OUR PARIS TRIP GOT OFF TO A SLOW START.Our first whole day there was Tuesday, and we had planned to meet a friend and her son back at our vacation house (45 minute train ride from the city center) that afternoon. So we got the kids up and took the train into Paris mid-morning for a quick excursion. When we emerged from the metro, we were greeted with cold, windy, and rainy weather. We wandered around a bit and toughed it out for a photo op at Notre Dame, but got the kids lined up to say cheeze and realized just then that the camera was dead. We took a stroll through the Notre Dame and when we finished it was already mid afternoon, so we trekked back in the freezing cold to the metro and headed back to base. Paris 1, Senneff Sieben 0.
BUT WEDNESDAY WE SETTLED THE SCORE.
We took the metro early to a station directly under the Louvre and started our tour there. Let me just say that the Louvre is not an ideal place for kids...it really can't be tackled with a giant family, including a bored, screaming 2-year-old. The best you can hope for is to hit a few key exhibits and escape alive. A full-grown adult would probably have trouble getting through a substantial amount of that place in one day, so a large family has no prayer. We made a B-line for the Denon Wing, where we found the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and a number of other interesting exhibits, and after a couple of hours, found a place on the floor in the lobby to eat lunch and evacuate.
One editorial note for parents of kids: while kids are not generally appreciative of fine art, ours found enough of the - er - material - to keep their interest piqued. I don't know what it is about fine art that requires someone to be partially or completely naked, but our kids found that element particularly entertaining. Kiersten stopped at nearly every artwork featuring a pair of boobs to exclaim, "Mommy, this one is inappropriate!" After a couple of hours in the Denon wing, we were strolling through the Roman sculptures when Camden snickered, "Mom, I just saw a penis." (Really, ya just now noticed? BTW: Need to write a future post on exposed breasts in "family oriented" places in Europe.) So...Louvre conquered, photos taken, all kids still alive and well. We figured that would be the highlight of the day...but we were wrong.
It was going to get way better.
That's EXACTLY what we did at the Louvre. Seems to be the best strategy. Oh, don't worry, your kids will - in a year or two - become nearly immune to naked people (not us adults though). Especially if you do a beach vacation anywhere on this continent.
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