Bonjour! Cheerio!

Hello friends! I am back from magical Europeland, and all I can say is that everyone who told us we were nuts for taking a toddler to Europe was 100% right. She didn’t nap. Like at all. But what you do except go with it, right?

Here’s the whole trip in a nutshell.

Tuesday. Overnight flight. Pshaw. This’ll be easy. My daughter will sleep, and I’ll pop a Tylenol PM and join her in no time and wait, what’s that? I’ll just stare straight ahead at the seat in front of me for 7 hours wondering when I’ll finally learn that no matter how many drugs I pump into my system I will never EVER be able to sleep on an overnight flight? Ok, yeah, that’s more likely.

Wednesday. So. Tired. Zombies in London. The tube is so not stroller friendly. Why does every mom in London seem to have a Bugaboo and the Louis Vuitton Wilshire? I must have missed the memo. We’re so tired we’ll just completely forget to bring the camera.

Thursday. Let’s go do some touristy things, like strike the exact same pose in front of Westminster and Buckingham Palace.

Friday. Tower of London day. This is now the third time I’ve been here, but whatever. Medieval castle? YES PLEASE.

I’ll switch up my “one hand on stroller” pose ever-so-slightly, just to keep them guessing. Tyra Banks would approve. Being here at the Tower really has my brain back in FOUR STONE mode. When my MC Devon is first brought to live in the castle, she sleeps in an alcove at the top of a tower, and I always imagined the stone to look exactly like this. (Click on the picture and zoom in to really see the detail).

Comfortable, huh? And then, when Devon starts social climbing (albeit against her will), she moves into a room in the castle that I always imaged to look pretty exactly much like this replica of the bedroom of one of the Henrys (the Third, I think?), minus the flowers on the walls. I’m sure the power of suggestion that comes from the fact I’ve been in this room before has something to do with it.

Saturday. Time to wake up at an obscenely early hour to catch a train to Paris so that I can spend the weekend with this lovely lady and her husband.

Yep, that’s Susan Dennard! We’ll frolic around Paris this weekend with Sooz and her husband, the Frenchman (minus the actual  frolicking because that would be a little weird). First order of business: Fall in love with these doors from the front of Notre Dame and try to figure out how I can copy this on the front doors of my house without it looking absolutely ridiculous.

Sunday. Paris-y things with Sooz and the Frenchman. The Louvre, the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees. I have pictures, but you all know what they look like. We’ll climb the bazillion stairs to Sacre Couer at the top of Montemartre and look over the city.

And then we’ll stumble across a harvest festival and drink spiced wine and watch the Junkanoo band parade through the streets. (Okay, I’m sure it’s not an actual Junkanoo band but it’s a lively French version of it and I wish I knew what it was called). We can go ahead and call this one the best day of the trip.

Monday. Yes, we’ll have plenty of time to rush over to the Eiffel Tower and take pictures before … what’s that, we’ll come to within 20 seconds of missing our train back to London and I’ll get straight up scolded by a very cross customs agent? OOPS. (Technically, this is my fault for just having to stop in a little music box store and buy a gift for my daughter). Also, behold the last picture we are able to snap before the camera battery dies.

Monday on the train. Whew. We made it. But why is my tooth starting to hurt? That’s weird.

Tuesday. Research day at the Museum of London, which is my favorite museum in all of London. Yep. FOUR STONES: PART DEUX is set to take place during the Tudor and Stuart years. The reign of Henry VIII, religious upheaval, beheadings, Shakespeare, another plague, the great fire. The Museum of London brings them all to life. Wish I had a freaking CAMERA to document some of it. Man, my tooth is really starting to hurt here.

Wednesday. Nine and a half hour flight with a toddler who won’t nap and holy hell, it feels like someone is drilling my tooth without anesthetic. Yeah.

The end! (And then I had an emergency root canal on Friday, which explains the tooth pain and why this post is only going up now even though I’ve been back for almost a week). Yep.