A day in Paris

At the beginning of January I started taking my 6-month old daughter to daycare. We were extremely lucky to get a place in the very sought-after "crèches" and so far it's working out really well for all of us. I think this easy beginning owes a lot to the fact that we transitioned over two weeks, starting with a couple of hours and working up to a full day.

On the very last day of the transition period (and my last Friday before going back to work full-time), my husband took off and we decided to spend the day in Paris. Being the wonderful husband that he is, he left it up to me to decide how we would spend our time.

Now normally I would head to the fabric / crafting stores, but I'd recently made a pact with myself that I wouldn't buy any more supplies before finishing my current projects and / or using up a good part of what I already have on hand.

So instead we headed to the Chatelet Les Halles neighborhood where we browsed the restaurant and baking supply stores (see links here) and left with a couple of cutting boards and some stackable plastic storage containers that I planned to use not for food storage, but for my sewing supplies (looks like I found a loophole in my no new crafting supply rule...).

We then went to Le Bistrot Paul Bert for lunch. This restaurant has been on my list for a long time, after reading about it on several of the food blogs I follow. We both ordered the sole meunière (above), one of my favorite French dishes. We skipped dessert at the bistrot and instead headed to Ladurée for ice cream and macarons. I always order the macarons glacé at Ladurée -- a scoop of ice cream surrounded by 4 chilled macarons. They try to coordinate the macaron colors with the ice cream color -- in the past I've ordered rose ice cream and it's always come with beautiful pastel-colored macarons. This time I ordered coffee and, while I enjoyed it more than the rose flavor, the ice cream / macaron color combination is one I can only describe as "1970s shag carpet". Oh well, it tasted good...

We ended the afternoon with a stroll before heading back to pick up Bon Bon. All in all, a perfect day in Paris.