mark helpfully suggested, diven?) into a pool for ages (maybe 20 years?), when I got up on that stand the water seemed a loooong way down. I was relieved to see the woman in front of me chose to jump in. I took the same chicken-way out. The only other heart stutter occurred when it was time to retrieve rings from the bottom of the pool. It turns out this task was to be done in the deep end. I had hoped they just wanted to see that one could swim under water and would do it at a reasonable depth like, I don’t know, 4 feet. Wrong. We did it in the way deep end. And for a girl with sensitive ears and a cold to boot, it seemed a long way down. But I did it. And I passed. I realize I may come to regret that.

Mark’s parents are visiting right now. The other night we watched a slideshow of lots of photos that spanned Mark’s dad’s career and travels. At some point there was a photo of two pandas humping. Mark pointed out matter-of-factly that they appeared to having sex. Maddox immediately asked what that was. Jasper (who knows exactly what having sex is because we have read a very detailed book about it to her) jumped in quickly to assure Maddox that he's really too young to know about it. (Mark’s parents, listening silently, surely agreed with her.) But, of course, Mark seized the opportunity for instruction, and gave him the very brief one- sentence version about the male penis and the female vagina and making a baby. Still, I guess it's a bit confusing for a four-year old. And so after a pause he asked, "what do they do with a penis?" (I'm sure Mark’s parents were silently appalled by Maddox’s persistence, as well as Mark’s). Mark answered, "the male puts his penis in the female's vagina." Maddox silently considered this for about 3 seconds and then said, "I want to do that."

So, while he may not graduate from French pre-school, Maddox definitely seems well on his way to growing up. After all, who cares about drawing perfect loop-de-loops when you can do that?