This is me & Wendy in Sydney in December 2000. She's scared of heights so it was quite an achievement for her to get up this high...

We got on pretty well there and Wendy came over to Northern Ireland the following summer, finally resulting in the following little "growth" appearing...

It doesn't look like much but it kept getting bigger...

And finally this thing popped out...

It didn't look too bad about five minutes later when it was cleaned up (well, he did do quite a load on the way out!)...

He's been getting bigger and bigger and after seven weeks he looked pretty good...

That was him at about 7 weeks; here's him on August 23rd (he'd be 17 weeks on the 26th).

And on an outing the next day...

We finally got around to Christening him in Christ Church, Carrowdore on September 8th, 2002

Here's him in mid-baptism and afterwards

This is his certificate of the event

This is us outside our house in Richmond Heights, Holywood (just outside Belfast) in 2002. Click the photo to download our Christmas Letter of that year.

James' first Christmas photo (2002)...

In 2003 we had a bit of a rush of blood to the head and bought Auberge Mas Camps which is a small hotel in the south of France near Perpignan. Lots more about that at www.mascamps.com and about the region at www.pyreneesthemes.com . This photo was taken on the last day before we had to head back home to Holywood; as usual when you need a good photo in a hurry, it's raining! We were still in Richmond at the time.

We moved over to France in April 2004 and hit the ground running with our first guests arriving a few days after we did.

 .

By 2004 we had another arrival...

John was born on August 29th 2004 in Perpignan, France.

Hard to believe, but this photo was taken in November! By and large the "summer" stays here 'til you get into December.

Our first Christmas in France. Although the custom here is to give presents around January 5th (as in Spain), the Christmas present tradition is here too.

We've been kind of busy since uploading the above photos with the hotel, hence lack of recent updates. In the meantime, here's a couple of much more recent (October 2005) videos of James & John in the St Esteve park. Unless you've an ADSL connection, it's probably best to right-click on each, save them to disc and run the movies from there.

This is one of the many "Summer" days in December 2005. If we get any later with our Christmas letters, we're going to miss a year!

It's seriously difficult to get a Santa of the two of them and John was in between screams for this one in 2005. James was less than pleased when Santa took the present off him.

Even in the south of France, Winter still arrives (usually briefly)...