Fourth Anniversary: the Versailles Gardens

We kind of like to  keep the goofy  anniversary gift traditions-- like first anniversary is the "paper anniversary," etc.  Our 4th anniversary proved a bit more challenging for me than for Ryan, though:  "flowers and fruit."  Riiiight.  'Cause every guy likes fruit and flowers and finds that super romantic, right?  Ryan "bent" the rules for me a bit and bought me an amazing new bike, with a pink FLOWERY bell on it.  Easy for him.  I brainstormed a long time before buying him a French copy of one of his favorite books, St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince, who you might recall tends his rose (a flower, yep) tenderly (I also gave him a book by Orson Scott Card on how to write good fiction, saying that word-craft and story-growing is as involved & slow-yielding as plant-growing... but yes, it's a stretch).

We did decide to totally stay in our theme in how we celebrated together:  a day at Versailles, on their Garden tour.  Wow.  Talk about beautiful flowers in abundance!!  The Summer Garden tour is special in that all the fountains are turned on (not the norm in Versailles these days) and Baroque music is playing all over the park.  Many of the fountains had music and water shows, with the jets alternating quite spectacularly in time to period music.  Very cool.  We had to leave the garden for dinner so they could set up for part 2:  the after-dark light-music-water shows, also including lasers, smoke, lanterns, fire and a finale of fireworks & music.  As we followed our maps around the atmosphere was so jovial that we felt like we were at a party under the Sun King himself, and half-expected to see aperetif trays or champagne stations around every bend.  Eowyn weathered the day like a champ, enjoying the flowers very much and splashing her little feet in the fountains.  She napped while Ryan & I enjoyed an all-crepe dinner (Ryan's first!) and woke up chipper and happy for the finale.  I can't imagine a better way to spend a summer day... except maybe if we could have gotten INTO the pond and enjoyed a swim... Oh to have been a guest at Versailles!

The whale-bone looking thing is a modern statue of some sort... we didn't think it added much to the decor.  Nor did we find it particularly genius-- definitely not worthy of its placement here.

We got lots of colors practice!

I can only imagine what it would have been like to stroll around when this sort of display was the norm!

Funny baby

PS- I don't usually advocate taking your kids with you on an anniversary get-away... kind of defeats half the purpose, in my mind.  But I will make exceptions for Paris. :)  And we did enjoy a get-away earlier in the year to the Weekend to Remember conference so I got my alone-with-hubby time for the year and was quite content.