Which One's the Antique?

When Lloyd was young his family lived in a rural community called Harvey Station, New Brunswick. Their home was surrounded by acres of farm land so his parents invested in cows, an infamous nasty bull, a dog, cats and chickens. Lloyd loved the years spent on the farm in spite of the chores that fell to him to complete. For one thing, almost before he could reach the pedals, he was allowed to drive the tractor. Such freedom and responsibility! He loved it.



When he was 14 his family left the farm for the 'big' city of Fredericton, and he never had the chance to live on a farm again.

When one of our city-raised daughters took her city-raised sons to a farm museum in rural Alberta, her #4 son, Micah, discovered that he too loved 'driving' a tractor.

"Look Mom I'm a farmer"

I guess some traits skip a generation. On look, I just noticed, the 'antique' tractor Micah is driving is the same as the 'modern' one Lloyd was driving back in the late 1950s.

Old Pictures

This weekend, spent in Lethbridge, Lloyd and I became the recipients of a dozen or so of Lloyd's mother's photo albums. I think because I'm a scrapbooker everyone considers me the custodian of the photographs. This past year I have also become the caretaker of my mother's photo album collection.

It's fun to go through those old pictures 'remembering' events and people caught in snapshots of daily life and special events. However, many of the pictures are mysteries to us - who are these people? why do we have pictures of them? how important or trivial are they to our family? Others are considered important, milestone, classic pictures with stories to tell.

Mum and Dad with their three children and spouses, and 11 grandchildren - 1986

Dad (center) with his parents and sisters - 1930

Dad and me - 1948

Going through my mother-in-law's photos this weekend we found several albums full of pictures of people we didn't know, fuzzy out-of-focus pictures, yellowed discolored pictures, etc. Thelma was very good at writing the who, where and when on the back of most of the pictures. That helps a lot. Still, Lloyd and I don't want to have albums full of people and events that mean absolutely nothing to us. His sisters aren't very interested in old pictures. So we have decided that we'll put them all on display at the family reunion in August and let everyone go through them and take any pictures they want (Lloyd and I have already taken the ones we want). The rest of the unwanted pictures will be trashed.

It made me think of all the thousands of pictures I've taken and collected. What will happen to them after I'm no longer here? Not every picture is a treasure so a lot will be thrown out I'm sure. However, the ones I put into scrapbooks will live on - the journalling on the pages will tell the family stories. Hopefully they'll be treasured.

Very important to Lloyd and me - the story of how I came to move from Nova Scotia to Edmonton in 1968.

A family classic - me in 1953 and a story to tell.

This whole process of going through old photos has made me realize that I must work more on my scrapbooks, especially the ones I consider heritage ones. I want our grandchildren and their children to be able to look at these books and enjoy the stories being told and gain insight into who they are and where they come from. I don't want our stories to die with us, and I want to preserve the stories of our parents and grandparents through these scrapbooks.

So, a final word of advice. Take a few minutes to write names, dates, locations, etc. on the back of your photos so that those coming after you will know the important data when they do their scrapbooks. And keep taking pictures! And if you're looking for a new hobby to take all your time and money, consider scrapbooking. You'll never regret it.

School's Out - The Art Class

Remember how great it felt that first day of summer, when you wake up at your regular time only to realize that - yea! school's out for the year! Then do you remember what your first activity of the day (after all the necessary wash, dress, breakfast stuff was done) after the last day of school was??? That's right!!! You got out your half full notebooks, leftover paper, pens, pencils, crayons, etc. etc. etc. and played school. Go figure. It just felt so good to be the teacher and boss the students (your dolls and friends) around. It just lasted for a couple of days - until it really had a chance to sink in - no school for two months! It just doesn't get any better than that when you're a kid.

Tuesday, June 29, was the last day of school for our kids here in Edmonton. On Wednesday, Kenzie, Charlie, and Elly got together. In a slight twist on the playing school theme that we used to love so much, they got out Charlies art set and played Art Class, with Charlie as teacher, Kenzie as apt pupil and Elly as class troublemaker! They played at it for several hours. I wish I had taken pictures of their finished projects but I guess I got distracted somehow. Anyway, the following pictures show how absorbed they were in their 'class'.

Watch out - Elly's casing the paint set.

Elly really concentrates when she's working on a project.

Charlie is so serious

and so is Kenzie. She's making pencil rubbings of sea shells

They all worked together so well. I guess I was the teacher for this small project, showing them how to do the rubbings. They learned quickly. And now the long summer looms ahead. Kenzie has a brand new baby brother to learn to help her mom take care of, and in a week or so Charlie and Elly will have a brand new baby sister to teach and learn from.

Happy holidays all you lucky people who have been granted a temporary reprieve from your regular work/school day schedules. Enjoy.

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!

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.

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.

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.