Atherton Family Notes

Today is Carissa’s 10th birthday. It’s hard to believe that she has been a part of our lives for 10 whole years now. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we made that late night trip to the hospital a few days earlier than expected and Carissa entered our lives.

We’re quite proud of her. She is growing into being a smart, easy-going, fun young lady with a lot of potential. Sure, she drives us nuts sometimes, like any kid will, but overall, she’s a keeper.

We’ve decided to make a little fuss over her 10th birthday… it’s not everyday you add a digit to your age (and it’s a dicey proposition for anyone to assume they’ll be around to see the third one added). In honor of this momentous occasion, I’ve added a few retroactive blog posts about the first few days that Carissa came into our lives.

Here are the links, and I apologize in advance for the picture quality. Even my iPhone, which I’ve complained about bitterly in recent days, takes better pictures than the little 1 megapixel Kodak D200 that we had at the time… and it was very nearly state of the art then!

Happy Birthday, Carissa!
A Party for Carissa
Everybody wants to hold the baby!
Carissa goes home
Silly Girl!

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Here’s an accidental stereogram taken by Carissa on our recent trip to White River Gardens. I wish the butterfly had its wings spread — they are a beautiful blue color on the other side. I like the photo anyway, because it has an odd artful feel, the way that I am the largest object in the photo, but still not the subject. The 3D effect is pretty nice, too.

Here is another take on the photo, where I’ve oversaturated it to emphasize the artistic effect.

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For her 10th birthday, Carissa had a slumber party with several of her friends. It was a fun evening. Carissa had her favorite meal, schnitzel and spaetzel, and instead of a birthday cake, we had a chocolate fountain into which we dipped fruit, marshmallows and cookies.

The girls also painted picture frames and Sandi took pictures for each of them to put into the frames. Here are the pictures:

Group hug !!!!!

Carissa and Maddi

Carissa and Lizzie

Carissa and Carmen

Carissa and Adriana

Celia’s friend Jessica spent the evening with us as well, then she and Celia went to her house for the night.

…and Sadie and Andrea are always together.

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Here are the portrait Sandi took of Carissa for her 10th birthday.

These are the “official” portraits. There are a couple of other shots we took that I’ll probably post in the next few days.

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This is a photograph we took of Carissa last Sunday out in Danville at a small conference center that Sandi knew about from a previous shoot. The original photograph way too grainy to be used alone, but it looks pretty nice after I ran it through gimp’s “Oilify” filter.

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This is another picture Sandi took of Carissa out in Danville. I had to do a little rescue work on it as well, but I thought the shot was interesting enough to be worth it.

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I thought this outtake was funny. This is the last one, I swear.

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It dawned on me while I was posting the other day about the World War II Monument in Washington, DC, that I had never written anything on our blog about the American World War II Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. This is despite that fact that I visited it three times during our time in France and that I used it favorably in comparison with the monument in DC. Today, Memorial Day, seems like a good time to rectify that oversight.

Most Americans that venture out to the northwest of Paris eventually wind up visiting this cemetery. It is an extraordinary place to visit. It overlooks one of the beaches that served as a turning point, where the allies began the invasion of Europe that would lead to the end of the war. It is a calming place, well-kept, and highlighted by a large memorial and a small chapel. It is also the final resting place of more than 9,000 soldiers and the site of the final reminders of more than 1,500 more whose bodies were never recovered. The majority of those buried here died in the two-week period starting with D-Day, June 6, 1944.

A view across the cemetery toward the English Channel

You can stand at the edge of the cemetery, look out on the beach and imagine the chaos of D-Day. It is easy to see why the Allied casualty numbers were so high in the beginning. The Germans were occupying higher ground and the beach provides little place to hide.

There are a few places I visited where I can say I felt history, and this is one of those places. Actually, the whole coastline in this part of Normandy felt this way to me, from Arromanches to the east to Pointe du Hoc to the west.

Stereogram of the beautiful, but awkwardly named “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves”

photos originally from March 28, 2004

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We spent the holiday weekend down at the Cabin and drove in Jasper on Saturday for a picnic lunch. The girls enjoyed playing in the park, but they also really like playing Nintendo DS with each other over the ad hoc network. What can I say, they are kids of the modern age.

Here’s a stereogram I captured of Celia and her friend Jessica (who spent the weekend with us) that I caught while they were sitting really still playing video games.

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