Friday. Our second to last day in Paris. What to do? We'd been to most of the good playgrounds, and the last couple of playground trips had been a bit of a bust, with the kids all complaining that they weren't nearly as much fun as they remembered. No one wanted to go to an art museum (though there were certainly lots of those to go see). We'd toyed with going to the Égouts de Paris, but they weren't open on Fridays, so that was out. Naturally, we could just sit at home and do nothing but watch TV and play video games, but that somehow didn't sound all that appealing. Oh, and we had to be home no later than 6:30 in order to pick up the picture from the framer's shop.
Blaise, naturally, said that he had a lot to work on and that he'd prefer to just do that, which left it up to the kids and me, so I asked them what they wanted to do. Sapphire shrugged. Cherry shrugged. Ezio said that he really wanted to go and see armor, and thus it was that we ended up at the Musée de l'Armée after a bus trip that ended up being significantly longer in practice than it appeared on my iPhone app, since we ended up getting caught in a shift change. (In Paris, this results in everybody being ordered off the bus to wait for the next bus of that particular line. In theory, the replacement bus is supposed to be following directly behind the first bus, and the entire procedure takes about thirty seconds. In practice, that doesn't always happen, and so this time we were forced to wait for ten minutes at a random bus stop for the replacement. Also in theory, the 68 bus is supposed to follow the 24 bus, not be in front of it. There went another 10 minutes at the transfer.)
In any case, after the griping about the buses, we did eventually end up at the museum, where they had moved the ticket office to the front of the complex instead of the back. (These details, incidentally, are the reason that I don't have space in my brain for the important things, like which of my kids' names goes with which of my kids.) We bought tickets and started in the Arms and Armor section of the museum. Then, at Cherry's request, we headed to Napoleon's tomb. And at my request to the Église de Saint-Louis des Invalides which has never before been accessible when we've been at the museum. Then Cherry wanted to see Napoleon's horse, which is stuffed and in the modern department (which incidentally goes from 1643 to 1870). The original plan was to just walk through that section and see the horse and then get out and go to the World War I and World War II exhibit, which nobody had really shown all that much interest in, but of course the kids got distracted by the tactical reenactments of the battles and so by the time we finally left it was was only about 20 minutes before I had said we needed to think about leaving.
Naturally, at that point Ezio announced that the real reason that he had wanted to go to the museum was to see the exhibits on the World Wars and that he was very upset that we only had 20 minutes left, and so I agreed that we could leave a bit later than we'd been planning to, say 5:20, so that we would have somewhat more time in that exhibit. I told Ezio that he was in charge of pacing our trip, and that until my alarm went off, he could spend as much or as little time in any part of the exhibit as he wanted. He rushed through the entire thing (which still took us nearly the entire 40 minutes) and then burst into tears because he had felt rushed and didn't get a chance to really look at the weapons, which were, evidently, the things he most wanted to see. Also, Paris sucked and everything was stupid and boring and he wished he had just stayed home and played video games. And I always did everything that Cherry wanted. And nothing that he wanted. But of course none of that changed the fact that we really and truly needed to leave at that point or we wouldn't be in time to pick up the picture, so I hugged him until he stopped crying and then we headed for home.
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