Daphné and Alban spent a a couple of weeks of most summers that they lived in the US with Pierre, their dad, and his family in France, mostly in and around Paris.…
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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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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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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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Nick and Daphné were our first two High School graduates . . .
Nick with his Grandma (“Yaya”) after receiving his diploma from Scotts Valley High School in June 2004 Daphné with Alban after receiving her diploma from Harbor High School in June 2005 On the left is…
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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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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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Maman Fille
This is a relationship made in heaven, although it may have been forged a little in hell. That’s often the case if you think about it. The more that you go through…
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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 Daphné (1987-97)
Daphné was born in August 1987 in Malestroit, Brittany, during Marie-Hélène’s summer vacation at La Grée. Maman loved to get away from the hustle and bustle of Paris. La Grée is located near where…
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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…