Day 9: 22/06/17 Ouistreham school trip

We all woke up late this morning and we had planned a day of just getting organised. Looking at Laurin sat typing this I wonder how many days we really would need to get organised as she still looks like chaos! Kids read to us in bed again which was nice as the last few days we've been in a rush and done this under way. Then a massive brunch and French lessons which didn't go exactly to plan.... but in a good way.

Halfway through our planned French lesson Patrick called to say that the kids we had seen sailing optimists earlier this morning seemed to be heading in our direction. Eager for the kids to at least say "Bonjour" we came up on deck. It looked like a school trip full of kids of similar age to ours had parked themselves at the top of our pontoon. We went up to say hello and I asked the teacher if the kids had some scheduled play time that we could join in. End result was we gate-crashed the school trip and the kids and I spent the next 2 hours at the beach while Patrick got on with some boat jobs.

Kids both English and French were extremely excited to practice their language skills, though AJ was far more confident than Esme on this occasion, running off with the boys and only occasionally coming to ask me how to say a certain phrase. I think the interaction was more biased in favour of AJ teaching the French kids English than the other way round but it was definitely fun. Esmé needed me with her more, and we made friends
with a French girl called Jane. We did a lot of counting shells and Esmé shared looking at some of our dual language books with her. After a while AJ was playing football and then running down towards the sea. He said I smiled at him so he thought he was fine to carry on. What I didn't realise was that he was running through the puddles and then into the sea still in his shoes and socks! He then returned with very wet feet saying he wanted to take them off! All in all a pleasant 2 hours and the kids enjoyed giving away some of our boat cards so that our new French friends could follow our blog.

When we returned to the boat we took the kids straight up to the shower block. Shower tokens are 1.60 Euro's each and we didn't have any so we put the kids in the laundry sinks! 10 minutes later and they were rather more presentable. We had a lovely visit to the harbourmaster who helped us practice our French more, and went back to the boat for some much needed downtime (AKA iPad time). When I read the Worldschooler's Facebook group there are lots of mixed feelings about kids and electronics but at the moment we would be going stir crazy without them. That 1/2 hour of quiet after lunch and just before tea just about keeps me sane. I haven't done 24/7 with the kids since they started preschool other than for holidays.

Whatever anyone thinks, this isn't a 2 year holiday. This is our life for the next 2 years. We still have lots of jobs to do in addition to educating the kids, only all that normal stuff like washing clothes and shopping for food takes much longer when you have to use laundrettes or wash by hand, and don't have a car to cart heavy bags of food home in. By now it was almost 4pm and we still needed to shop. We had found a Lidl that didn't look too far away and wanted to stock up for the next few days, so we got out the granny trolley, scooters, rucksacks and Esmé's scooter bag and off we went. Mission accomplished and celebratory ice creams eaten we made our way back and completed the long task of trying to play tetris with the top loading fridge. Finally had tea at 8pm, kids in bed 9pm, very little downtime for parents. This is exhausting... definitely not a holiday, but definitely worth it.

Over the next few days we are planning visits to Sword beach, Pegasus bridge, and Bayeux. How great an education is that!