Paris through the eyes of children.  My heart twisted up on our last day, walking down the Rue de Rivoli with Eli’s hand clutched in mine.  We are missing Oma and Opa who had to leave yesterday, and being distracted by the “cute little pigeons” strutting across the sidewalk.  Eli loves pigeons.  Jake loves merry-go-rounds.

With Eli and Jake by my side, I am seeing Paris in a way that the guidebooks could never show me.

Today in only a few short blocks, I saw reindeer dancing together and eating cookies in a giant department store window.  I smiled at a bear drinking cappuccino, and we had to stop to look at a family of little white squirrels playing around a mannequin’s feet.  I’m sure the store was probably selling some nice clothes, but the squirrels were what Eli wanted me to see.

On another block, a firetruck was dousing a small fire, so we stopped to watch the firemen rolling up the hoses and taking off their boots.  We noticed garbage trucks and recycling trucks, and the street cleaners who let out water from built-in water spouts beneath the curb.  What an ingenious city design to clean the streets!  Eli thought that all these service workers wore great uniforms.  He is collecting a menagerie of little souvenir Eiffel Towers, the kind that are made in China and sold in bulk by the thousands, but to him they are very special.

The Eiffel Tower IS pretty amazing.  Even in the fog.

There is a wonder that fits each stage of life, some stages more wonderful than others.  The wondering “why” leads to more wondering why.  At some point, I guess we just need to stop wondering why and go back to plain wonder.

Life won’t wait anyway, so why bother wasting too much time looking for answers.  Right now things are pretty good, and I don’t want to wonder why.