This is the story of my life so far: 68 years and counting.
Prequel: A Brief History of my Family in France
The story starts here
Previous episode: Part 93
The house I bought in Limeil-Brévannes, where we moved in September 1990, had four and a half bedrooms. So, we had each our own bedroom.
There were two bathrooms, one attached to my bedroom, and one for the children.
As is usually the case in France, the toilets were not inside the bathrooms but separated: water closets. There were 3 of those.
All the bedrooms were on the first floor (the second floor for North Americans!).
What I called a half bedroom was not really supposed to be a bedroom, but a storage room. But I had asked the constructor to put a skylight in this room so that it could be used as a bedroom for Gaëlle, who was 6 at this time. I put her bed high so that she had a little more room.
Roseline, Betty, and Syrille had their own bedroom.
On the ground floor, there was the garage, the kitchen, and a large dining/living room.
Here is the front of the house:
The left window was Roseline's bedroom, the right one Syrille's, and the skylight Gaëlle's.
And here is the roof on the back of the house:
The large skylight on the left was my bedroom, the one on the right was Betty's bedroom, and the two small skylights were the two bathrooms.
Most of the time during the week, I left the house to go to work before the children were up so that I could come back sufficiently early in the afternoon to spend time with my four children.
One of my rules was that there was no TV in the evenings before school days. To make sure that the rule was followed, I would open the back of the TV set, put the power cord inside, and close it. I learned years later that Betty and Syrille were opening the back and plug it to watch TV. And they put back the power cord inside before 5PM when I usually arrived at home.
I gave a rather big allowance to my 4 children, but they were responsible to buy their own clothes and shoes with it. Roseline was handling the allowance of Gaëlle.
The idea was that my kids would learn to handle money early and this was one less thing I needed to worry about. It works quite well in fact.
We spent four years in this house until we emigrated to Canada in July 1994.
Continue to Part 95.
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Summary
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7
Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14
Part 15 - Part 16 - Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21
Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24 - Part 25 - Part 26 - Part 27 - Part 28
Part 29 - Part 30 - Part 31 - Part 32 - Part 33 - Part 34 - Part 35
Part 36 - Part 37 - Part 38 - Part 39 - Part 40 - Part 41 - Part 42
Part 43 - Part 44 - Part 45 - Part 46 - Part 47 - Part 48 - Part 49
Part 50 - Part 51 - Part 52 - Part 53 - Part 54 - Part 55 - Part 56
Part 57 - Part 58 - Part 59 - Part 60 - Part 61 - Part 62 - Part 63
Part 64 - Part 65 - Part 66 - Part 67 - Part 68 - Part 69 - Part 70
Part 71 - Part 72 - Part 73 - Part 74 - Part 75 - Part 76 - Part 77
Part 78 - Part 79 - Part 80 - Part 81 - Part 82 - Part 83 - Part 84
Part 85 - Part 86 - Part 87 - Part 88 - Part 89 - Part 90 - Part 91
Part 92 - Part 93