Chocolate factory and trip to Germany

In the town next to our village, there's a chocolate factory.  I've heard lots of great things about this place and sometimes you can actually smell the chocolate wafting up the hill when the wind blows in the right direction.

 With Gaby's impending trip to *Germany coming up, we thought it would be nice to buy some "local" chocolates for the family that she's going (gone now) to stay with.  
The above photo was taken outside their little boutique, cute isn't it?

 We bought a big box of dark chocolate for the family, and these yummy (I know because we bought some for us too) solid chocolate lollipops that are great for dunking in a hot chocolate or coffee...

Finally for her German friend, Lea, I found this small candy cookbook which has some surprisingly delicious sounding recipes and lovely photos to boot, and I just had to get the fraise Tagada's too...

* Gaby left for Germany this morning with most of her classmates from 5eme 4 (year 8) and some 6eme's (year 7) .  She isn't there long, just today, traveling by coach (eta 16:00) plus Tuesday and Wednesday and then back on Thursday, still better a couple of days than nothing at all.

Gabrielle's 12th Birthday

Gaby's lemon curd sponge cake covered with a white chocolate frosting

I'm a bit late uploading photos onto my computer but now it's done and I can cross another job off my to do list.  

Gaby turned twelve on Thursday, twelve, amazing.  Since going back to school in September, this year in  5eme, she has matured a lot.  She's calmer, she's more organized (work wise...but lets not talk about her bedroom!) she loves school, and most of her subjects, especially Math, French, English, German and Latin....  Latin, interesting, as she only started it this school year,  and it's an introductory year where she gets to choose if to continue or not for the rest of her time at college and maybe (hopefully) Lycee. she said at the beginning of the year she'd only do it for one year but guess what( she might not admit it)? She likes Latin and hasn't said anything about stopping, here's keeping my fingers crossed
Gaby is still shy but is very popular and has a best friend since starting college "Marjolaine", she doesn't do Latin, she chose Drama instead and hates it...

 Here are a couple of the presents she received.  She has been very busy using her new camera.

 For her Ipod and her cd's and for an alarm that she doesn't need because she's always awake at the crack of dawn.

And no, I didn't buy this present, Granny did. It's a giant make-up case. I never wear make-up, much to my mother's disappointment, so she's compensating and she's happy to have three grand daughters, two of which, who are actually happy to receive presents like this...

Oh yes, the cake was good, Gaby loves lemon curd, so I made a sponge cake, filled in with lemon curd and covered it with a very calorific white chocolate frosting.  

No more birthday's for over a month (thankfully) because with cakes like this you need time to work off the kilos.

La classe de 5.4 Gaby's school report

I don't normally write about school results and all that, but as I did for MK this year, I thought I'd have to do the same for my four other sweeties, even if one or two didn't do as well as they'd hoped (or we had hoped).

Today the turn of Gabrielle. She's 11, and she's in her second year at college (year 8 in the UK).

She is in the elite class (terrible to say that but so true), why? Because she chose options this year and last that group children together, those who aren't scared of a little extra work.  She's in a section called bi-langue which means she does English and German in tandem (mostly, from year 7, children learn just English and from year 9 they choose a second foreign language, usually Spanish. 

I can't remember if she has three hours or four of English per week and the same for German this year, but that was the case for last year anyway.

This year she took the option Latin.  She wasn't over keen, but we kind of pushed up a little, and she knew if she didn't like it, after one year, she had the right to stop.  Amazingly, she loves it, and for now at least, doesn't want to stop...yippee.

Ok in her class they are twenty eight children and twenty one of these are in the "bi-langue" class. Most of them either do Latin or Theatre as an option. 

On Saturday we met her form tutor in order to get her long awaited first school report for this year. And we learnt the following that out of twenty eight pupils

10 had felicitations, which like the highest honor you while in college

3 had compliments which is basically very good

3 had encouragements which means you are trying hard and we've noticed, and carry on it's good.

2 had been sanctioned for lack of effort.

The average of the class was a fairly high 13,70 (in comparison with what we've seen in the South of France, which was mostly between 10 and 11)

And eight pupils got an average more that 15, this is really good, the competition is at a maximum.

And guess what, Gaby, who is the youngest in the class (she skipped a class ages ago) was first of the class and first of her school year for that matter...big headed? no! Proud? Yes, proud as punch.

Sixty one tests since the beginning of the year, she managed to fight her way through them all and get averages over 19 in Math, English, Latin and Art and as for the rest, still amazing. Just under 18 of average is just awesome.