In 2009, the Isle of Wight Festival was headlined by Neil Young, whom some present at the time complained was too old. We beg to differ! This odd conjunction prompted me to action.…
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2009: Tom and Maureen Vacation in California!
Tom and Maureen spent the month of September 2009 in California, and for much of the time stayed with us in Santa Cruz. That felt just fine. This was his first trip back to…
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Tom in Paris in 2008
Tom left to go on vacation after Christmas in 2007, and ended up spending the whole year of 2008 in Paris. Then all of 2009. Etcetera. He was gone. When he left…
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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 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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Cutting the Umbilical Cord!!
They all have to leave, the children that is. We knew that, just as every parent knows that. But being forewarned was not necessarily being forearmed. First, the children become teenagers. That…
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Alban and Tom Graduate High School!!
Daphné with her graduate. Way to go, little bro! Made it!!Needless to say, both of our 2007 Graduates put the parents through some hoops before they made it. Their theory must be something…
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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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Music to our ears . . .
Music is one of those rare activities that both the parents and the children in our whirlwind of energy get into. The parents came first, of course. I inflicted what they now call…
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Teenagers with a capital T . . .
Charlie and Alex spent the week before Christmas in 2010 with me and Tom, who was visiting from Paris. They were going to spend the week beginning the afternoon of Christmas Day…
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Yosemite
Ever since I first saw the Yosemite Valley, during a weekend trip from Berkeley sometime during the 1976-7 school year, it has been one of those places where my mind turns when…
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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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Road Trip to Colorado in June 2004
In June 2004, after years of constant overwork, I finally had a little free time. Ah, the joys of being laid off! At the same time, Tom was on vacation with nothing…
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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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Young Tom (1989-94)
Tom was born in Paris in the same week in 1989 that the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area. The World Series was in progress, with the players on the ball…
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Nick and Tom back with us
For me, one of the absolute high spots of our collective lives together was the day that Nick and Tom came back to live with us in Santa Cruz during the summer…
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Nick and Tom in Paris: the rest of us in Santa Cruz
It was Christmas 1997 before Nick and Tom paid their first visit to the rest of us in Santa Cruz, where we had moved in June 1997. The intervening six months had been a…
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L’école d’Hermeray
Nick and Tom started at l’école d’Hermeray in January 1994, when Sunshine and I moved to Le Tahu in the village of Hermeray, about 75km southwest of Paris in the Forêt de…
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Blending or agitating or churning, depending on the day . . . .
When any couple moves in together, there is a lot for each to get to know in the other. In our case, we never had the time! No, that’s not what I mean! I…