Apparently We Came Home From France With Marie Antoinette
Proud of her. 🖤
One of the last things left on our France checklist was Versailles.
Yes. Another castle.
Cue eyeroll from the 9.5-year-old who had, by this point, seen a fairly unreasonable number of impressive European buildings.
We had no plans to actually go inside the Palace of Versailles. Crowds, cost and time were all factors, and after nearly ten weeks travelling through Europe, we were getting pretty good at knowing when seeing the thing was enough.
So we wandered.
We admired the ridiculous scale of the palace, peered through gates, walked around the grounds and lightly explained who Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI were, and why the French eventually decided they’d had quite enough of the whole monarchy situation.
Lightly being the important word here.
School work can really trigger this one’s PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance), something that forms part of how her neurodivergent brain navigates the world. With autism and ADHD in the mix, there is a fairly firm “no facts” rule the moment she suspects we’re attempting to sneak education into her day.
But give her something she’s genuinely interested in?
Entirely different story.
Then, in the gift shop at Versailles, she found a graphic novel about Marie Antoinette and her early childhood.
Quietly, I was thrilled.
The deal was we’d buy it if she promised to read it before we got home to Australia.
Cue head in book for the next hour.
By the time we’d made our way around to the gardens and set up our picnic lunch, she’d finished the entire thing.
From Versailles to Melbourne
Fast forward to getting back to our Paris apartment and realising that, because we’d decided to come home from Europe a little earlier than originally planned, she’d actually be back in Melbourne for Book Week.
One of her favourite school dress-up days.
“What if you went as Marie Antoinette?”
Eyes. Widened.
And so began the research.
Hair.
Dress.
Makeup.
Accessories.
Apparently sourcing a Marie Antoinette costume across three countries is just a normal thing we do now.
I happily jumped aboard the hyperfocus train with her and found a costume shop in Paris with a dress that would be perfect.
Dress in Paris, check.
Accessories in Singapore, check.
Baby powder from our first online Coles order after arriving home in Melbourne, check.
Marie Antoinette was ready for Book Week.
The bit I was actually proud of
On the morning of Book Week she woke early, as she always does when she’s excited about something, and woke me up ready to get started.
Breakfast first.
Then I got to play hairdresser while she absolutely nailed her own makeup, particularly delighted that she could accentuate her natural beauty spots.
The finished costume was bloody brilliant.
She was a little disappointed not to win a prize at school that day.
But that night she went to bed knowing how proud we were of her.
Not because of a costume competition.
Not really even because she looked fabulous dressed as an 18th-century French queen.
It was because the whole thing was hers.
She found something she was interested in.
She read.
She researched.
She planned.
She made choices.
She followed an idea all the way from a book she picked up at Versailles, through Paris and Singapore, and back home to Melbourne.
And then she pulled the whole thing together beautifully.
For a neurodivergent kid who can put up an enormous wall the moment learning feels like learning, there was something particularly lovely about watching knowledge sneak in sideways simply because she’d found something that fascinated her.
No worksheet.
No lesson plan.
No “you should learn about this while we’re here.”
Just interest-led learning, a story that caught her attention, and an ADHD hyperfocus train I was more than happy to jump aboard.
We may have sighed and smiled at each other that night.
Because after nearly ten weeks of family travel through Europe, with all the incredible places we visited and things we deliberately set out to show her, one of my favourite little outcomes started with a graphic novel in a gift shop.
Some days you get one of those sweet little wins.
