I may be Grandma LaLa in Ghent, but south of Brussels, in French-speaking Wallonia, I’m Mami for granddaughter Lais.
She’s 9 already, and a little mother to her new cousin James. She fed him a bottle, helped change and bathe him, and got down on the floor to play with him. But during our brief weekend together, Lais also pampered me by making crepes with her Maman (Sabine), enjoying the various playgrounds we visited around town, and playing our favorite card game, Go Fish.
What thrilled me the most was her deep connection to the natural world. While the older folks were resting on a park bench and James was snoozing in his stroller, a ladybug alighted on Lais’s hand.
Immediately she went to work. She gathered grass from the park lawn, a few twigs and leaves from a nearby tree, and built Madame Coccinelle a house to protect her from the park pigeons. Lais played there for 10 minutes or so, completely enthralled. So was I. Laurie Lynch
Help the Planet: Encourage your communities to invest in bicycle infrastructure. Belgium does it so well. The country has roughly 10.8 million people and 5.2 million bikes. Belgium ranks No. 9 in the world for bicycles per capita. (Neighboring Netherlands is No. 1 with 16.6 million people and 16.5 million bicycles—and 27% of trips are made by bicycle.)
In Ghent, tree-lined canals are enhanced with walkways and bikeways, even a high-tech scorecard to let everyone know how many bikes pass each day, as well as the running total for the year. In Antwerp, when Marina and her sister-in-law Fleur took the girls to the World Gymnastics Championships (and Simone Biles), they arrived in style—via pedal power. Fleur took the crew while Marina, the photographer, rode solo. James and Rozanne stayed home with dads Koen and Sven.
Fleur-de-Blog 