A warm new year

Lucie's grandparents invited her to a nice warm place over new year's, and so her parents went along for the ride.



She got to swim in the warm sea, with the help of her private undefined flotation device.

She liked to go see the fish that live off a little rocky point


She got to see the full moon rise over the bay.


It wasn't all that exciting...
On New Year's eve, she got to sleep on the beach under a coconut tree. Some people would think that's special, others would wonder what awful parents would do this.
It really wasn't that sad.

Of course, she got lots of kisses from her grandparents.
And they tried to take her swimming in the waves.
Lucie celebrated her grandmother's birthday with some balloons.
For a short while, Lucie's parents got to escape and go for a romantic walk.

The weather wasn't nice every day, but it was still a beautiful vacation for everyone.

Christmas, Part 2

We celebrated our second Christmas with about twenty of Greg's Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins.
Greg's Aunt Sabine and Uncle Patrick kindly organized everything.
Christmas day involved opening more presents... This time Lucie was joined by her cousins Camille and Simon.





Morgane and one of Lucie's newer cousins, Gaston.
The little cousins received scooters and bikes from Santa Claus.






And lots of long walks...

Christmas, Part 1

We celebrated Christmas twice this year. Santa first brought Lucie presents to her home and she opened them in the morning with her great-grandmother who stayed with us for a few days.
We had Greg's sister and his father over for "Christmas dinner," which to keep it simple was take-out couscous.

Decorating the Tree

We put up our tree in early December, but have gotten behind downloading photos from our camera. Lucie really enjoyed decorating the tree.





Oddly enough, French Christmas lights are not in strands, but are one large loop. I don't know why they do this, but it makes the task of untangling the lights even harder. Putting them on is also challenging. It requires lassoing the tree.

Mystery pictures

To celebrate the holidays, we bring you this year's contest (there wasn't one last year and probably won't be one next year either, so enjoy this one). Your task, should you accept it, is to identify who is in the pictures below. As a hint, you should know that all of these persons have been featured before, and that it's mostly one person. To make things more interesting, you can also guess which year the pictures were taken. Let the persons who are on the photos, and who will doubtlessly recognize themselves, please stay out of the contest...






And if you're wondering why this has suddenly appeared on our otherwise dormant blog, here are some hints: long flight, new computer, jetlag, middle of the night, awake.

A few random pictures

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip to Brussels and Antwerp. We went to see friends in Antwerp, and here are two pictures taken of Lucie and their daughter.



Once a week, Lucie goes to 'music' class, at one of the local day care centers. She has a blast, learns to shake maracas and make all sorts of noises, etc...