Wit Over Ignorance

Who is that masked man ?

To whichever member of his family picked up his camera and sneaked this shot, you have been warned: the masked man (and his donkey) will have their revenge.......

Splash

Yes, folks, it's that time of year again. The Allen-Mills water babies head for the pool, where they stay until September. Prepare to be splashed !

Pig-bashing

No modern American birthday is complete without a piñata, a Mexican papier-maché confection that turns small children into homicidal thugs. I'm not entirely sure how a generation of parents came to think it was appropriate for howling packs of six-year-olds to take blunt objects to a defenceless pig (or goat, or donkey or any number of cute, defenceless creatures) in the hope of splitting them apart and then fighting over their contents (usually a handful of cheap chocolates and several small plastic toys manufactured in Taiwan). But hey, what our little darlings want, they get, right ? Shortly after the adorable first picture below was taken, those cute little kids picked up iron bars and took it in turns to smash the pig to pieces. And to our undying shame, we cheered them on....

 

Meeting the prez

Anouk's number one friend from New Jersey was in town, so naturally we took him to see the sights. And who should we bump into but the prez himself. He was busy flogging T-shirts at a souvenir stand in Old Town, Alexandria. Apparently the US economy is in worse shape than we thought. Tristan was very impressed. Anouk thinks her Dad is much better looking. She's right, too.

Chez Mr Cheese

The trouble is, when you ask a 6-year-old American girl (even one who's half-French and half-English) where she wants to take her sisters for a birthday party, the answer (once you've excluded the impractical, the unaffordable and the illegal) is always Chuck E. Cheese. For those of you who have never heard of America's suburban cartoon mouse rip-off, Mr Cheese is a kind of amusement arcade-pizzeria imitation of Mickey. His small, overcrowded, deafening entertainment emporia are the closest you get to hell as a parent. Yet somehow, all four of my daughters have succumbed to his cheesy attractions, and even my older pair, long past the peak age (6) for Chuck E. visits, declared themselves thrilled to be paying a nostalgic return to a much-loved haunt of their youth.  Needless to say, they all had a ball.

   

That birthday in full (1)

I'm a bit slow, as usual, getting these loaded. The one thing that occurred to me, looking through my shots from Anouk's birthday a couple of weeks ago, is that at some point in their lives women go from pink to black. I wonder why this happens. I wonder if there's an actual moment you can photograph, when your daughter discards her beloved pink ensemble and climbs into a black outfit for the first time. I must reflect upon this some more.

The sisters had a ball on the Big Day, and there's more to come after this:

Anything you can do

One of the problems with having two sets of daughters is that it's very easy for the younger ones to pick up bad habits. I guess I'm lucky in that my older daughters (16 and nearly 13) are mostly sweet little angels (OK, sweet big angels) who have not yet succumbed to any seriously worrying vices (unless you count daughter number two's insistence on singing Broadway show tunes whenever she gets in the car). But as you might expect, my younger daughters (6 and 2), adore their older siblings and want to be like them in every possible way. I don't mind the sharing lipstick, sunglasses, and other girly things, but I do get nervous when daughter number two heads for the high trapeze and daughter number three goes: "me too, me too" (daughter number four also goes "me too, me too", but she's small enough to be forcibly restrained; fortunately daughter number one is now way too sophisticated to hang upside down, and wouldn't be seen dead on a high trapeze). So I stand there torn between wanting to stand under them in case they fall, and wanting to record the scene to show to their future boyfriends. Yes, I shall have my revenge.

Blink

Daughter number two thought an extra eye would come in handy.

Spot the difference

What is it about kids and mud, anyway ? The first picture below was taken of daughter number three on Chesapeake Bay a couple of Sundays ago. The lower picture was taken of daughter number one on the Towy river estuary in South Wales about five years ago. Or was it the other way round ?

All is not lost

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years ago, we pretty much knew what to expect. My sister is an expert on ageing, has worked in several old age homes, and has since become a regional representative of the Alzheimer's Society. Yet still the old bag managed to surprise us.

The first thing you learn about Alzheimer's is that while it is incurable, it doesn't actually kill you. Ma will be 86 in August, and is showing every sign that she'll get to be 100 and earn her telegram from the Queen (or email, or tweet, or whatever Buckingham Palace sends out these days). She's physically frail, and has given us a couple of scares in recent months, but given that she smoked like a chimney for 60 years, it's frankly a miracle that she can still draw a breath.

Instead, Alzheimer's steadily takes away pretty much everything that makes life worth living - memory, family, peace. It's a scary and sometimes violent affliction. We were lucky in that the rate of Ma's decline was much slower than the norm; but now she's mostly lost to dementia, and mostly lost to us.

There's still a spark, though, some vestige of her past life that somehow glints through the fog. As we talked during a recent visit, I was never sure that she knew quite who I was, or even what it meant to have a son (the one advantage of Alzheimer's is that among the many things she has forgotten is that she used to be a smoker). I took a few photographs, and when I looked at them afterwards there was a full range of her ever-shifting expressions, some too sad or cruel to reproduce here. But there was also something I used to see a great deal of, especially when I was a child. She has an irresistible smile.