Good grief.

She got up and wandered into our room at six o'clock, after finally going to sleep after ten thirty. We took her into our bed, and twenty minutes later I got up because having someone gently stroking my arm while I'm trying to sleep is enough to drive me batty. (One of the reasons I don't want to teach primary is because I hate being poked.) Now she's sitting on my lap, fiddling with one of her stickers and happy as a clam.

I may try to nap while she's napping this afternoon, but that usually doesn't work for me, so we'll see.

At least this means she will probably nap.

Les Filles du Roi

For the first time since finishing my degree, I'm reading a novel in French. I got it from the public library, young people's section, and it appears to have never been read before.

It's from a series of books published by Scholastic and designed for preteen girls, called Dear Diary. It tells important stories in Canadian history from the point of view of the people who lived them. This story is about a young girl who becomes a Fille Du Roi (Daughter of the King) in New France in 1666. These girls were young women with few means to get married in France. The King provided them with their passage and a good dowry for a farmwife, on condition that they marry a Canadien when they arrived. Some were as young as thirteen, but most were between sixteen and twenty. The girl in this story is fourteen.

My knowledge of this part of history is pretty good. New France is one of the grade seven units, and I've taught it now three times. Still, I'm picking up a lot of details that either aren't in the grade seven material, or were glossed over because my students weren't up to them. (These are kids who, when asked to draw a diagram of Quebec City in 1660, drew cars and paved roads. That was AFTER I'd shown them and told them about transportation methods and the way people lived there. So it's not surprising some of the finer details got lost in those classes.) More importantly, I'm renewing my acquaintance with aspects of French vocabulary and usage that I'd almost forgotten. English has a tendency to take basic verbs and add words to them to create more detail - go up, go down, go around, etc. French doesn't do that - they will take a noun, add "er" to it, and make a new verb to describe what they mean. So, instead of the dog following at someone's heels or coming to heel, you have the verb "talonner." It's a good review.

I think I've figured out who the fille du roi is going to marry, and it's going to seem rather strange to a modern reader - the idea that she will become a stepmother to a girl four years her junior, when she herself is only fifteen, is just weird.