Presented with my lovingly prepared document, the kids were impressed. "The itinerary, including all revisions of it, is one of the main things I remember about the trip," said Alex recently when asked to share her memories for this story.
For every day of our stay there was a morning thing, an afternoon thing and an evening thing.
The average visitor stay in Paris is 48 hours, so we had time to do more than such basics as the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay and Versailles. For instance, we visited the Pantheon to see Foucault's pendulum, an early device to prove the Earth rotates on its axis and #54 on TripAdvisor's list of top things to do in Paris. We had sandwiches at the ruins of a Roman arena on the Left Bank, #217 on TripAdvisor.
I was worried about Pearl being too young to appreciate everything, but she had been immersing herself for some years in the Horrible Histories series of books, which are designed to make the past salaciously interesting for young readers, and she took a great interest in everything, even the Institut du Monde Arabe (#323 on TripAdvisor).
So many special memories were laid down in this magical week. Joel was almost beside himself with excitement when he realised you could get beer at McDonald's. Alex was almost beside herself from the effects of the cold. To the point where she was finally banned from reminding us how cold she was. She took so many hot showers to compensate that she developed a heat rash. She wasn't allowed to complain about that either.
There was the day that Daniel, sitting outside the apartment smoking, was given a few francs by someone who thought he had no home.
It all culminated in a wonderful Christmas Day when we took them to the ballet at the Palais Garnier - the opera house as seen in Phantom of the Opera. We were perched in the toppest top row in our $30 seats for Giselle and, though we've never really been a ballet family, everyone cried when Albrecht finally lost Giselle forever.
We even took them to mass at the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois (#204). What the heck, it was Christmas and we figured they should probably see inside a church once in their lives.
The concelebrated sung mass was unusually lugubrious, even by Central European standards. The sermon did not feel any shorter for being in French. The children showed little interest in the Flemish altarpiece or the 15th century statue of Saint Germain. The information that it was the tolling of this church's bell in 1572 that signalled the start of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which more than 5000 Protestants were killed, left them unmoved.
Then suddenly, Pearl who had so patiently allowed herself to be dragged for a week from gallery to museum to ballet to palace melted down and we had to go. We thought it was due to boredom and cold, and there was a definite undercurrent of sympathy for this in some quarters. However, those were not the reasons. It was only many years later that she told us the truth. Inspired by her Horrible Histories reading, and unfamiliar with the drill at church services, Pearl had convinced herself that we had brought her to a cult ceremony at the conclusion of which she would be made a human sacrifice.
And honestly, we've never claimed to be the world's greatest parents, but we would never have done that.
