This wonderful photo of Daphné, Alex and their maman had its own page online at first, called “La supériorité naturelle des Berhauts.” Check out those expressions! It was taken on the sidelines at a one of Alban’s soccer games in December 1998. Alex was not yet a year old!
First, the header, featuring all six children!
Alex is on our left as the sorcerer’s apprentice at Disneyland in Anaheim in 2003.
Moving right, Alban, Daphne and Nick were at Thanksgiving dinner with the Hanlons in 2005.
Then Charlie takes a corner for the Santa Cruz County Beakers, also in 2005. Finally, Tom plays one of his first guitars, also in 2005.
It was a good year!
The house is “La Bellanderie,” where we all (except Alex, who was likely conceived there!) spent a great year before moving to California. The setting was “la forêt de Rambouillet” southwest of Paris.
HOW TO NAVIGATE
There are various ways to navigate this volume, which is the most complicated of the three on this site.
Daphné and Alban asleep in the back of the Aerostar in late 1994. Are they cute or what?!
There are a mixture of pages (about 20 in this volume) and posts (about 125, really!), as well as categories or themes (about 20).
The Zinzins Categories menu (on the right) includes all of the zinzins themes.
Each theme is accessed in the sidebar, and each gives you a list of all the posts in that category, a great way to browse by theme. For example, if you want to check out posts tagged as history, meaning that each covers some aspect of the family’s history, click on History in that sidebar.
The list of posts in each category (theme) is in reverse chronological order, as if each theme was a blog. So in History, for example, the first post in the list is the most recent and the last is the first chronologically. I should figure out how to list them in chronological order!
The Zinzins category in that menu on the right links to all of the posts, making it the only index of posts. Individual posts are not always easy to find in that long list. But if you’re looking for Disney, you’d try the Vacations category, for example, and if you’re looking for Christmas, you’d try the Special Days category.
The dynamic duo! Nick and Tom testing the limits of the swings in Higginson Park, Marlow, during our summer 1999 visit
The Zinzins Index menu below links to each page (as opposed to post). Pages tend to cover the theme which is the subject of the page, and link to posts in that theme, but not all of the posts in the theme.
If you want to browse by time, click on the year pages in the Zinzins Index menu below. Each is a summary of a year in our family history.
You can also use the search tool on the menu bar above. Like I said, complicated!
LOCATING EACH OF OUR CHILDREN
When they were growing up, the individual children, in particular their photos, were the subjects of most interest in this volume from outside. Each child (it’s getting harder to call them children!) has his or her own category in the Zinzins Categories menu on the right, and his or her own page in the Zinzins Index below.
Some earlier photos of each of the children are collected on the page covering his or her early years. These pages are all named “Young ________”, where the space is the name of the child, are all dated August, 1999, and can each be found in the child’s category.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
While our beautiful blended family was still together, but for the comings and goings of our by now young adults, we had an online photo album (for the time being still at www.zinzins.net). It had captions for the photos and a little background, but not much.
This was taken in April 1999, before the kitchen of our home in Santa Cruz was renovated. Charlie and Alex were both sitting on the kitchen floor. Nous aimons nos biberons!
After the parents moved apart, I started elaborating on the clipped captions and brief text of that online album. I added a lot of the history of the family, much of it in the form of anecdotes and stories, and putting flesh on the initial album’s bare bones with much more of the hectic life of those years, more of the feelings, more of the real.
And that’s what you have here.
CONTACT:
Please comment on any post or page, and especially please flag any errors that you stumble upon!
This volume had been extensively revised and reformatted over the last few years, and there are errors all over the place. I’m slowly going through the volume correcting errors as I find them, but would greatly appreciate any assistance you can offer.
You can get in touch with me reliably at ian@zinzins.net. Thank you!