About a week ago we noticed a sign in the neighbourhood advertising a street sale on June 1. Monday is actually a statutory vacation day and we had been planning a 3 day long weekend in France but decided to fore-go the trip in favour of staying around town to participate in the street sale. Not to buy of course, but to sell! In the process of some harsh spring cleaning, we identified many items that were just not worth keeping. So we moved the contents of our cellar storage room (la cave) to a piece of sidewalk next to Petillon metro station at around 8am with the intent of making a few extra euro. The boys helped with the the first full car load of stuff and I realised as I was unloading the second car load that the boys needed to be removed from the situation otherwise our house would refill itself with other peoples cellar storage stuff.

By 9:30am, I parked the car at the edge of the Forêt de Soignes and tricked them into trekking 2.2km to a playground. We stopped along the way to balance-walk on fallen tree trunks, float sticks down the creek straight from the spring source of water, observe and confuse a chipmunk for a lizard, lament that the pond where Mowgli would wade was now fenced off to protect the nesting area of the martin-pêcheur, and so on a so forth. One and a half hours later, we arrived at the playground whose centrepiece is a great big pirate ship next to the Rouge-Cloître. After about an hour, I warned the boys that we should start heading back towards the car if they were hungry. Frunty almost immediately campaigned to his little brother to head back because he was starving and Pit starting asking to be carried home. I announced that it would not be necessary for Pit to be carried because we would take a short cut and Frunty replied that he hoped "...the short cut would not be too long." Lucky for everyone, I wasn't a trickster and only marched them 1.5km back to the car during which time we had to listen to Frunty complain that Pit was too slow and that we could die of hunger. By 1pm, we were home and snacking on rice-crackers with peanut butter and jam.

Shortly afterwards, we were on bike to the snack shop for falafel and fries to deliver to The Mommy who most surely needed a break. But no! The Mommy was fading but did not want to part with her belongings without some cash to show for it until the very last moment. So I ran back home to get a duffel bag of soccer balls and took the boys (and some neighbourhood friends) to the local school playground for about an hour of football and playtime. By this time The Mommy was finished so I got the car and filled it with half a load.

Thanks to The Mommy's hard-sell sales tactics, the other 1.5 car loads that I brought 7 hours earlier had been transformed into a neat 3 digit cash amount. Everybody pitched in today, especially the boys who had some angst about parting with their old things but managed to understand what needed to be done.