c'est trop bien!

 

The Pipotame (aka, Progeny) really made great strides with his French this summer. He loved his French summer camp, though I didn't hear the kids speaking French very often. But one day he came out of his classroom gurgling, 'rrrrruh rrrrruh rrrrrruh' with a perfectly French 'rrr' sound, and I knew we had it made.

Three weeks in Corsica/Paris with his older sister sealed the deal. By week two, he was running around exclaiming, 'oh, c'est trop bien!' (oh, that's too great!) whenever something worthy of childish delight occurred. He ran with the village summer kids and was accepted. He tried to communicate with them in French, and absorbed any corrections we made to his grammar without a blink, but he rarely made the same mistake more than twice. Pretty great for a three year old.

The French have a pretty strict view of how children should behave by a certain age. When he was 1.75 (that's one and three-quarters years old, for you traditionalist writers out there), we were in Paris for Christmas. Nico and I had severe upper respiratory infections (can you say, walking pneumonia, mama? I thought you could. At least the Boo was just snotty), so we went to the doctor's. Nico didn't want to see her, and was clingy and a bit loud about the whole thing. So she proceeded to read me the riot act about how he was 'too spoiled' and I needed to cut the apron strings right then. When she finally wound down, I protested that he wasn't even two yet. She looked at the forms we'd filled out, and hemmed a bit. She retracted her statement and allowed as how his behaviour was perfectly acceptable, but that by three, I should make sure he's grown out of it.

Oh please.

But at least she looked momentarily embarrassed about it.

So folks would raise their eyebrows at some of his antics. My inlaws and husband were less than sympathetic to his tantrums in the first week. I tried to explain to them: he just left his American grandparents, we had a long flight over and missed our plane to Corsica (very upsetting for the Boo, who wanted his papa), and now he's jetlagged and thrown into a culture where he must speak a language he has never used for communicating, in a completely new place, with a whole new set of rules and tons of people to deal with. He's a little overwhelmed!! Cut him some slack.

The inhabitants of the village stopped raising their eyebrows once they found out he was only three. See, my guy is big, and composed, and coordinated, for his age. His great-grandmother H. thought he was four or five. Most folks do.

He started pretending to talk on his toy telephone. In French. He talks in his sleep. In a mixture of French and English. When he doesn't know a word in French, he says the English one with an over the top French accent.

But the best was the elevator. At his mami's apartment in Paris, the elevator is this antique, glass and wood closet with double doors and a little green fold down seat. And every time we went out, I asked him to do what the little black button said to do: appelle l'ascenseur. And every time I said that, Nico did what I asked. His little boy voice would pipe up and call out, 'Ascenseur!! Ou tu es?'

Because I'd asked him to call the elevator.