Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Getting Air

I spent some time with Rob and Cindy's kids last week. They have a new trampoline so we had some fun time jumping and snapping action photos. If Brooklyn looks slightly odd in the pictures it's because she has a patch on one of her eyes to correct a lazy eye. She likes to draw pictures on them before she puts them on (a new one every day) and the patch on that particular day contained two large black dots...a kooky, creative kid. One of her previous patches contained a drawing of an eyeball!

Anyway, this blog is about jumping so here are some pics. It's such fun to see the grandkids having so much fun.


You can tell Brooklyn has had some dancing lessons - what great form she displays!





For such a light, slight little girl, she can bounce pretty high.




And her landings are perfect. Notice the dotted eye patch in this picture.






Anson figured that sometimes just running along the edge was fun enough.






And they jumped together, separately.







Anson has discovered that part of the fun is just laying on the tramp getting bounced while the other guy does all the work.








But then he takes his turn jumping too.




I'm told this is called the Donkey Kick. I'll take her word for it.



What a happy time! Go Anson!

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Dress

Way back in 1981-82 when Amy was 6 years old, I decided to make each of my daughters a special dress - more complicated than the ones I had made before. The Simplicity company had put out a new line of dress patterns for children called Gunne Sax (Gunny Sacks). These patterns had many small pieces and were a bit of a challenge for me.

I started with Amy's dress because at that time I really needed to feel the closeness to her that doing something like that would bring. I worked for days on it - it had three different fabrics, two different laces, and half a dozen buttons - a real labor of love. And while I worked on the dress I thought about this special little second daughter of mine and realized what a sweet, loving person she was developing into and how much I loved her. I also loved the dress, which fit her so well and looked so good on her.

But now I was on a roll and decided that I should make the other three girls a fancy dress. I used the same pattern for Jenny's dress as I did for Amy's, but made it purple instead of burgundy. I got a different pattern for Sara and Mary and did Sara's pink and Mary's blue.


My girls are the ones with the funny yellow feather pins on their dresses.

These are all of Mum and Dad's grandchildren as of 1982 - my children and Wendy's. Emily was born in 1986 and finished them off. Top row is Rob and Jason. 2nd row is Jenny and Hilary. 3rd row is Megan, Sara and Amy. Bottom row is Meredith, Mike and Mary. My girls are all wearing the dresses I made them. I think Wendy made her girls' dresses too.

This morning Amy's oldest daughter (my oldest granddaughter) Kenzie (7) came running into my place to show me what she was wearing to church.

It's the dress I made all those years ago. I had kept it for years - couldn't bring myself to give it away - and gave it back to Amy at some point. And now her sweet daughter is proudly wearing it. What a nice feeling to know that something that meant so much to me so long ago is making another little girl happy today.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Summer Fun - So Far

Summer has finally arrived in Edmonton - long hot days, almost daily thunder showers, sunlight that stretches till almost 11 pm, and kids. They're just so much freer than they are in the fall, winter and spring. I've been taking pictures of their fun.

One thing I didn't take a picture of though, not wanting to offend anyone, happened today. Amy brought Aidan (almost 3) over to play with Elly (2.5) while she went shopping. I sent them out to the back yard to play while I went and got the bottles of bubbles out of my goody bag. In the 1.5 minutes I left them unattended, Aidan had stripped off his clothes and was standing naked in the wading pool. Elly was in the process of doing the same. Mean old Grammie made them put their clothes back on and distracted them by giving them the bubble solution to play with.


Elly liked to blow the bubbles and poke them at the same time.


Aidan wasn't as fascinated with the bubbles -

maybe because he kept getting the bubble solution in his mouth.


Elly wanted to sit and blow bubbles all day




Aidan wanted Elly to quit blowing bubbles and take care of the baby. It took a while but she finally came round and they played together bubble-free until Amy came to pick Aidan up.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Flood Update

I guess compared to so many people in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan we've come through the flooding down there fairly well. We had minimal water damage in the basement which will require us to replace the carpet down there, but since we were planning on renovating the basement anyway, it's not too upsetting. Our main problem is distance. Since we live a 5 hour drive north of Lethbridge, and had limited time on the weekend, it meant we had to drive down there, spend 3 hours at the house, and drive five hours home. It made for a long day. Luckily Mike and Avril live not far from us down there and had the hall carpet and underlay out, the wet edges of the big room carpet lifted, and the water mopped up before we got there. We left 3 industrial sized fans running which Mike will check on for us. Hopefully the rain and flooding is over now.



Carpetless hall and family room entry


Wet carpet getting dried out.

The wet at the foot of the stairs.




Once the carpet and underlay was lifted,
we could see where there used to be tile on the cement floor.
OK. I was within half a minute of giving up on creating this new blog when I suddenly figured out how to add a background. So I'm going to go with this new one and not work on my old one anymore. I have several reasons for changing at this point. The main reason is that I didn't like the URL of my old one. I started it in 2008 as a scrapbooking challenge to post a photo a day for a year. But once the year was over I was hooked on blogging but didn't know how to change the URL, so I stuck with it for two more years. The blog was also getting very long making it harder to look up specific posts in the archives. So I hope you've followed me over here and will continue to read my entries.

Let me knolw what you like and don't like about the look of it. I know at least one of you loves orange and another one doesn't. Maybe I'll change it up more often now that I've figured it out. Thanks.