Bella, Gabe and Josiah

The Musee de l’Armee. I think I could have left the big two there for the day and then picked them up for dinner. I mean, it was interesting, but there was a lot of stuff there and the different types of spears used in the battles in the 1700s just don’t hold my interest in the way that it does the boys… I literally brought my crochet with me. That way I could see stuff, but not get bored. And then we saw Napoleon’s tomb. Then I needed to do some more tourist shopping, so we headed towards a couple of shops and ended up at the Eiffel Tower again, which seemed a fitting place to end the trip.

Today was a much slower day. We started with a trip to Pere Lachaise Cemetery and while it was amazing, it felt awkward taking pictures, so this is the only one that I have. We didn’t really have much planned, so we just wandered aimlessly. We headed in the direction of Napolean’s Tomb. However, when we got there we realized that we needed tickets and were weren’t sure it was worth paying for. So we were trying to figure out what else we could do, when we discovered that Napplean’s Tomb was actually part of the war museum. Since I was traveling with three war obsessed little boys, I promptly bought tickets for the next day… We decided to head to the Jardin du Luxembourg and spent a lovely afternoon reading books, watching boats and people watching. Then we finally got tickets to get inside Notre-Dame. Apparently I did not take very many pictures, but it was so pretty!!  And then we headed back home to sleep.  

I assumed when we started this trip that we definite weren’t going to any museums because, well, boys. But then we mentioned that there were lots of museums andI asked them what the most famous picture in the world was. They both answered the Mona Lisa. I told them that was in Paris and they informed us that we absolutely needed to go. So, okay. I guess we’re taking two little boys to the Louvre… But first, we had a slow morning. And the boys bought some new hats. Then we headed to the Louvre. Our first stop was the Mona Lisa. Josy was super excited, which I did not expect. But since we were there, we decided to explore a bit. Josy wanted to find a sarcophagus that he saw in the map, so we had to search the entire museum looking for it. He’s convinced we did not find it. I’m pretty sure that we did… It was a long day and we were all worn out by the end, but it was also really fun.  

For our first day back in Paris, I got us tickets to see Sainte Chapelle. I couldn’t get us tickets to Notre Dame, so I figured that we’d just Go get in the ticket-less line. Unfortunately, one look at that line said that there was no way that we’d be able to actually get into Notre Dame before we needed to be at Sainte Chapelle, so we settled for looking at the outside and figured that we’d try again later to get inside. A lot of the outside was still blocked off for reconstruction. But we got to see the most incredible stained glass at Sainte Chapelle! Then we wandered the Consierge, which was used as a prison during the French Revolution. And we found the cell that Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in. By the time we finished all of that, the fact that we hadn’t had lunch yet was very apparent, so we got a very late lunch/early dinner, went back to the house and finished Harry Potter and went to bed.