Noa, the sweet smell of success!

I wanted to take a minute and add a post about La Petite Noa. As Lili has been posting herself, you all have heard about what is going on with her throughout the year but I've now realized that maybe we haven't spoken enough about what is going on with Noa. In short, she is doing great. She has lots of friends, mostly American and she doesn't mind going to school... too much. Noa's biggest problem has always been waking up in the morning, and it remains the same here but once we are out the door, waiting for the bus, she is fine... usually. She is understanding a lot of French. The things she understands the best are command type words you would hear in the typical French class room: Be quiet. Get in line. Move back. Put your things away. No Talking. I'm running out of patience. You're getting on my nerves. Etc. She is still struggling to express herself, although she is speaking up more and more in class because we have now started a small reward system for such efforts (totally unfrench of us). She is a very attentive student mainly because she is scared of getting in trouble (French system working like a charm). Because she is in a French school with some British influence, she has started using words like 'bin' for trash can and 'prefer' when telling me what she wants to do, as this is the word you would use in French. In the beginning of the year, when she was just learning how to read in French and she was tying to write at home in english, she would spell things the phonetically correct French way, like 'snel mel' (accents on the e's) for 'snail mail'. She is also very keen on correcting our pronunciation. And she is right to do so, the little stinker has the best accent in the family. It would be kinder if she didn't laugh at us though while she was correcting us.

Oh, and Noa has developed a love for the extreme sport of Parcour. It is based on a military technique developed by the French Foreign Legion that involves jumping. climbing, scaling or running over all obstacles in one's path. In Noa's case this means climbing up walls, hopping on and off traffic barriers, jumping about the edge of fountains and just about any endeavor that would make an average parent cringe. This of course has turned many of our walks through Paris into an adventure worthy of an American reality TV show. Lili even suggested we start filming Noa for that purpose but this was because when I asked her to go get dressed she came back out wearing her green laundry hamper turned upside down as a "disguise." Yes, she is truly profiting from all the cultural bounties afforded by a year in Paris!