Picture Day – Ornaments, the old and new





Our tree has many special ornaments on it some very old and some very new.  Each year we mark our celebrations with a new ornament and so each year which follows brings us back to a certain memory or reminds us of a special event in our lives. Some are fun, some are a little more serious, but each and every one is beautiful and is loved.

 

Scrapbook Woes

The closest to scrapbooking I’ve ever come has been the girls’ baby books.  I’ve put together photo albums certainly and from time to time added little bits of memorabilia to those albums but never have I done a traditional scrapbook.

With a trip to the most magical place on Earth and having happened across a beautiful scrapbook I thought I’d give it a try.  Unfortunately by the time I saw the lovely book I wanted we had really spent quite enough on souvenirs and had no room left to pack it if I bought it.  Naively I was thinking some abstract thoughts about ordering it online or picking it up at the Disney store in Minneapolis eventually and we left it behind.

Well as it turns out I should have figured out a way to stuff it in a bag. We have no plans to head off to Minneapolis until the spring time at the earliest so unless I want to put it off and start forgetting things before doing this scrapbook option A was out.  So onto online purchasing….well once again shipping costs heading north of the US border make online purchasing a royal pain in the behind.   

So what to do? Well we had another option as we knew of several people heading to Orlando in the next few weeks and so to save on shipping costs we asked if they found themselves near that particular Disney store to grab it for us if they could. The first wasn’t able to but the second group we knew picked it up for us and I was very excited to get started.

I printed off all the pictures I want to use and gathered all the materials that I want to make part of the book.  Sunday afternoon I got the book from them and despite pictures and dimensions being sent it’s, you guessed it, the wrong one!  Right design wrong book, album rather than scrapbook.

Of course I didn’t tell them that, I just graciously paid for the book they brought us, thanked them for looking for me and sucked it up.  I am thankful after all that they put in the effort to do me a favour and I can’t fault them for grabbing the wrong one. The two books are identical in everything but size and I know they thought they had the right one.

Inside however there was a little girl whose new balloon had just been popped and was in the process of throwing quite the un-ladylike tantrum. I’m much too far up the path to stop the project now. I’ve purchased materials and started arranging pages which will only fit in a full size scrapbook and I’ve put in a lot of effort to get that book home to me.  I've invested myself in the project and so I'll follow through.

Unfotunately it's now going to cost me much more thanks to paying for the wrong book and those terrible shipping fees never mind the extra time and effort.  Lesson learnt.  If you find something thousands of kilometers from home that you really want don’t let little things like how much room is left in your bag stop you from buying it.  I’m sure if had really tried I could have found a way to stuff it in.

Looking Forward to Looking Back

This was considered the theme, motto sounds better in my opinion, of my yearbook the year I graduated high school.   I remember seeing those words emblazoned across the front cover and scoffing my first thought being “who thinks up this crap”. 

I for one wasn’t considering looking back in fact I recall thinking that I had absolutely no intention of ever looking back.  Those days would be done and my plan was to never stop looking forward. I didn’t have the happiest of school years nor did I have the worst and it is only with experience that I’ve realized it.

As time went by and my school years became further and further behind me I lost much of the early cynicism that I’d had towards those years and I found that sometimes in the natural course of life that you had to look back.  It also become apparent to me that taking a glance over my shoulder from time to time in no way prevented me from staying focused on looking forward the other 99% of the time.

Perhaps I realized that by denying those looks back was kin to denying who I am and where I came from.  That wasn’t the intention behind the original thought, that I would not look back, but was an apparent by-product of that mind-set.

We can’t nor should we leave it all behind.  

Our lives and everything good, bad or in-between which happens to us must be embraced as a part of us, a part of our memories, before looking forward can be done with strength and conviction.  To accept it, forgive those who wronged us, admit to our own mistakes and look back at our lives with the new perspectives which are gained with each years knowledge is vital to looking forward.

So now I am looking forward to looking back from time to time....I still think the phrasing sound kind of stupid though. 



My graduating class on the steps of the Manitoba Legislative.
I'm on the bottom row farthest to the left in blue.



Picture day - Dog or Cat

I think I understand why some people will often say that they are dog people or cat people.  Many people will when asked if they prefer one pet over another will answer quite resolutely. I’m a dog person, or I’m a cat person.  I almost always find that those answers stem from a single childhood experience which was good or bad or sometimes even neutral that they had with a pet.

I was quite lucky to have had wonderful experiences with pets of all shapes and sizes growing up and into adulthood so I am neither I just love all pets. Wait scratch that I wasn’t too fond of my husband’s tarantula, icky spiders.  One thing is certain for me however and that is that my home is not complete without an animal wandering about.

Some pets are of course recalled with more affection than others.  Three stand out in my mind.

Scooter my cat.  It’s not hard to reason why she will always be the first pet I think of as I got her at the age of 5 and she remained a part of my life for 24 years.  She was affectionate and smart and she worshiped the ground I walked on.  I was her person I suppose you would say, she allowed me to dress her up in bonnets and doll clothes without complaint and never failed to choose my lap over someone else’s.

Duchesse the first dog I really remember was silly and not all that smart but loveable all the same.   She is also the mother of the dog who really did capture my heart.  Born under my brother’s bed I was the one to find him and after exclaiming “there’s a puppy under here!” Kody was cemented into my memory as one of the best things ever.

My two favorites got along in a way that many cats and dogs do not, they played together slept together and sometimes cuddled with me together.  It is something I’ve always hoped my own children would get to experience with their own pets and luckily enough Lucy and Chase are as great a pair to them as Scooter and Kody were to me.  

Quinzhee

Each year I make the girls a quinzhee. I enjoy making it not just for the girls but because I still get a kick out of playing around in the snow.  It's also one of the things left that will bring out the kid in my "I'm not a little kid anymore" 12 year old.

It wasn't such an easy task this year seeing as we have had very little snow and much of what we have had has melted away on one of our many warm days.  I do it every year though and so I had to try. The pile of snow to make our quinzhee this year makes up about 90% of the snow in our backyard. In many places I've cleared the snow all the way to the grass in order to get a big enough pile to build with.

I guess this is one of those things I got from my Dad, he used to build great forts and tunnels when I was a little girl that I recall as being wonderful snow palaces and intricate sculptures.  Imagination and the wonderment of being a little girl may be exaggerating reality a little but they're good memories.

I hope my forts and sculptures are remembered with as much fondness.

A piece of love

E has managed to break two backpacks beyond use this school year.  This time I decided I wasn’t going to buy a new one so close to the end of the year and would just dig out an old one.  Both my husband and I used to take backpacks to work so I knew we had some floating around.

She had running club early this morning and I like to make sure she has everything ready to go the night before when she needs to be out of the house early.   So at 10 o’clock last night I found myself in our storage room searching out one of these bags for her to use.

I found one and to my absolute delight something I haven’t seen in many years inside of it; my baby blanket.

Now I knew I had it somewhere but it is one of those things that you don’t truly remember having or think of unless you find it.  My MaMere made it for me, my mother’s mom and a woman I remember very fondly.

I went from grumbling and cursing under my breath wishing I was anywhere but digging through the storage room to standing there with a smile on my face and happy memories floating through my head.

I don’t remember using the blanket but I’ve seen it in pictures and know where it comes from. It smells a little musty, the white isn’t quite as white, the pink not so bright and it has come apart in several places but there is something undeniably special about it.

It was made with love and somehow after all these years it remains silky soft, it is a reminder, a symbol, of a person whom I loved and who loved me in return. She may no longer be here but she left some very important things behind for the people who will always carry a piece of her with them, for me this is one of them.  

95th Birthday Celebration!

It isn’t very often you have five generations together but this weekend my family did just that.  My grandfather will be turning 95 tomorrow and he had children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild come out for his birthday brunch.

I tried to explain to my kids how unique an experience it is to not only meet your great-grandfather but to have him around long enough to not only hear some of his stories but be old enough to remember them.  I believe I only met one great grandparent, and by meet I mean have a picture of me being held as an infant by one.

I still enjoy listening to my Grandfathers stories even though I’ve heard most before I don’t mind hearing them again and every once in awhile a new one will pop up. When I was a kid I always looked forward to seeing my grandparents because I loved being partnered up with him to play the card game 2 of spades.

We were almost unbeatable together, I’m sure we lost once in awhile but we were always the team to defeat. I’m sure it had more to do with his play than mine but I was always pretty lucky. I still have great luck when it comes to most card games and certainly some of it must be skill learned from my grandfather.

You can’t predict growing up what things you are going to remember fondly, the things that will make you smile. My grandmother on my Dads’ side passed away when I was quite young and of all the things to remember about her I remember a specific drinking glass. 

It was a small glass with hand painted roses on it and was always the one she gave me to drink from.  I also remember she smelt like lilac and that she was soft and warm when she hugged me.  To this day catching a hint of lilac will give me a warm comforting feeling.  It’s not much and as a child I certainly didn’t think to myself one day I’m going to remember these cups and that scent.

I don’t know in the end what my girls will remember of their great-grandfather after he is gone but it’s nice to know they will almost certainly find something that makes them smile when he is brought to mind.

I was glad to wish him a happy birthday yesterday and I hope there are many more to come and a few more memories made.