Joyeaux Anniversaire Part 3

Today we celebrate 4 crazy years of love and survival.  The whirl wind that we call our youngest son has officially turned one year older.  Based upon his outlook on life, I suspect he is attempting to live his life out in dog years, so perhaps it more apropos to place 28 candles on his cake this year.  Unlike the eldest boy (Even Steven), my youngest embodies both the Ying and the Yang.  Without dark you cannot appreciate the light, right?  It has been 4 years of trial and error and I dare say we still don’t have the formula quite right.  Either way, he is the ever vibrant pulse that beats throughout our home, and I can’t imagine our life without him.  To that end, we have celebrated his birthday Hannakua style.  Since we can’t have the traditional party as we would have back home, we have protracted the event into a weekend long celebration.  I only wonder what the fallout will be when the daily gift giving ends.  In preparation for his big day, it occurred to me that if our current travel schedule holds, the wife will never celebrate her birthday here in France.  Don’t know why that dawned upon me or even if it matters all that much, but it was one of my revelations for the day.  The marking of the youngest’s birthday also marks the beginning of the holiday season for us.  The children are on break for the next two weeks and over the course of the next few months, it would seem that they are on vacation a fair bit more than they are in school.  I believe this a blessing as their presence in the house will lessen some of the sadness inherent in the passing of this time of the year.  I myself am very fond of the winter months.  For me, life as a child was a blur during these joyous winter months.  From my birthday on, life was a delicious dance from one holiday to the next.  Halloween comes next and unfortunately it doesn’t seem that they trick or treat as they do in the West.  As this is perhaps one of my favorite holidays, missing it this year does bring with it an element of sadness.  Thereafter comes Thanksgiving . . . an American holiday which is obviously of no importance here.  Another milestone of loss and homesick sentimentality.  We have done Thanksgiving alone in the past however, so we will make the most of it . . . just the four of us.  The upside is that there will be ample left overs with fewer vultures at the dining table.  And then homeward bound once more to rekindle old friendships and lick our emotional wounds before the next installment of our adventure.

The fact that our first year here in France is drawing to an end brings with it a certain sense of accomplishment and a want for reflection.  The time spent has at moments seemed to stand still while the truth of the matter is, our first year here has flown by in the blink of an eye.  In mountaineering terms, it would seem that we have reach the false summit.  The steepest part of the climb seems to be over, but what would have appeared to be the top from our vantage point at the start was but a fraction of the total distance run.  In its simplest terms, we have survived and that in and of itself is worth celebration.  While perhaps not riding it into the ground like breaking a wild bucking bronc, we have managed to tame this beast a bit and are no longer afraid to get into the holding pen for fear our lives will likely meet with a most untimely end.  Baby steps they call it.  I don’t know that we will ever lay siege to our new lands like the Viking hoards as time is not on our side, but that is OK.  We have already grown from this experience on levels I would never have imagined and the initial goal of fully bilingual children seems attainable in the not so distant future.  Having recently resurrected the poetic words of Robert Frost, I am reminded once more of the sentiment in The Road Not Taken (La Route Non Prise):

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

                   -Robert Frost