Last night we agreed to have a day of doing less and not dragging Millie around. We failed at the first but succeeded at the latter. We tried to say yes to more of her requests throughout the day: going out to get pastries for breakfast, taking lots of walking breaks, participating in endless role playing games on the playground instead of pushing her to play by herself, etc. It resulted in a more pleasant day for all of us, and she still managed to happily walk our average of >10k steps.

We are staying near Montmartre so we decided to stay within walking distance rather than dealing with a journey on the metro. We headed uphill towards Sacre Coeur, stopping at a small playground on the way.

She request lunch and we said yes. We completely ate through our homemade rations by 11AM.

At the church, we waited in another long, quick-moving line. Once again we walked into choral music and the smell of incense, and then I realized that it wasn’t a once a week occurrence that we got lucky with at Notre Dame. Catholics just have mass constantly.

There were lots of “no photos” signs, so here is one from google to set the vibe:

Millie saw people lighting candles and wanted to know what it was all about. I bought a €2 votive and explained that we should think of someone we love and think of something nice for them while we light the candle. After we lit it she said “I hoped that grandma Mary Jane has a nice breakfast” – so grandma, if you’re reading this, I hope it worked!

She spent the rest of the time very interested in the mosaics, and the miniature model of the church. We saw nuns and I attempted to explain why they want to dedicate themselves to the church instead of having a family and she could not believe that anyone would choose anything in life but having babies.

We then spent more money to go to the tower of the church. I know Paris doesn’t really have a reputation for being a cheap city but dang, they really charge you for everything! We walked the 600 steps up to the heavens to see the view. Millie was excited to see the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

We heard there was a carousel at the bottom of the hill so that was our next stop. It was packed with people and guys aggressively trying to sell us things.

After the carousel it was about 1pm and we had nothing planned for the rest of the day. Doing less is hard. At home we’d go home and play and chill, but we don’t have many toys here. So we decided to hop on the metro and go to the kids’ area of the science museum.

This felt boring and overpriced to me and Nick (and we were starving), but Millie had a fun time, and that was the goal of today.

We took the metro back again. She is doing so well on public transport, hopping on and off trains like a champ.

It was a hot day today and everyone was still in good spirits so we decided to stop at a classic Parisian cafe for a spritz. The waiter gave Millie a lollipop which made her day. The way to this girl’s heart is sugar.

We picked up kebabs for dinner, spent even more time at a playground, and then headed home with very tired legs.