Life is a bag full of cherries...

"Mom, take a picture of the cherries!" That is what Abigail requested, I decided her presence improved the picture, you can be the judge. After picking up Andy from school, we were re-tracing our steps of our walk earlier, and we decided to buy a big bag of cherries to go with our pizza and mergeuz frites sandwich.

We stopped and ate at the park at some church near Andy's school. Then we let the kids play for a while on the toys. It was our 3rd park of the day.

This was the fruit rouges tart that we ate for a mid-morning/put-off-lunch snack. Whenever I purchase food, Avery knows. If I don't immediatley bust out a piece for her, she starts grunting. This time was no different. It helped a little, that I tool the picture with the food on her tray.

The first park we stopped at was the Arenes de Lutice. It is an ancient arena from the 3rd century, when this was a Gallo-Roman stronghold, long before Paris was Paris. The arena was discovered over 100 years ago when they were digging a metro line. Now it's a park. The arena was cool, and there was a nice-sized park adjoining it. We ate lunch on one of the staircases befire heading to the park. For lunch, we hunted down a boulangerie I read about on the internet that was also on the walk I had planned today. We had the yummiest dessert bread--escargot canelle: cinnamon snails (think cinnamon rolls). They were made with croissant dough and filled with a creamy cinnamon filling....Needless to say, we went back with Andy tonight to buy more and eat for dessert once we got home. The other breads we bought, also on the reccomendation of the article I read, were excellent. I love French bread of all kinds!
We met the nicest American couple and their cute 14 month old son, Harry, there. We had a great time swapping sites and stories. I really enjoyed the time we spent together and we may even meet up this weekend at the kids museum we like so much here. They loaned us sunblock, we told them some great parks to go to, it was a great exchange. It was fun to share why were in Paris and how well everything has worked out in answer to our prayers.

Other fun moments of the day: our walk started off near this church, St. Etienne. We went in and among all the other cool things, saw a beautiful sculpture of Christ being placed in the tomb by His friends. I was reminded of Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin's conference talk a few years ago, "Sunday Will Come." It was all about how there are "Fridays" in all of our lives, but there is also the beautiful promise of "Sunday," just as Christ was resurrected on that day, to the astonishment of all. http://lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-646-11,00.html
We passed this beautiful courtyard and I thought of Lindy and wished she were there to see it. It looked just like something she would paint if she could get the right picture. I put my camera through the gate, but as we left, a lady who lived there went in, and I bet we could've followed after and taken pictures.At the second park we were at, again, at some church, Warren discovered this toy. You sit in it and your body weight pretty much just keeps you going, and going, and going...
We passed this shoe store and I stopped to look in the display windows. Avery was so excited. She was pointing and making all sorts of sounds about the shoes. She really likes shoes, and she needs new ones, since she has worn holes in the ones she has on here, and on Sunday threw one from her other set down somewhere while we walked home from church. She does that a lot, but usually she would immediately cry or grunt frantically to let us know. Or some nice passerby would notice and bring it to us. It happened at least 50 times, so I suppose I can't be shocked we lost it. I'll let you all know how buying shoes here goes once we do it...tomorrow.
Total steps today: 17,936
French word: monter (verb): to come up, to get on, to ascend, to climb, to mount