La Rentree

Ecole Primaire, Pont du Loup

SPOILER ALERT! 
We survived the first day of school in France.

7:00 The alarm rings. Boy1, of course, has been awake for an hour and is watching something on Netflix. Boy2 dashes across the living room to pick up his device so that he can play a game.

7:30 We see a rainbow over the next ridge. That's a promising sign for the start of the new school year. Still, I cannot eat breakfast and just sip a cup of tea. The Boys listen to music and jabber while eating apples and peanut butter. No more toast and Nutella for breakfast on school days because they need something substantial enough (read: less sugar) to last until lunch time.

8:20 After meeting Belle Mere downstairs, we walk to the village school. A little more than 60 kids across five grades. The Boys are quiet. It's starting to rain lightly.

8:25 We sit on a bench in the schoolyard. About 10 feet away is the Danish couple and their sons, who are also new and speak little or no English. We try to make the Boys laugh, but their smiles are weak. I have them give me kisses now so they don't get embarrassed by the public display of affection for their mom.

8:30 Boy1 joins the end of a line of students that is led by his teacher to the classroom downstairs. With windows on two sides overlooking the river, it seems cheery on this gray day.

8:32 Boy2's teacher, the principle of the ecole, has them line up, too. Boy2 holds my hand and we stand at the end of the line. He won't say a word. I tear up and hide behind a tree, overwhelmed by my anxiety on their behalf and the realization that today is the first time in two months that they will be away from us and each other.

8:35 We stop at the brasserie next door for a coffee for me and hot chocolate for Hubby and Belle Mere because it seems the French thing to do. A few other parents are here, too, along with the mayor, the assistant mayor, and the school bus driver. The Danish couple is here, too, but we don't speak to them because we haven't yet been introduced and that is not a French thing to do.

9:15 Hubby and I return home and try to find work to keep us busy while we try not to imagine the anxiety, even tears, that may be happening 300 feet away.

10:30 I hear the sounds of children playing. I cannot see the school--the old hotel is directly in the way, darn it!--but I assume there's some sort of recess happening.

11:45 We walk back to the ecole to pick up the Boys for lunch. There is a parents' waiting area with benches just outside of the playground; the gates are locked when school is in session and the teachers have the key. The Danish couple are already waiting. The woman introduces herself and tells us that they vacationed here for 10 years before deciding to move here over the summer to run a cycling business. "This is our adventure, not theirs," she says, which encapsulates the guilt we are all feeling about dropping our children into school in a foreign country.

12:00 Boy2 emerges second in line from his classroom. His eyes light up when he sees us, and he walks calmly through the gate to my waiting arms.

12:05 Boy1, also second in line, runs up the stairs to the playground. He's racing another student and seems to forget that he's coming home for lunch rather than going to the cantine. When I call his name, he stops short, looks confused for a second, and then walks over to where we are waiting. An embarrassed one-armed hug is all I get, and for even that crumb I am grateful.

12:07 We cross the bridge as Boy1 tells us how easy he found the math lesson. Decimals, negative numbers, yada yada yada.

12:20 Sitting down to lunch, we ask for status reports. To our surprise, they can't stop talking, interrupting and talking over each other to tell us about their morning. Boy1 reports that it was a little scary at the beginning, but he's sitting next to a bilingual boy with a British mom and the Danish boy who hasn't yet spoken. There are three "grades" in his classroom, but they all do basically the same lessons. (We believe that they will eventually be grouped by ability.) Then recess, during which he played soccer, and then math. There was some English practice during math, so a boy next to him helped write the French numbers and he helped with the English numbers.

     Boy2 reports that they sat in a circle and introduced themselves, then did some writing, and then played a game with their pencil bags that Pierre (the teacher/principle, who allows students to call him by his first name!!) likes to play. He's short on details, but that's nothing unusual. The teacher spoke "a little more English than I was expecting, but I didn't find myself struggling." RELIEF. And when did he start using words like struggling?

12:50 Lunch over, the Boys get 30 minutes of tech time, followed by quiet time that isn't very quiet but is at least technology-free.

14:05 We walk Boy2 back to school. Today, his group has a 2.25 hour lunch break on Tuesdays, although most days will be only two hours. When it's time to return to school, he runs down the stairs saying, "This has been pretty good for a first day of school. Really good!" We cannot keep up with him on the walk across the bridge.

14:40 We walk Boy1 back to school. Today, his group has a 2.75 hour lunch break, but he too will usually have only two hours. We walk across the bridge and see that his class is already lined up. A child's voice calls out his name and Boy1 and Hubby run ahead. As he takes his place at the end of the line, two boys move back to join him and clap him on the back.

15:00 Hubby and I get back to work, this time working a little more frantically to get something accomplished in the 90 minutes available to us. But who am I kidding? I write this post. Hubby takes Belle Mere to the grocery because we need bread and it is having a sale on wine. "Buy as much as you want!" I say. "Or as much as you want?" he asks. "Yes, buy as much as you would want and then keep going until you have as much as I would want."

16:30 Back at school, Hubby and I wait for the children released for the day. Boy2 muses that the afternoon was "really pretty great" and Boy1 describes how he and his "new best friend" worked together on reading a text this afternoon using Google Translate. We changed into swimsuits and spent an hour at the river. The water is growing colder, but so far it's no match for my Minnesota Boys.

Belle Soeur and I discovered today that every school seems to be able to create its own schedule, so while La Cousine starts at 8:30 as well, she goes home for lunch at 11:30, returns at 13:30, and her day ends at 15:45. For now, the Boys will be coming home for lunch, staying in the cantine only on Tuesdays. Le directeur suggested that we ease them in to full days at school, starting with one day a week and then increasing as they feel comfortable.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, so school ends at 11:45. I believe that Wednesdays used to be a day off and students would attend classes on Saturday morning, but now the two are reversed.

I did not expect such a happy first day of school in France, and I'm grateful that there were enough bilingual kids in this tiny village to make the transition easy. But they are still in the novelty phase of this transition. Soon that will wear off, they will not speak or understand as much French as they need, and they will become angry and disillusioned. We will have to help them through that phase somehow, and I am already expecting a repeat of the refrain "I HATE THIS VACATION!" that we have heard so many times before. (My response: "This is not a vacation. This is your LIFE.")

For now, we are counting the days until the Toussaint holiday in October, when the kids get two weeks off and we get to see Les Cousins again.