My office sits on the second floor of our home facing south into the garden. A few feet from my desk, a sliding glass door opens up to a balcony from which I can see the ocean when the sky is clear of clouds. Today I was in the middle of revising a set of technical documents when I saw Nina out of the corner of my eye. A small, smiling head growing out and upward from a polka dot-speckled mustard sweater seemingly suspended in air and peeking at me from the balcony’s exterior. I had to do a few takes before I realized she was sitting in her old hiking backpack (purchased off Craiglist when we lived in Vermont and put to so much good use) and strapped to Romain’s back as his head soon appeared, and the two could not stop laughing. Nina had a package in her hands from the mailbox, and Romain had strapped her into the hiking backpack in order to hoist the two of them up a 10-foot ladder to hand-deliver the envelope to me.

Thus begins the absurdity of day two of a 15-day confinement in France. Today’s digest of all things absurd includes the following:

— I hand-wrote my attestation de déplacement dérogatoire in pen in the hopes that I can simply use a pencil to make updates/erase/make updates again without having to recreate a new form each time I might need one. Today’s motif was for a déplacement bref, a proximite du domicile, liés a l’activite physique individuelle. This basically means I checked off a little box on my home-made permission slip to leave the house with the expressed purpose of going for exercise. The fine has gone up to 375 euros if you are caught without documentation. Though I doubt that I’m going to run into gendarmerie in the woods, I’ve had stranger things happen.

— The weather has been PHENOMENAL the past two days, yet we can’t leave the house to meet friends for a BBQ or have a picnic at the beach or take a walk along the port. You have to remember that it has literally rained every day since October here, so it’s almost a slap in the face that the sun starts to beam down on us when we can’t get very far.

— Romain’s week-old nub of livarot. Each time Romain has pulled his cheese box of livarot out after dinner this week, Nina’s ca sent mauvaise reaction has gotten more intense. Today the smell literally knocked her out of her chair, leaving one hand holding a spoon covered in chocolate pudding and another holding her chunk of bread that she dips into this pudding (this is my child) while she buried her head in my arm. The livarot looked like it had been in the package I received in the mail today and run over by the mail truck a few times before being put in a hamman to sweat out years of built-up impurities. Yes, a beat up, foul, sweaty piece of cheese. Put on our dinner table by choice. I watched Romain eat up every last bit as Nina fought every urge she had to shout out a disgusted BERK at her papa.

More confinement tales to come. I’m admittedly falling asleep every 5 seconds over here, so I’m going to go confine myself to bed.