This is how you kill 3 birds with one stone. Entertain your 3 year old, spend time with your 3 year old, and work on your French. #Disney+, you are so awesome!!! I highly recommend supporting this “ultimate streaming destination”. (Especially considering that Disney parks alone brought in about 6 billion in revenue in 2019 And the projections for the parks for 2020 and 2021 look like mere pennies in comparison to this number. Very sad.)

My love affair with learning French started when I visited Paris for the third time. I guess like they say, third time’s a charm. I have a decently good command in German and Spanish and literally spoke no French. I was in Paris in December of 2018 with my family (we had all four kids with us on this trip) and my mother-in-law.  We stayed in a residential apartment in a residential/non-touristy city street in Paris and we could see the Eiffel Tower and it’s beautiful sparkle every hour on the hour from all of our bedrooms. Even the grocery store below us on this street was very local and non-touristy. I met our “neighbor” from across the hall in the elevator and she had lived in Paris for 30 years (from Iran, I believe, I would have to go back and look). She was a piano player and teacher. It was such a great trip. Great memories! We brought a big stroller and a small stroller to the very top of the Eiffel Tower (not even the almost top, but the tip top). I think we somehow broke some rules there. I held my one year old asleep in my arms until they felt like they were falling off just so I could look at the city below a bit longer with Josie Jane, who was four years old at the time and fell in love with Paris too. She hasn’t stopped talking about Paris since then. The French food was like nothing else in the world.

“Atlanta is the most perfect place to live”…said a very rich, elderly, Atlanta developer that I brought one of my commercial real estate clients to meet with and discuss buying his iconic building around 9 years ago. We asked him, how so? He said “There are 87 (nonstop) flights between Atlanta and Paris per week, averaging 12 per day.” And then he said something like…Sometimes I just hop on a last minute flight on Friday and wake up and have breakfast in France. A French press and French onion soup at a cafe on Champs-Élysées for lunch…watching the French go about their busy days. Then I fly home on Sunday. Josie Jane and I talk about doing this all the time.  

So, I started taking French in March 2019 and during covid-19 I have graduated into a French conversation class (where I am the worst in the class). We do one 1.5 hour zoom meeting a week. Unfortunately, I have missed a lot of French school lately with the kids being in school from home, but I was able to get back on this week and this week I learned all about Coco Chanel and her life-all learning it in French. It was fascinating, to say the least. Did you know there is evidence she was a spy for the Nazi’s during WWII? She had a Nazi boyfriend and helped them by delivering a letter to her English friend Winston Churchill. Despite all the evidence, her foundation vehemently opposes this. 

I spent three years in German conversation class and once I got to that point, it was all downhill from there on the learning curve. 

I have no interest in learning any other languages and probably won’t for the rest of my life. Once I become more conversational in French, all I want to do is improve my grammar in German, Spanish and French. 

If you have any interest in learning another language you must listen to the Coffee Break French/German/Spanish podcasts. I highly recommend them!! Thank you to Darija Pichanick for recommending this. Also Paul Noble’s method of language learning works very well for me and he teaches a handful of languages-you can listen to his books on audible while you workout or cook. It really can be relatively easy to learn another language with the right tools and time commitment (years if you’re learning outside of the language of the country). 

This is McKenzie last night in her new Minnie-Mouse dress she got for her birthday. She was so proud. She loves Minnie so much!!