And here’s a postscript.
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2009: A Summer Weekend in Tahoe
Alex was invited by his friend Galen, not forgetting Debra and Tony, Galen’s parents, to spend the weekend in their summer home on the west side of Lake Tahoe. That was an…
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2009 Sports
In prior years, most of our sports have been soccer, or football as they call it in England. We’re still doing a lot of soccer, but 2009 included other sports, involving varying degrees of…
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Big Kids with Little Kids.
Different families have different strengths and weaknesses, different spaces of trust linking family members, and different walls keeping some of them apart. The most striking strength of our blended family, a strength which…
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2008: Kids’ soccer!
This was the year that our soccer became really intense, at least for the parents. Let’s start with one of the high points. On the left, at the bottom left-hand corner, wearing…
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2008 Family Portraits
Not in any particular order, this page features a collection of portraits of us in 2008. That’s what this website is all about, after all! Rather than adding good portraits to preexisting pages…
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Childrens’ Parties
We have had quite a few parties for the children, but find surprisingly few photos, perhaps because a child’s party is one of those moments when the parents do not have a lot…
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Charles & Alexander 1998 – 2007
Charlie and Alex shared a remarkable complicity throughout their childhood. It continues to this day, years after their parents moved apart. This page is comprised of four galleries of photos of the two…
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Alex & Charlie’s Friends
Needless to say, all of Alex and Charlie’s friends can’t all fit here. But between Happy Valley School, Scotts Valley Middle School, Scotts Valley High School and soccer, there were quite a…
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Family Groups
The hardest pictures to get were ones of all eight of us together. And it got harder over time for the simple reason that our four older children had better things to do than…
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Santa Cruz County Breakers’ 95 Boys Fall Season 2005
First, a little background. Santa Cruz County puts a lot of effort into organizing its youth soccer. There are several different structured recreational teams, and several different structured competitive teams, as well as more informal arrangements.…
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Happy Valley School, Santa Cruz
Happy Valley School is the wonderful elementary school where Daphné and Alban started in September 1997, Tom in 1999, Charles in 2000 and Alexander in 2003. (Nicholas went directly to Branciforte Junior High School when…
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Soccer: hobby #1
Look at the expression on Charlie’s face! Pure, unadulterated glee! That’s what soccer did for all our boys, more or less. Alban, our first soccer fanatic and star, started it all off…
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Pools II (2004)
We start this second look at our family in pools with Alban diving. The end of this particular dive is in the next photo. Whatever it is, if it’s done in the…
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Alexander and Charles are Baptized
On August 12, 2004, l’abbé Texier, until his retirement a catholic priest in Bordeaux for over 20 years, baptized Alex and Charles in the Church of Sainte Anne de Tréal. L’abbé had retired to…
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TV, Video Game and Computer Screens
The most difficult activities to regulate in our house were watching TV or movies and playing video games. What we can all do with our various screens nowadays is a wonder, but they are simply…
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2003: maximum youth soccer!
By the fall of 2003, we had five out of our six children playing soccer every week. That is all of the boys! For the parents, that meant at least one match per…
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Children have a habit of Fooling Around!
The children fooled around effortlessly, like puppies, making adventures out of nothing and drama out of less. For many years, roughhousing was key, a simple joy to be shared. But they had…
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Halloween
Halloween is one of the USA’s more recent and successful exports to Western Europe, but to really get into the spirit of the thing it helped us to live in the US. Beginning…
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Homework
Okay, so homework was never really a hobby, not like soccer, swimming pools, Disney, Halloween or other real childhood pleasures. It was an institutionally required activity. As such, it was unlikely to…
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Bisous!
As we guys of the male gender know (thank you, Dave Barry!), there are moments of warmth and affection which simply cannot be avoided. This shot, of Alban wincing in the vice-like grip…
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Young Charles (1995-9)
Charles was born in August 1995 in Malestroit (the nearest town to La Grée) at the end of our summer vacation that year in Brittany near Brocéliande. Our little world gelled around Charlie from his…
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Charles arrived in 1995
This is one of my favorite photographs ever. It is August 28, 1995, in the Clinique des Augustines in Malestroit, Brittany. No longer busy being born, we find Charles Allistair Tristan Stock, cleaned up…