Parlez-vous Quebecois?

We have an impromptu French tutor staying with us for the month of July. Raphaelle is the 14-year old daughter of some friends from Montreal. When her mother found out we were going to be spending some time in France, she offered to have Raph come down to TCI for a few weeks to help the girls get used to the language (and to get Raphaelle away from home for a bit!). She's a great kid who has really taken to the girls and her job...and Chico.  And, she has not only been helpful with French tutoring and generally hanging out with the girls, she is preparing us for what life with a teen age daughter is like (these days that means lots of Facebook and IM, plus the time honored teenage tradition of sleeping in til noon). I hope ours are as well mannered as Raphaelle when they get to be her age.

Actually Raphaelle has been here before, five years ago when we did a home exchange with her family. Ironically we have never met her parents live (only through email) but we feel like we know them and now that we have met Raphaelle we can tell she comes from good stock.

Most days she puts Lindsey and Savannah through the paces of an informal French lesson, using an array of books she brought down, and engaging them in conversation. Part of the whole idea was to help Raphaelle get more comfortable with English, too, but she is much more fluent in that language than we are in French so I am not sure how much help we are in that regard. She seems to enjoy hanging out with the girls and their friends and there doesn't appear to be much of language barrier at all. They have gone to the beach, the movies and even Beaches for a day so Raphaelle would seem to be having a fun summer (she keep her Facebook page very up to date with her latest photos, which are quite creative and artistic).

Being from Montreal, Raphaelle speaks a slightly different version of the French language than we'll have to deal with (I am sure some Parisians might call it a foreign language altogether). The Quebecois dialect can be challenging even for the most fluent of French speakers, and there are actually entire words and phrases that are unique to that version of the language. We're using French flashcards with the girls (plus experimenting with Rosetta Stone), which are based on Parisian French, and it's interesting to hear Raphaelle offer up the Quebecois version of some of the terms. But she speaks kid which is the most important language this summer.

It's been fun having Raphaelle around this summer as part of our family. I just wish we could take her to France as our personal translator

Family Photo Shoot

We finally cashed in on our family photo shoot that our staff gave us as a Christmas present. We are very lucky to have such a talented photography firm here in the Turks & Caicos - Brilliant.  They do an awesome job and took shots of us (including Chico, of course) on the grounds of Royal West Indies, and the beach out in front of that property. It was our first experience with such an production as a family, and it wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it might be

The pictures came out great, especially the girls, and it's nice to have some memories of them on Grace Bay Beach.

A part of the package they deliver to clients is a animated slide show, complete with sound track.

Enjoy!

Savannah's graduation

Hard to believe that Savannah's run at the Ashcroft School here in Turks & Caicos is over.

She has been there for almost 8 years, and regardless of whether we were to move or not, she would be moving on. The school has had its ups and downs, but it's been a consistent part of her life - and ours - for almost her entire existence.

She has nice memories of her time there, her teachers and friends. She got a good education and probably has a more expanded view of the world than she might have if she was in the US. I think in an odd way it also helped her get closer to her little sister as she looked after her at school. She's a bit sad about not moving on to the next school here in TCI with her friends, although several of them are leaving the island as well.

I've talked to her quite a bit about her new school. She'll be in the sixth grade there, which is the oldest class they offer. I think she will like being in that position for one more year, and we were actually a bit worried about her being in the 6th grade of a school that has grades 6-12 if we stayed here in TCI. PLus, she can walk there, and they offer a nice variety of extracurricular stuff.

So Savannah closes a major chapter in her life and gets ready to turn the page...along with the rest of us. As you can see from the video below, she seems ready:

Sand Dog & the Swim Race

It's always fun to bury your little brother or sister at the beach. Chico was the victim this time. It didn't take long. This family fun (for everyone but Chico) happened at the Open Water Swim Race that took place over the weekend.

The 'big' girls swam (Lindsey cheered them on) in the kids race (below), and Raphaelle and Savannah both got medals. We even got to hang out with the star attraction for the event, a highly regarded long distance swimmer named Marcos Diaz. He's from the DR but is world renowned for his marathon swimming exploits, including swimming back and forth across the Straits of Gibraltar, and swimming around Manhattan twice in one go. Needless to say, he won the adult race.

The end of my rein as Rotary Prez

For the past year I have spent quite a bit of time performing my 'volunteer' role as president of the local Rotary Club.(at this point I can't recall actually volunteering, much less why).  It can be a fun and rewarding job, but also a tiring, frustrating and an extremely time-consuming one. Rotary is a great organization and there are outstanding people involved with it, but it's an entirely volunteer orgnization so I learned alot about how to organize and motivate people without the benefit of financial incentives. Service Above Self, people.

I think it was a pretty good year for our club but I was happy to hand the reins over to Art Forbes. My stepping down isn't related to our move - one can only serve as president of a Rotary club for one year, which I completed as of June 30.  I'm sure Toni and the kids are even more happy as a seemingly endless schedule of meetings, events, community projects and other commitments comes to an end. (Toni also stepped down from her leadership role in a non-profit group, relieving herself of her role as president of the local Aids Awareness Foundation, another group that has done great things in our community. Alas, we no longer reside at the Residence of the Presidents, which our friends had dubbed it).

As for me, I will stay plugged into Rotary, and will seek out my Rotary brethren in Aix as there is a club there. I may have to build a little more confidence in my French skills first, though.

Love this Animoto thing

Our good friend Eleanor has expanded her creative skills to the world of multimedia design. Always the life of the party and the Queen of the iPod in her nocturnal persona - DJ El -  she has turned us on to, and is perfecting herself, the very cool on-line picture editing tool called Animoto. You basically send them a bunch of pictures, pick out a soundtrack, and they put together a well-choreographed slide show. It's a little more complicated than that, but not much.

Eleanor has become a pro at documenting the previous night's festivities, which is sometimes handy, sometimes regrettable when things get blurry. For better or worse, Eleanor's Animoto's are a great way to see the whole story unfold. Even when she is in the middle of the action, she can somehow produce a lucid retrospective of even the wildest of  "what the f*** happened last night?" type of affairs.

Obviously overwhelmed by a bewildering combination of creative inspiration and emotional distress about leaving the island for the summer to go back to her native Ireland (and thus probably not seeing us before our move) - and maybe having too much time on her hands -  Eleanor made a tear-jerking farewell montage Animoto for us, drawing up on the 'best of' of her party photo collection, as well as some other fun we've had with her and her family. Check it out here.

Thanks El!

Actually her best work may have been her first. She did an Animoto for my surprise birthday party back in January. And I prefer the sound track on this one a bit more!

Sailing on the good ship Atabeyra

We took advantage of a Monday holiday to 'go tourist' and a bunch of us chartered the Atabeyra sail boat for a day of fun on the high seas. Dave Douglas and his crew do a great job and really roll out the red carpet for residents. We sailed on the South Side and anchored right of a wreck that was grounded during the '08 hurricanes. The Atabeyra is the one on the right, by the way. As you can see, Kerry really flipped over the experience!

Bonfire on the beach. North Caicos

Just fooling around with the Blackberry tool that lets me email photos right from the mobile phone to the blog. This one is taken at a bonfire during our weekend on North Caicos with friends Owen and Emelda. Meeting the infamous Bobby Ball, outside whose house we did the beach bonfire, was a bonus.

Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel