It is hard to believe but Merci, one of Paris’ most fashionable concept stores has been out-trumped by a kid’s store. Just a stone’s throw away from Merci on the corner where the boulevard Beaumarchais turns into the boulevard Filles du Calvaire, Bonton has opened up a 800 M² new flagship shop. It is absolutely fabulous! On over 3 floors you can find clothes, clothes and even more clothes, a book shop (with a GREAT selection of books), a bakery, a sweets bar, a hair dresser, a deco area and I don’t even remember what else.
Rebecca (who used to write for us from Washington and who has, luckily for me, moved back to Paris) and I went to the opening and had a blast. The Prosecco was flowing, there was a huge counter full of hams and cheeses and little sandwiches. It was a great way of discovering the shop and the new Bonton summer collection.
Oh, did I mention that they also have one of those old-fashioned photo booths with a bucket full of dressing up hats in front of it? We also took advantage of that, though we were the only grown-ups queueing up for it in a huge line of kids…
- Emilie
BONTON
5 boulevard Filles Du Calvaire
75003 Paris
Open: Monday – Saturday 10:00 – 19:00
It has seriously been freakishly cold here in Paris. We have seen snow, snow, snow and more snow. First it was fun, then it was plain cold, and now it is just fustrating. It means that children have to play indoors most of the time and it is really hard to keep them from going completely stir crazy…
So we have been building forts, castles, caves and jungles — it is amazing how much you can do with some chairs and a couple of blankets… and some dress-up items.
One of the big hits of this winter has been a lion mask we got from the gorgeous Shak Shuka online eco-boutique. It looks great and it is amazing how much one mask can stimulate a game that is starting to go stale. I am really glad there is no one living under us right now, as I am not sure what they would think of the lioness and her cubs roaming around in the flat above them…
Check out this YouTube video featuring Julie from Famille Summerbelle cutting out, by hand, her New York map. I saw it on the Famille Summerbelle website and could not resist writing about it. The whole thing took 20 hours to make, but don’t worry, the video only lasts 2 minutes. It is seriously insane to watch — I personally would have sliced off the tip of my finger in the first minute….
I really like watching someone work with pen, paper and scaple instead of a computer, just like in the good old days.
I also have to say that I have a real soft spot for Julie’s work, especially her cut-out maps. They are lovely and full of little details which are acute observations of the cities on the maps.
England is not known for its cooking, but sometimes that reputation is uncalled for. Sure, jellied eels, deep-fried pizzas and french fry sandwiches (aka chip butties) are not to everyone’s taste, but in a cold, wintery climate a warming dish cannot be beaten. There is one thing I miss in particular from my London days: a good savoury pie.
Every country seems to have its own variation on a baked crust with a savoury filling, but it is hard to beat a good English pie… ask my children, I think they would agree.
This is my version of a pie, but any suggestions or spins on the subject are more than welcome.
Chicken Pie:
- Left over chicken from a roast chicken
- mushroom or leeks (depending on preference)
- an onion
- a can of sweetcorn (I personnally am not a huge fan, but some people do get very exicted about sweetcorn)
- chicken stock
- about 150 ml of créme fraiche
- 1-2 tablesppons of flour
- a roll of puff pastry
Pre-heat the oven to about 180 degrees. Now fry the onion gently in some olive oil. When it is nice and soft, add in the vegetables and cook them them all together for about 2 minutes. Top the mixture up with some chicken stock so that the mixture is just covered and let it all bubble away gently until the vegetables are tender. By this time the stock should have reduced quite a lot.
Add in the left over chicken. Also add in 1 to 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken up the mixture and and the créme fraiche. Taste and flavour with salt and pepper until it tastes good to you.
Put the mixture in a pie dish and cut out a lid out of the puff pastry to cover it. Stick it into the over until it is golden brown on top.
Enjoy! I normally serve the pie with a salad. Traditionally, in England, it would be served with mashed potatoes, known as Pie n’ Mash for short!
My kids love going to the cinema. The crowd, the sounds, the visual experience — a promise to go to the cinema makes them get so excited they have difficulty sleeping the night before!
Luckily enough, here in Paris, the children’s cinema scene is huge, between the Forum des Images and several yearly children’s film festivals. Cinema is so much a part of the culture over here that the city organises screenings for school classes at least once a semester.
A great cinema event here on a Sunday is the monthly ‘Pochette Surprise’ event at the Balzac, an art house cinema off the Champs Elysees. On show are a series of short classic films, some of them over 100 years old, mixed in with some classic Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and some old-school Tex Avery animation shorts. Every short is silent and the whole programme is accompanied by a musician, so even if you are completely anglophone, you will not miss out on anything… and to make it even better everyone gets a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream!
I was sitting beside a Lebanese guy at a wedding this weekend and he could not help raving about the wonderful food from his country and the Mediterranean area in general. Since then I have not stopped thinking about great Mediterranean dishes. Don’t forget: eating a Meditarrenean diet apparently makes you live longer…
So this afternoon my daughter and I got busy and made up a dinner’s worth of felafel, which we had not eaten for the longest time.
Felafel are perfect for kids, easy to eat and perfect to accompany lots of different salads. They are very simple and a huge amount of fun to make. (I told my daughter that we were going to be making little round balls out of a sticky play dough-type substance and she was completely enthused by this.)
Above all, felafel tastes absolutely delicious and gets devoured at high speed here at our place…
Here’s the recipe:
Felafel
400 g can of chickpeas (you can also soak chickpeas overnight and then cook them; I can never be bothered)
-2 tablespoons of gram flour (chickpea flour), alternatively normal flour will do
-1 good handful of parsley
-1 teaspoon of dried cumin powder
-1 teaspoon of dried coriander powder
Drain the chickpeas well; you want them to be as dry as possible. Add all the ingredients together and mash. I usually do it in our food processor. The mixture should be quite sticky but firm enough that you can form little balls out of it. If you have a feeling it is too wet, simply add a bit of flour to it.
Form balls out of the mixture and fry them in about ½ cm of oil until they are golden brown.
I usually serve Felafel with hummus to dip them in, a tomato/cucumber salad and wedges of pitta bread.
For a printable version of this recipe, click here.
I have two girls who are great sleepers and long may it continue. There is another side to this coin though: as I have mentioned before they are impossible to get up on school mornings, and their grumpiness is legendary….
Getting them dressed and out of the door on time is a such nightmare that I have resorted to the following: I have started putting them to bed at night in a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt so in the mornings I only need to pop a tunic over their head and voila — I have saved 15 very valuable minutes and a huge amount of my sanity!
There are some great tunic style dresses out there… Take the Sophia Dress by Pink Chicken which I got from the great e-shop Umberleaf! It really would not look out of place in my wardrobe. It’s made out of beautiful blue chambray cotton with a lovely little embroidery around the collar. Super cute and easy to wear — long live the leggings and tunic look!
My youngest daughter is 22 months old, and really starting to assert her independence. Her main war cry at the moment is “WALK” every time she sees the buggy appear. I really don’t get it — she could be sitting comfortably in a buggy but instead she wants to exhaust her little legs stumbling down Parisian pavements! All part of growing I guess…
The problem with pushchairs is that you cannot put a kid in a long coat in them. The straps squish them and the coat rides up and they look so uncomfortable. Which is why I love her little cape from Half-Dot Brooklyn, a lovely little new brand that is, as the name suggests, based in Brooklyn. The cape is super practical, it is easy to put on and keeps her nice and cozy. She really looks like a little version of Sherlock Holmes in it — very cute.
After putting the kids to bed and sitting down with a good, warm cup of tea (you just cannot take the Irish out of a gal, even when living in Paris), I grabbed my computer to sit down and write some blog posts. I was suddenly inspired not to write yet another post about great things for kids but, for a change, something about some great things for mums!
So here is one of my latest discoveries — the lovely UK webshop Plümo full of beautiful trinkets, clothes, shoes and furniture. Whomever the person is who sources the items, they have fabulous taste and I want to get almost everything… And the best thing about it? At the moment they still have a sale going on!
You see, this is my way of thinking: if you have daughters, like I do, everything you get for yourself will have a second life in the future. The girls will steal things out of your cupboard, wear them and call them vintage. So if you shop now, all you are really doing is investing in the future…
Does this scenario ring any bells with you? You want to treat your kids to a delicious meal and so you slave over the stove to make sure the meal has the right nutritional value and is above all, tasty! Then you hear the famous words: “I don’t like it!!!!” Sometimes followed by the even more inane question: “Can I have a bonbon instead?”
I do sometimes wonder why I bother peeling potatoes and carrots, trimming beans, deciding what shape they should be cut in, asking myself if they would be better steamed or roasted or even just boiled. I think the phrase “Don’t like it” is one of the most disheartening things for a parent to hear.
By the way, the same goes for clothes: you spend hours thinking about what you should buy for you little one, what would suit them and what they would be comfortable in… only to be told: “Don’t like it”!!!
My mother always remembered that one winter she decided to only buy me trousers because I did not like tights… only to be told one morning: “I don’t like trousers”. She insisted and had a battle on her hands every morning getting me dressed.
I do know that this is all about kids establishing their independence and a degree of “Don’t like it” is unavoidable. I do sometimes wish that evolution would have left out the independence gene in small kids, ideally replacing it with an appreciation gene…
I do love new designs/books/characters that appeal to grown-ups and kids alike. My girls are going crazy for the Noodoll characters I brought home recently, and so am I.
Noodoll lives in Noodle town where everyone and everything is made out of noodles. His main arch enemy is Rice Head, who is constantly trying to stop the Noodles. The illustrations are great, very simple and funky.
The world of Noodoll and Ricehead spans from books to accessorizes and toys. And, if you have a spare second do check out the website — the noodle and rice recipes are some of the best I have ever found!
I took the kids the other night to a fun park filled to the brim with people, and it occured to me how easy it would be to lose them in the crowd. Especially the eldest, whose birthday we were celebrating, and who was running around like an excited little puppy with her friend. That is when the friend’s dad had a stroke of genius: he simply wrote our mobile numbers on their arms with a pen and instructed the kids that, if they ever got lost, they should go up to one of the booths to a person in a uniform and ask them to call the number on their arm. The kids completely got it, and would have known what to do in the case of getting lost! So simple, why had I never thought of that?! (I am sure most of you had, I just wanted to write a post about it, in case you were a bit clueless, like me.)
I remember Courtney telling me a story of how she got lost at a big fair when she was a child and got picked up by a stranger who spent a good hour walking around with her trying to find her parents while her mother was worried sick. At least we can avoid this in the era of mobile phones! BTW, thankfully, no kids got lost on my day out to the park and it was a great birthday celebration.
My children hit the Parisian nightclub scene for the first time yesterday — and had a blast. I took them to a kids party at a nightclub, organised by the Kids event organisers So Chic Kidz. It was called “Every Child is a Superhero”.
About 100 Superheros all got together to party the afternoon away, have their face painted, eat loads of bonbons and play games. It looked a little bit like a small people’s comic book convention considering 80% of the children were dressed up as Spiderman (or Speederman as he is known as over here) but it was a lot of fun, and there are many worse things to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon than teach my kids some moves on the dance floor…
Check out the website for updates on upcoming events!
I am sure everyone has heard about the horrible, horrible situation in Haiti brought along by the earthquake. We asked our friend Fionnuala, a Paris mum who adopted two kids from Haiti 2.5 years ago, to write about Haiti and the small charities that are currently doing their best to help alongside the big, international organizations.
Here’s her story:
When I told my kids I was going to send money to Haiti, their faces fell. “But Mama, “ my son said, “will we have enough left for us?”
Before you leap to conclusions about the little monsters I’m raising, let me add one thing. My six and seven year olds know what life is like in Haiti, and have some awareness of how much it will take to bring standards there anywhere near normal. Two and a half years ago, they lived in an orphanage in Port au Prince. Before that, they slept on the streets in one of the city’s worst slums.
It’s easy to forget, even for me. I look up at breakfast and see two petits Parisiens sloshing croissants in hot chocolate, their former diet of rice and beans a crazy, fairytale memory. We spend Sundays at the Louvre, urgently debating Titian versus Tintoretto, never mind that before in Haiti they had scarcely ever seen a single pot of paint in their entire life.
But they remember. The first thing they asked when I told them about the earthquake was whether anyone in the orphanage had been hurt (luckily no, though many buildings collapsed).
That night, as I put them to bed, my son held me tight. “Mama,” he whispered, “when I grow up, I want to stop people being poor.”
My daughter, younger by a year, overheard. “And I,” she said with a flourish, “am going to be the boss of television and wear sparkly dresses every day.”
Maybe she still has a way to go. Maybe we all do.
Giving to Haiti
There is so much need in Haiti, not just for emergency relief but for long term support in constructing a viable, safe and democratic society.
One charity I can particularly recommend is Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health (PiH). For over twenty years they have brought modern medical care and deep compassion to Haiti. You can learn more about their work in Tracy Kidder’s wonderful book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and on the PiH website.
I adopted my children from the orphanage Foyer de la Nouvelle Vie, which is supported by a US charity, Reach out Haiti. They help find adoptive families for Haitian orphans and run a safe haven where single mothers can live with their children and be trained in a variety of trades.
Lately, whenever I see an item of children’s clothing I like or a beautiful piece of children’s furniture I hanker after, more often than not, it comes from the same place — Oeuf NYC. Oeuf is spearheaded by a French/American husband & wife team who design all these beautiful items, always with the same principle in mind: to make something great without taking advantage of the environment and the people making it.
I recently got this beautiful little jumper (pictured) for my daughter from the fab web shop Zebre a Pois. She pretends that she can fly when she wears it and I love it because it is beautifully made and I do like to shop ethically when I can. Sure it comes at a price and it isn’t always possible, but great to do when I can…
A little while ago I was asked by Ciao Bambino to guest write a post for them about my top ten favourite things to do with kids in Paris. They’re running a feature this week all about kids in Paris and have asked a few writers to contribute.
You can read my post on the Ciao Bambino blog here. Hope you like my ideas (it was really difficult to decide on ten!) and do let me know if you have any other favourite things to do and see in Paris!
We do get really spoiled, writing for Babyccino… it so much fun discovering lovely new kid’s brands as a job and finding out more about them. Before I had kids I seriously had no idea that there were so many great brands out there, ranging from cheap and cheerful to seriously luxurious.
My newest discovery is Ola and Olek, the brain child of a UK designer who is doing some phenomenal designs for kids. The clothes are quirky, fun, simple and easy-to-wear (lets face it, the kids need to feel comfortable). Eliza, the designer, is really particular about the fabrics she uses — they are all great quality but also very practical. As much as she can, she avoids using fabrics that needs to be hand-washed or dry cleaned.
I only wish my kids wouldn’t grow so quickly and would get more wear out of their clothes. It seems like they only wear their clothes for a couple of weeks and then, at a blink of an eye, nothing fits anymore!
You can find the list of Ola and Olek stockists here!
I am sooo jealous of Courtney and her family heading down-under for 3 months. While we will be dealing with the winter blues over here in France she will be skipping around Sydney in a little skirt and flip-flops!
Actually, I can’t complain as I did a similar trip two years ago and had a great time discovering Australia and Australian style. I love the fact that the style is so relaxed over there. Things aren’t taken as seriously and I guess, because life does revolve around the great outdoors, kid’s clothes are especially simple and fun.
The Australian Label Rock Your Baby is a great example for easy-going Ozzie wear. They just don’t take themselves too seriously: they make rock’n roll playsuits and T-shirts, with a couple of skull and cross bones thrown in for good measure. My daughter loves her new sailor dress, and maybe more importantly, I love it too!
A new website called Australian Design Store has decided to make it their mission to introduce all of us Europeans to Australian labels, so check out their site — they have some great little things!
The Antoine and Lili flagship stores must be some of the cutest rows of shops I have ever seen. I was walking past them today and they were so bright and cheerful on a grey winter’s day!
They can be found along the canal St Martin, an area which, for a long time now, has been attracting lots of little shops and restaurants. If the rumours are to be believed the Antoine et Lili shops were actually the first independent shops to open up in this area, turning the area into a trendy little spot.
Anyway, if you are in Paris and like kitsch and bright colours, Antoine et Lili is a must. The kid’s store especially is a bright, bright space with great toys, presents and clothes from the world over. It is definitely not minimalist, but colourful and loud! I also love the homewares shop were you can find great Mexican waxcloths and fabulous melamine plates for the whole family.
Antoine et Lili
95 Quai de Valmy
Paris 75010
Tel:+33 1 40 37 58 15
I know Paris is well-known for being an expensive city, especially when it come to clothes. However, it is possible to find some bargains, especially come the new year: the winter sales start on the today!!
But it isn’t only during the sales time that you can find bargains. We also have a few local high street shops that have a great selection! Here is a list of a few places to visit next time you are here in Paris or in other French cities:
•It may sound strange to buy your kids clothes at a supermarket, but the Monoprix supermarket chain has a great range of baby clothes called Bout’Chou and CFK for older kids that seriously can rival any design brand. (Unfortunately their website is terrible, so you need to go in person to see what is available.) A lot of my kids’ clothes are from here. Super cute tunics, trousers, dresses and knitwear makes these a hit with a lot of Parisian mothers.
•Du Pareil Au Meme, otherwise known as DPAM, has now become an international brand, but if you cannot find it in your country of origin, do check it out! It has a great range of clothes, from newborn to pre-teenagers. The shops are often grouped by three, one catering only for newborns (clothes and all equipment), one for all age ranges and one specializing in shoes…
•A little shop I love called Alice A Paris has some lovely items at very reasonable prices. The collections are very classic and practical (The little dress in the photo is from there). The shop is in the 6th arrondissement and you can also buy online.
•Another place worth checking out if you like classic clothes is a shop called Natalys, which specialises in baby things up to the age of three. The same group runs a chain of shops called Sergent Major for older kids. I don’t always find what I want in there, but it is definitely worth a look if you happen to be over in France.
•Last but not least, one of my other favorite shops is called Vertbaudet. I mostly order off their website, but they do have some shops scattered around Paris, and all over France for that matter.
It is hard to believe but Merci, one of Paris’ most fashionable concept stores has been out-trumped by a kid’s store. Just a stone’s throw away from Merci on the corner where the boulevard Beaumarchais turns into the boulevard Filles du Calvaire, Bonton has opened up a 800 M² new flagship shop. It is absolutely fabulous! On over 3 floors you can find clothes, clothes and even more clothes, a book shop (with a GREAT selection of books), a bakery, a sweets bar, a hair dresser, a deco area and I don’t even remember what else.
Oh, did I mention that they also have one of those old-fashioned photo booths with a bucket full of dressing up hats in front of it? We also took advantage of that, though we were the only grown-ups queueing up for it in a huge line of kids…
Emilie in Paris
March 4th, 2010
7 comments
I was sitting beside a Lebanese guy at a wedding this weekend and he could not help raving about the wonderful food from his country and the Mediterranean area in general. Since then I have not stopped thinking about great Mediterranean dishes. Don’t forget: eating a Meditarrenean diet apparently makes you live longer…
