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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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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La famille de Marie-Hélène !
Marie-Hélène’s family were kind to us all during our initial years together in France. There was a flattering curiosity about us, expressed with a French reserve but nonetheless expressed, in particular about…
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La Grée
La Grée will be our vacation home forever, in my mind at least. The first version of this page was written in French with a lot of help from Marie-Hélène. During the…
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Marie-Hélène Berhaut (born and raised in Paris)
I have to admit that it would be very hard for me to paint any kind of complete and balanced portrait of Marie-Hélène at this point, even a miniature one. In part,…
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Grand-Père
Our children were a little short on grandparents. After my mother died in 1996, just two years after Marie-Hélène and I and the four older children had moved in together, just one year after Charlie…
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Maman
Being a mother is the center of Marie-Hélène‘s life. She was the office manager at Kevorkian & Rawlings, the law firm where we met in Paris, and has been at various times…
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Ian’s Friends
My friends are the ones that keep going, come hell or high water, and through the ups and downs. There are a few, at least one or two, from each period in…
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Brocéliande
In the interior of Brittany, the peninsula that is the westernmost part of mainland France, France’s Cornwall if you will, is la Brocéliande, the magic land of Merlin and, if you believe 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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Les copains de Marie-Hélène . . .
D’abord, les plus sérieuses, Camille et Amélie en état de grace, halloween 1999. We were spoiled by Amélie, as were the children. She was a student locally who moved in with us…
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Moving House
Sounds easy doesn’t it? But it took more than three years for our furniture to move from La Bellanderie to Santa Cruz. Why? First and most importantly, Tison S.A. the furniture moving company based in Coignières (78),…
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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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Young Nick (1986-1994)
Nick is a Leo with Leo rising. There you have it! Although he was born in Manhattan, he was moved to Paris when only six months old in February 1987. This was his…
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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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Young Alban (1989-1996)
Several of the photos on this page were taken before our family blended, when Alban and Daphné lived in Paris with Maman and Pierre Brun, their dad. I found them in Marie-Hélène’s own collection…
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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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La Bellanderie (1996-7)
“Le bonheur grande nature. Une seule année aura suffi pour nous faire regretter cette maison à deux pas du Paris-Brest dans les Yvelines. Au rez-de-chaussée, les pièces communes, petit salon, grand salon, bibliothèque et…
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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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Our Wedding: May 24, 1997, St. Hilarion, France
Here we are, at the reception in La Bellanderie, our lovely home in Saint Hilarion, southwest of Paris on the old road to Chartres. The French civil service had done its duty, and it…
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St. Malo, cité des corsaires . . .
St Malo was our first family holiday town. It’s an extraordinary walled city on the Northern Brittany coast, less than two hours by car from La Grée, and on the way by…
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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…
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Our first home: Le Tahu (1994-6)
Le Tahu was the modest brick house that I had been living in since January 1994 in Hermeray, a village in the Forest of Rambouillet southwest of Paris. Initially, Sunshine, Nick and…