This month has actually been pretty active for DNA cousins, I had one of my cousins pop up, they are actually my half 1st cousin but in my family we don’t really use “half”. I also had the child of one of my cousins pop up, again they are half relation but we don’t use those terms.
Itr is actually interesting to see the shared relatives between both of my cousins. I was expecting to see just relatives of my grandfather but sprinkled in there were relatives from my grandmother’s side and my father’s paternal and maternal side!
This is interesting to me because my grandparents were from different countries. My paternal grandfather was from Saint-Barthélemy in the French caribbean, my paternal grandmother was from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands and my maternal grandparents were from Dominica.
I’m trying not to get ahead of myself while speculating on the relationships of all these dna relatives and what it means that they show up in my shared relatives in common with my cousins. It is entirely possible that I am related to this person on their paternal side and my cousin is related to them via their maternal side. I have no idea how I’m actually going to prove these lines though, Dominica genealogy is the most frustrating one I have ever had to deal with, if I could find my way to a family history center and view the records on, FamilySearch I would be so happy but I have no way to gain access to one. I hope that the records for Saint George parish will be made available one day and I’m able to search whenever I want.
Here is my Half first cousin, their parent is my mother’s half sibling. We share 7% of our DNA, 485 cM across 22 segments. My cousin and our aunt who is my full aunt share 1031 cM across 34 segments while I share 1808 cM across 60 segments. My cousin actually share a little more DNA with my brother than I do and I don’t like it lol, my brother actually shares 594 cM across 20 segments, it doesn’t really change the fact that this is our cousin but in my mind it’s like they are more his cousin than mine and it makes me a little sad. It’s an illogical thought but my mind travels down these paths frequently.
Now, here is my half 1st cousin once removed, we share 4% of our DNA, 301 cM across 11 segments, their shared DNA with my aunt is intereting, 223 cM across 10 segments, I share more DNA with them than they share with my aunt, I wonder if it means that my mother shares more DNA in common with this half sibling or maybe their other parent is somehow related to me through my father. This cousin’s parent is my half 1st cousin which means their grandparent is my mother’s half sibling.
So here is a little chart showing piece of my family tree, I have way more aunts and uncles than is shown here, I just wanted to show where my cousins are located in the family tree.
I wish some of my cousins on my father’s side would test so I can see how much DNa we share and what relatives they might be related to that doesn’t show up for me or my brother. They don’t seem to be interested in it but one can only hope.
I haven’t actually updated my blog in a while especially when it comes to my life, so I’ll do that now.
I have to actually go back to last year when I visited a Psychologist here in France; this was a court-ordered visit to find out if I was suffering from some mental disorder that caused me not to be able to speak. I never got the results so I had no idea what the results were until our next court visit in February before my 37th birthday.
The Psychologist came to the conclusion that I was Autistic; I had Selective Mutism, Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, and Childhood Trauma. I thought this was an official diagnosis but apparently not, since Psychologists can’t diagnose Autism in France like they can in the US. If I want to get an official diagnosis, I will have to pay out of pocket and look for someone on my own, and I can’t afford it, so I have an answer to all the questions I’ve had for my whole life, but I don’t have paper proof that I can use for official paper if I want to apply for aid.
I’m not really surprised at this diagnosis, especially with how I grew up and how much my father and younger brother display classic signs of Autism.
Last week, something terrible happened in my family; I lost a cousin unexpectedly, and it has been really hard. My cousin Craig was like a ray of sunshine; when you were depressed and at your lowest, he would find the most insanely funny way to make you laugh; he was a champion of the disenfranchised and the first to have your back. He had an intense dislike for Roti, especially chicken roti with bones; he likened it to daggers stabbing your gums and wondered why anyone would choose to eat it.
There are days where I remember him with a smile and a laugh because I remembered something funny he said or did, and there are days when I cry deeply at the slightest reminder that he is gone. I hope my cousin knew the impact he had on the people around him and how much he is missed.
Que sont les “Quick Claims”, demandez-vous ? Il s’agit du nouveau programme utilisé par Influenster pour offrir des produits gratuits à ses membres. Il est basé sur les informations de votre profil et vous n’avez pas besoin de répondre à une enquête, ils vous envoient un e-mail et une notification et vous pouvez réclamer votre produit. Certains Claims ne proposent qu’un seul produit à réclamer, tandis que d’autres offrent de nombreuses options au choix. Il existe même des réclamations groupées où vous choisissez plus d’un produit à utiliser ensemble. Je n’ai pas encore reçu de réclamation groupée.
Si cela vous semble familier, c’est peut-être le cas, surtout si vous avez été membre de Tryit Sampling. C’est ainsi que Tryit fonctionnait et, depuis la fusion avec Influenster, c’est ainsi que de nombreux programmes fonctionnent désormais sur Influenster.
Pour tout vous dire, ce n’est pas le premier produit que l’on m’a offert, on m’a offert un brillant à lèvres de Gucci, mais il est arrivé après 23 heures, un soir d’école, je dormais et je n’ai donc pas pu en profiter.
Je vais maintenant vous parler du jeu de société Monopoly Gliss ci-dessous
Monopoly Gliss
Monopoly Gliss est une version actualisée du célèbre jeu familial Monopoly.
Dans cette version du jeu, les joueurs s’affrontent dans un concours de jetons. Les joueurs jouent à tour de rôle en faisant glisser leurs jetons sur le plateau de jeu d’un mètre et demi et en essayant de les faire atterrir sur des propriétés.
Le but du jeu est assez simple, vous devez placer vos jetons sur les meilleures propriétés et faire tomber les jetons des autres joueurs en prison ou hors du plateau.
Mon fils et moi essayons toujours de viser la place de parking gratuite, car vous pouvez gagner 500 dollars monopoly.
Il est en fait assez difficile d’atteindre l’espace de stationnement gratuit, vous devez glisser à la bonne vitesse et au bon angle. Je n’ai réussi à l’atteindre qu’une seule fois, mais mon fils l’a fait environ quatre fois au cours de notre jeu ensemble. Je n’y suis parvenu qu’une seule fois, mais mon fils y est parvenu environ quatre fois au cours de nos parties. Il semble avoir beaucoup de chance de son côté !
Mon fils et moi avons joué à ce jeu ensemble et nous nous sommes beaucoup amusés. Les instructions étaient un peu difficiles à comprendre, mais heureusement il y a une vidéo qui vous montre ce qu’il faut faire.
Comme son nom l’indique, vous faites glisser vos pièces sur le plateau dans l’espoir d’atterrir sur une propriété vide ou sur une place de parking gratuite difficile à atteindre.
J’aime l’idée de travailler en équipe lorsqu’il y a plus de personnes, car notre fille de trois ans est trop jeune pour comprendre le concept. Elle peut donc jouer en équipe avec son frère, avec moi ou avec son père.
C’est vraiment un ajout amusant à nos soirées de jeux en famille.
Summer has come and gone so quickly, I thought I was going to accomplish more but life showed me that I shouldn’t make plans for the future.
I meant to post this in early September when the school year had just started but we’re now heading into the fifth week of school and it’s almost October. I’ve been very behind on my blogging, but I’m here to share my update now.
My daughter is two and a half years old and she could have gone to school this September if only she was potty trained, I said to myself that I was going to potty train her over the summer break but she’s just not ready. She won’t sit on the potty, she doesn’t really say when needs to pee or poop, and she doesn’t say that she has a dirty diaper. If I don’t smell it or change her frequently she would be fine to just sit in her dirty diaper all day.
People told me that girls were easier to potty train than boys but I’m not seeing any truth in this, my son would at least sit on the potty my daughter just refuses, she will cry and scream if you even suggest it so I don’t.
I bought her some underwear to wear but she goes through them so fast that I’m beginning to see that I need much more than 20.
Slowly but surely we’ll get there so I’ll be trying not to stress too much about this.
Other than potty training woes we didn’t really do much or go anywhere.
The Village
We’ve been to The Village before, several times in fact but not frequently so we took the kids there so they could run around in the play area and have some summer fun.
After the children played we visited The Waffle Factory which is a restaurant that serves only waffles. I got waffles covered in white chocolate and Naveen got waffles and whipped cream. My husband had waffles covered in milk chocolate. Oyanie refused to eat any of the waffles and choose to drink all the lemon water instead. The waffles were a bit difficult to cut especially with the flimsy wooden fork and knife they gave us. Marvin was in the middle of cutting his waffle when his fork snapped. I joked and said he used all his muscles on it.
The Aquarium
Going to the aquarium has been a dream of mine since moving here and we finally got to go.
We decided to go in the afternoon, the drive there probably took us half an hour and we spent two hours vising all that tanks and watching short movies, Naveen and Oyanie seemed to have really enjoyed themselves and Naveen made sure to tell me all about the fishes he saw and the sharks were one of his favorites to see.
Naveen was really excited when he saw a Blue Tang, he told me he saw Dory but no Neemo, a couple of tanks over I spotted a clownfish swimming in and out of an anemone and pointed it out to him when he yelled out Mami look Neemo! it made me really happy that he could see these fish in person.
Pool time
Since we are not near to any beaches and were not planning of traveling to one this year we made do with going to my in-laws and enjoying their pool.
Both of my children love the water and do not want to leave the pool anytime they get in it. Naveen definitely got a sun tan with all his sun exposure while swimming around with my husband’s cousins as well as their own cousins.
Back to School
Back to School for us was on September 1st. Naveen is in CM1 which is the French equivalent to 4th grade. Oyanie and I had to wake up early to take him to school, pick him up for lunch, drop him back after lunch, and pick him up after school.
It was the worst experience of my life, there were so many people jammed in front of the gate all trying to force their way in to drop their children off. I felt very uneasy with people stepping over the stroller or standing right up against my back, someone even touched my butt and I hated every second I had to spend waiting in that crowd of bodies.
The second day I decided I would leave the stroller home and we’d just walk until it was lunchtime Oyanie said her feet were “fatigués” which sounded like fatigee to my ears. I thought that if she was so tired I’ll just use the stroller next time but she refused so we walked again after school she was really tired and I got the stroller out which she did not like at all. Oyanie, when she doesn’t get a chance to nap, is a monster, she screamed, she cried, she threw things, I thought for sure she would sleep in the stroller but she did not and I don’t know how to include a nap into our busy schedule. If I let her nap after we drop Naveen off after lunch I’ll have to wake her up during her nap and she hates that just as much.
I really hope I won’t have such a busy schedule next week because we both need her to have her afternoon nap.
The 2nd week
The 2nd week went by much more smoothly, we don’t use the stroller at all anymore but sometimes I wish we did, when Oyanie’s little legs get tired of walking or she stumbles and falls she wants me to pick her up and carry her on my hips and walk is a workout, when we finally reach home my whole body is sore, my shoulders ache, my back ache, my legs ache, I know she won’t go in the stroller even if I bring it though. I have also gotten used to not having to try to find space to push the stroller through.
My baby absolutely loves picking up her brother at school, she gets to walk on her own, she points out all the airplanes she sees, they are her favorites, she gets really excited when she sees one in the sky and will scream with joy and point at it. She also likes stopping to smell the flowers and picks one every chance she gets, she almost always ends up dropping it before we reach the school when Naveen finally walks out the gate she runs up to him and hugs him saying “Vee-veen!”.
I am unimportant from that point forward, she wants to hold her brother’s hand, run with him, follow him, play with him, she wants to do everything with him, unfortunately, Naveen is hitting pre-teen years which means he doesn’t always want to be with his baby sister. He will ignore her, not hold her hand or tell her to leave him alone and it breaks her heart. She cries so much when does that and then she finally remembers me and comes to me for comfort.
I remember those days so well from my own youth, my sisters frequently pushed me to the side and made me feel unwanted, I had my brothers though and I made sure never to make them feel like I didn’t want them around. I can’t force Naveen to play with his sister though, he will be nine and I recognize and understand that he needs his personal space. Still, I also recognize that with only two children they are pretty much the only close family either one will have and Oyanie just wants to spend time with her brother. I have not yet figured out a way to navigate this turbulent sea. My mother never forced my siblings and me to play together but sometimes I wished she had, maybe it wouldn’t have taken us so long to finally get along.
I wrote about Joseph Boldt before in this post and this one as well. Since those posts, I have done a lot more fact-checking and some stuff is just not accurate anymore. Genealogy as you might not know is very fluid and things you thought you had checked and double-checked could always use a triple check.
First things first, Joseph and Christina’s first daughter was not Adelaide as I had assumed but Ancilla Boldt, this was not a middle name or nickname but her actual name. Ancilla was born on August 7, 1869, and she passed away on March 18, 1881, when she was 11 years old.
Burial records 1881 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
This record was the reason I went back through the records I had for Adelaide and realized that there were records for 3 people. There was Ancilla born in 1869, Adelaide born in 1883, and another Adelaide Boldt born in 1853. I now have Ancilla and my Adelaide accounted for but have no idea who the older Adelaide is. I’ve been trying to build a mirror tree for her but she is a complete mystery to me and I’ve shelved it for a little while. I’m more interested in Joseph and what secrets he has for me.
So, Joseph, I know was born in the 1840s and his mother’s name was Precill or something close to it so I focused on looking for birthdates with names close to it. I came across this entry:
Baptism records 1842 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
The name Sames made no sense to me so I looked at the record more closely and the name is obviously James.
Joseph was born on April 3, 1842, parents are James and Priscilla from Mt. Stewart.
This could be his parents, this could be my 5th great-grandparents but I’m not sure. They both have no surnames so I’m assuming they are slaves. I viewed a Session during RootsTech Connect that said slaves took names that had a meaning to them. The name of their master, their master’s mother, or grandmother, whoever it was the slave knew them and took the name for themselves during slavery and kept it. I’m now tracking every Boldt I can find on the Island. Somewhere there has to be a clue.
Very recently I found some new records that suggest there was another daughter named Rebecca, there’s no image available to view but the Household number leads me to believe this was one of my great aunts.
1880 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
Unfortunately, she passed away in 1900 before she could turn 23.
Burial records 1900 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
She’s old enough to have had children but I haven’t come across any so far.
As for Christina, I think I found some of her family, possibly her father and two aunts. I was looking over the 1870 Census when I noticed a familiar last name, Chamberlain. Family in the Danish West Indies almost always stuck close to each other so it’s telling that the only other family I found with this last name lived right next to Christina and Ancilla.
1870 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
Going back to Joseph’s parents in the 1870 Census Priscilla shows up as Precill Karen. She’s an Invalid living with her son Joe and sister Magdalene Karen who is also invalid.
1870 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
In the 1880 Census, she is Percila Boldt, there’s no image available for this record so I have if I look at the household number it’s safe to assume she was living with Joseph and his family.
Percila is very close to Priscilla so even if these specific people aren’t my great grandparents I’m going to refer to Precill as Priscilla from now on.
I haven’t had much luck finding any other Karens on the Island so it just might be a misspelling. So far the closest names I have found are Caren, Cairnes, Cairns, Karn, Kern, and Keron.
My Boldt Collection:
After going through the Census records which include Baptism, Burials, and Marriages I have collected quite a few Boldts to see if I could find a link to my family.
James Boldt born on 28 November 1854 in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, he went by the name Bolde while becoming Naturalized in Massachusetts.
I have not found a baptism record for him. I did find him in the 1870 Census living in a house owned by Sarah Jane Boldt. I’m still doing research into who this might be.
I’m now trying to work downwards from the connections I have made but it is very slow going because I’m not sure if they went to other Islands or other countries.
I was thinking how crazy it is that I began my genealogy journey in 2006, that’s 14 years ago, way older than my oldest child. I was barely a child myself, 19 years old and I had no clue what I was doing. I just jumped on Ancestry and started putting in names my parents gave me. I hit a huge brick wall because there were so many people with the same name and people frequently used only their middle names or nicknames. I did a google search for my great grandparents’ names which lead me to a thread on Ancestry about a family with that name. It looked correct so I put it in my tree. Biggest rookie mistake ever!
Luckily for me, it was the correct couple and that lead me to a distant cousin who had all kinds of information on my grandfather’s mother’s family. This was the first time I’d learned that her name wasn’t Josephine but Marie Josephine. The tree of this cousin took me all the way to Joseph Simon Turbé my 5x great grandfather. I assumed he was born in St. Barts as well since everyone else seemed to have been also, another rookie mistake. I did another google search which leads me to Anne Marie Danet’s post on her blog 3 – First French in the Antilles, you can see on line 24 there is a Joseph Turbe who married Anne Rose Greaux and he is the ancestor of all Turbe on the Island. This Joseph is my great grandfather. This suggested that he was from Nantes but he wasn’t born there which was a brick wall I had for a long time.
To break this wall I scoured all over the net, looked at several family trees, and then I found a reference somewhere that said he was born in Couëron, I had never heard of this place before.
Couëron is a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department in western France. It is part of the historic French Brittany. Couëron is one of the 24 communes of the Nantes Métropole.
It makes a bit of sense why he would be considered a Nantes native but it is very unhelpful for a novice. So, I now knew where he was from but I had no idea where to find information about his parents. I asked a question on Wikitree in 2018 asking if anyone could help me find his Acte de naissance or Acte de baptême. A very helpful person pointed me in the right direction and I found not only his Acte de baptême but that he had a brother! I haven’t explored much of his brother’s descendants, maybe I should do that sometime soon.
Now I work on all the families of Saint-Barthélemy, sometimes I find a link to my family and realize this stranger suddenly became a distant family member. I spoke a bit about it in my post about my Saint-Barthélemy Project last year, I actually have an update on that post that I just never posted about. I now have the ancestry of my 3x great-grandparents Anne Louise Chapelain and Pierre LaPlace thanks to the author of The Saint-Barth Islander. He was very helpful and I was able to make connections on those lines in my brother’s Ancestry DNA tree. The Joseph Chaplin that I thought was my grandmother’s brother was in fact her brother and someone made a typo on his age.
For now, I’m working on the Governors of the US Virgin Islands/Danish West Indies. It is much more challenging work compared to researching my French ancestry. A lot of them were descendants of slaves and those records are not so easy to go through.
If you’re also looking to do some research in the Dansk Vestindien I suggest this site Caribbean Genealogy Library or CGL for short, I find myself using the records for St. Thomas a lot when working with my French side because many of them left St. Barts and ended up in the Virgin Islands. I’m particularly fond of the:
For census records, during Danish time you can find those on Ancestry which of course requires a subscription to use but you can also find the St. Croix census on the Dansk Demografisk Database by Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives), all you do is enter a name and it will bring you up all instances of that name appearing in the Census records.
Show Household will display everyone that lived in the household.
Show all Fields will show you all the information about the person you were looking for.
It is a pain because you have to search for everyone one by one but it is free so I can’t really complain. I should note that not everyone can be found this way, the record you are looking for might not have been transcribed or the name is spelled differently than you are looking for.
For the more recent Census records you can find them on Ancestry or you can look on FamilySearch, FamilySearch is free to use, you just have to sign up for a free account. It is a very useful site because you can also look up their free world tree to see if your relatives are already on there. If they are you will be notified when you search for records about them. You can see it circled in the photo attached.
There are not that many of us doing Caribbean genealogy on Wikitree so if you are interested in helping I’d suggest joining and helping put our Islands on the map.
As you guys have read about before here, here, and here. I took the 23andme test in June 2018 and got my results back on July 18, 2018. I was left very underwhelmed, there was not much to learn from the results.
Take a look for yourself:
Over 100€ for that, I thought my brother’s Ancestry test was much more informative. It was fine though, a couple of months after there was an update and it broke down the African. It still wasn’t the best but at least it wasn’t just West African anymore. My .3% African Hunter-Gatherer was gone while Nigerian, Senegambian & Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese were separated from the broad West African category. Coastal West African while narrowed down from just West African is still a broad category not to mention the Broadly West African, Broadly Congolese & Southern East African, and Broadly Sub-Saharan African. Just a lot of Broadly.
My European stayed mostly the same. Scandinavian at .4% was added send it made sense since my brother had Norway and Sweden which I assumed came from my Father’s mother. My grandmother’s family has been in the Danish West Indies since the first slaves were brought there. There’s also a mulatto ancestor with the surname Boldt, I admit it’s not much evidence but a cousin who descended from that same line also has Norway and Sweden. Unfortunately, Ancestry DNA doesn’t have a Chromosome browser so I can’t see where that Norway and Sweden are located and if my brother and this cousin match on that same chromosome. Since doing my research on my grandfather’s place of birth Saint-Barthélemy, I realized that Swedish could come from that side since the Swedish colonized the Island from 1784 to 1877.
I should note that my African went up and my European went down, not by much but I found it interesting nonetheless. My Native American stayed the same and I gained Western Asian and North African.
In May 2019 my results went through another update, they called this a Beta update, my African portion was broken down, even more, I lost the Sudanese but gained Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean, the Congolese & Southern East African got a break down showing Angolan & Congolese but there were still those pesky Broadly categories.
My European had a revamp, the Iberian category was renamed to Spanish & Portuguese, I lost the little bit of Italian I had. My Native American once again stayed the same. Strangely, I had Central & South Asian added at 0.1%, seeing how categories at that level seem to vanish I didn’t expect to see it at the next update.
Now we’re at my most recent update before I phased with my father. It was updated around September 2019 but if you remember I was pregnant and sick during that time so I didn’t see the update until April of this year. My African Hunter-Gatherer is back at the same percentage too. Southern East African was added at .1%. My Western Asian & North African went up. I had a location for France, Nouvelle-Aquitaine which lines up perfectly with my paper trail, and I had a Caribbean location Dominica, which is right on the money since both my Mother’s parents were from there.
For Father’s Day, I decided I was going to buy my father a 23andme kit, it wasn’t a surprise since I had spoken to both parents about it and they were interested, my father got his kit in July and his results were ready earlier this month. I’m not going to lie but I didn’t expect anything in his composition other than European and African. What he received shocked me.
My father apparently has Native American ancestry. Never in my life has anyone ever mentioned him having Native American anywhere in any of his family lines and since both his parents have passed I have no one to ask about it and will probably never find out where it comes from. Even better?
My Native American comes from him. All my life I was told my Mother’s mother had Kalinago ancestry and when I saw Native American in my composition I assumed it came from my Grandmother, jokes on me though, it could have come from a Grandmother, just not the one I thought.
My Father has two regions in France and six in the United Kingdom. Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie line up perfectly with our paper trail but all the United Kingdom regions are a mystery.
Here are my results after phasing with my father. My African Hunter-Gatherer is gone once again. Italian has reappeared. My West Asian & North African has gone down again, this time they are trace ancestry.
I guess my course of action now is to test my Mother and see what secrets her DNA is hiding.
Welcome back or if you’re visiting for the first time hello.
The last time I posted “The Last of them” my grandfather had just passed away and I was not in a good frame of mind. I’m doing better now, not 100% but I don’t feel like closing myself up in a deep dark hole, I got the space I needed to grieve and I’m thankful for that.
One of my nieces went on vacation to the beach and my son wanted so badly to join her but the closest beach to us is almost 5 hours away! There’s no way we’d travel that far to go to the beach. Or so I thought…
On Monday, all smug like, my son said to me “we’re going to the beach tomorrow”, Yeah right, I thought, we’re not going anywhere but his father didn’t say anything to me, then again his father waits until the very last minute to tell me anything. I’m sitting there contemplating this information and whether or not I can trust it when Marvin comes home and asks Naveen if he told me.
Told me?
Told me what?
Naveen said “yes, I tell Mama”, you mean it’s true? We’re going to the beach tomorrow?
Apparently.
I had a rough night, Oyanie kept waking up even though she was sleeping for a good six hours, this night she decided four hours was good enough. So there I was on Tuesday morning, tired as hell and have to get up to start packing and making sure we don’t forget anything.
Everything checked and double-checked, we were on our way, on our to where? I didn’t know. I just knew we were going to the beach. I mentioned before that my husband doesn’t tell me anything until the last minute? Well for trips he doesn’t tell me where we are going at all… I think he works under the misinformation that I like surprises, nothing could be further from the truth, after 10 years I’ve just accepted that he likes surprising me. I’ve never hated any of his surprises so I’ll allow it.
First, we stopped to get gas, can’t drive for so long on an empty tank eh, that done we started our long drive to the beach, at first I was admiring the scenery as we drove but that quickly turned to fatigue as we continued driving, we’d been driving for almost two hours when I felt the car slowing down, I didn’t see it ok, I fell asleep, it was a very long drive. We took a little break so we could stretch our legs, eat and drink, and just rest for a bit. We still had about two hours left of driving to go. I was curious about what kind of hotel we would be staying in this time and anticipating just dropping onto the bed and staying there for however long I would need. Sitting in the car for so long had made my back ache like there was no tomorrow.
With our little break over we were back on the road again, this passed by like a blur, I remember a lot of trees and buildings and then water, some of the water was greenish colored but the closer we got to our destination the bluer the color became.
Finally, we arrived at our destination, this wasn’t like any hotel I’d ever seen before because it wasn’t, we were staying in someone’s air b&b?
It was an apartment of sorts, the door was one of those really old European doors, an ancient wooden panel with a round knob that looks like it might fall off at any moment, it didn’t though, these doors are pretty strong despite their appearance. Inside was a kitchen slash dining slash living area. Kind of like what we have at home, there’s no definition of space in the homes I’ve visited here in France. There was an upstairs, where I assume were the bedrooms and bathroom but there was one problem.
The stairs looked like something out of my worst nightmare…
Apparently, Naveen felt the same because he refused to climb the stairs, we had no choice though, the beds were upstairs and the toilet which we would need sooner or later. His father helped him climb the ladder, I refuse to call it stairs, I followed behind gingerly placing my feet on each rung and holding onto the railing as my life depended on it. If you think going up that monstrosity was bad, going down it was worse, each rung was so narrow I had to try to climb down sideways so my feet could find purchase on each slender step. The worse thing about this was when I had to go up or down with Oyanie in my arms, There I was with my tiny baby held tightly in one arm and the other wrapped around the railing and trying to gauge how far down each step was from the other.
Naveen became a pro at the stairs, he went up and down like they were nothing, me? No such thing, I took the stairs only if I really needed to otherwise I was fine to stay upstairs or downstairs wherever I was at the moment.
We didn’t end up going to the beach the first day because it would take another hour and we had reacher too late to go to the beach. We did visit an old wash station where there was a river flowing through. Naveen told his father he didn’t want to go to the beach anymore, he was content to stay here and enjoy the river, we didn’t come all this way for the river though. We were going to drive to the beach the next day.
A semi-good night’s sleep, Ms. Oyanie was up every four hours again, we had breakfast and relaxed a bit before heading to the beach around noon. The drive was interesting, we followed a canal of water along a very small road, you literally had to ride the wall to let another car pass, at the end of the canal was the beach.
I’ll be completely honest, being from the Caribbean I grew up with white sand, blue waters, literally beaches of your dreams, this, was not it. First things first, the sand, more like dirt was speckled with something gold that felt like dust on your skin if it touched you. The water was not beckoning at all, add in that there were so many people there, my anxiety went sky high and I was content to stay on the bench we scored under the very shady tree. Marvin asked me if I wanted to go in the water and it was a big no. I’m fine love.
We spent about two hours there, Naveen enjoyed himself immensely, Oyanie stayed with me most, and Marvin went in the water with Naveen, everybody enjoyed themself and it was time to drive back to the apartment.
Had an okay night, it was time to head back home which meant another long drive, strangely, going up and down those horrifying stairs gave me muscle aches in my legs, I will not miss them at all. And because I completely forgot that Oyanie made five months yesterday I decided to take some pictures, she was not cooperating at all so I got many many very similar pictures lol. I thought I had settled on the best picture but I felt like the background was too busy and you couldn’t see her face well enough so I moved locations and voilà, the month 5 picture.
This drive I did better, I didn’t fall asleep so I saw some cool things like this church? on top of the hill, not sure you can really see it in the picture.
Also saw this really cute tiny castle on a roundabout.
Finally, we were back home!
This trip wasn’t the only thing I was up to, I also found this really interesting app on the app store, you upload a picture and people try to guess where you are from, it said to input the furthest back your ancestry went so I entered France and Nigeria. Trying out the app I realized that I really can’t tell where people are from, I get lucky sometimes but for the most part, I guess very wrongly.
Here’s what people guessed for me:
The last interesting thing I have to talk about is a secret campaign I was selected for. I can’t say what I’m supposed to review yet but when the package arrived I’ll write a post about it. Stay tuned for that!
That’s what my grandfather would call me. Said in his Dominican (Dominica) accented English.
I have so many wonderful memories of him and with him. I can still hear him calling my brother Andre Champagne or hear him playing the guitar with us children gathered round in that little house in Peter’s Rest.
I can see his photography hanging on the walls of my parent’s home. It was through him that I developed a love of photography, I always hoped that I could someday be as good as he was, I haven’t used my camera in a very long time and that makes this so much worse to me.
I remember the Werther’s candy he always had for us kids. I loved them and will always think of my Grandpa when I see them. They don’t taste the same but I’ll buy a pack the next time I see one and just pretend for a moment that it’s the same one you used to share.
I remember that one year when you had so many Sonic the Hedgehog tops, my brothers and I would color on a piece of paper, cut it out to fit on top of the top, and watch the pretty patterns it would make as it spun in a circle.
I remember the last time I saw you, 2015, my mother brought me and my son to see you before we left the island for France. You held onto us and prayed for our safe journey.
I didn’t grow up knowing my great grandparents but I’ll be damned if my children don’t know about their great grandfather Norbert.
My grandfather was my last living grandparent, he fought that cancer for 18 long months, every message from home I dreaded those words, I knew it was coming but still…
Crucianize 