In April the girls went to their very first full-blown party as some neighbours and friends had a going-away party. It was also the first social outing, for a long time, for France and Christopher!
 
On the evening of July 6th, the Olympic Torch passed right in front of our humble abode, on its marathon cross-country run to Sydney. It was quite a moving experience. Véronique slept through the whole thing, cuddling her mother in the sling. Cordelia was having a blast, excitedly waving her little Australian flag and yelling "Hi" to everyone who passed by. Then in September we got to see LOTS of sports on TV, when the Olympics actually got underway. France casually followed swimming and anything else that happened to be on at the time. It was very hard to ignore the Olympics! What do you expect, even though they happened on the other side of the country (Perth to Sydney is similar in distance to LA-NYC or Montréal-Vancouver!), they were still "the best Olympics ever"! We taped the Opening and Closing ceremonies, but we still haven't finished watching even the Opening ceremony! One day, hopefully, life will return to normal and France and Christopher will have time to watch the hours and hours of television programs and movies they have taped. France pretty much goes to bed when the girls do and has to wake up when they rise. Not much of a chance to catch up on videos!
 
France and Christopher celebrated their second wedding anniversary on August 21st. That also means that they had lots of paperwork to do since it was time for France to apply for her Permanent Residency Visa. This can only be done after the first two years of living in Australia. Then, after the paperwork was filed, there was a long wait. On November 7, the day after the departure of her Mother, France received notice of her Permanent Residency being approved. She is still a Canadian citizen and will most likely remain one, since becoming a full Australian Citizen would mean surrendering her Canadian Citizenship, and we can see no advantage in doing this. As for Véronique and Cordelia, they will have dual citizenship since Canada recognises them as Canadian Citizens since they were born to a Canadian Mother, but they are real little Aussie babies as well, running around barefoot most of the year!
 
We all worked very hard at making the house really clean and festive for Christmas. We are ready to celebrate with the girls and with their Uncle Murray (Christopher's brother) who will join us for the occasion. France has been making a few changes here and there, making the house more of a "home" than a rental place, and has discovered a few "homemaker" traits in her that she didn't know she had; baking, sewing (well, she has been doing that for a while), decorating, re-arranging and, her father would never believe this one, but it's true: she's become a bit of a neat freak! She also gets to enjoy a few trips to Fremantle or to the nearest shopping mall since the buses here are wheelchair accessible, which means that they are also twin-pram (twin-stroller) accessible. Both girls LOVE to go on the bus! It's our only means of transportation since we don't feel the need for a car.
 
France will finally get a new computer in January. She got hers stolen about a year ago. To keep her going, we were able to pick up a little 486SX laptop for no cost, but it came without much grunt or hard disk size and a screen offering 16 spectacular shades of grey. Many colours are the same when boiled down to 16! Christopher is amazed that France has managed to keep her webpages updated at all with that crummy laptop! In any case, France promises to update the girls' web site, and her own, more frequently next year as she won't have any excuse to not do so! Véronique and Cordelia are in training for computing, they already discovered keyboards and red buttons on the front of computers (the reset buttons on Christopher's desktop computers and the on/off switch on France's notebook). That means that Mommy and Daddy have to proofread emails before sending them out and make sure they save their work at all times. France sent an email to her mother that had a whole bunch of stuff pasted in it, from the clipboard. She is still trying to figure out how the girls managed to do a ctrl-v!
 
Christopher has been busy keeping all the computers of the neighbourhood in tiptop shape, and getting newbies up and running on the Internet, and scanning their own photos. He studies hard keeping his computer skills up to date, especially in mastering Javascript, improving his scanning skills and use of Photoshop (he's currently trying to wangle the acquisition of a better, professional scanner). He is in the process of finishing the house wiring for improved intercom baby monitoring, and then setting up a local area network so all our computers will be able to talk to each other and access the Internet at the same time. This network is a work in progress, largely using leftover parts as they appear, at (so far) a total cash cost of zero! The network itself will therefore take its own time to implement, but it should be up and running in the very near future, which should effectively mean pretty much full-time, permanent Internet access for all of us, which will be nice.
 
With lots of help from Cordelia, he also completed building and installing a large desktop shelving unit for his computer room to enable his working on up to 4 completely disassembled computers at once. His room is still usually a mess, though! On the odd night, Véronique insists on following her father's night owl practice staying up with him until the wee hour of Midnight, even until 1am. Luckily, this only happens occasionally, but it does happen. Not to mention the time about a year ago, when she woke up around 3am and didn't let him go to sleep at all that night!
 
All in all, it's been a pretty good year for us, with few real disasters or problems to report. We're all healthy, and the girls are growing up really happily and all too quickly. We hope your year has been equally as fulfilling, and that 2001 goes well for all of us.
 

Merry Christmas and Bonne Année
from
Christopher, France, Véronique and Cordelia
 

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