Famly Photo Fun!

This past weekend, from Saturday evening thru Sunday evening, the older grandson was here with us. Always nice to have him be able to come up and spend a night with us now and again -not near frequently enough but at his age, he's also involved in a lot of other activities so we're just happy to get him here for a night and most of the next day then ya know.

Often though when he does come up here, it's because Aunt Mandy has made arrangements with him to help her do some things around the house that would be more than a bit difficult for her to manage to do alone.

And this Sunday -her game plan, with Alex to help her -start working on cleaning out the basement!

Now, in my opinion, the only job worse than this one here would be cleaning out the attic! Oh wait -we did that back in June in advance of the workmen from the Community Action program arriving here to put all kinds of insulation in the house from the attic right on down to the basement! And, a lot of the things that were taken out of the attic and which we still wanted to keep around for oh, another generation to worry about whether they were good or important or not, ya know are still tucked away in the bathroom, the hall closet out off the sunporch, in a corner of the dining room and oh yeah, in the basement too. They can't go back up into the attic until we get a couple sheets of plywood I guess to put down over the rafters there so any stuff we put back in the attic then isn't going to be sitting, resting, directly on the insulation!

So, the end result of Sunday's work then was a nice big bonfire Mandy and Alex did manage to have in the lower part of the back yard.

Last night though, Mandy showed me a couple of things she came across in the basement that she saved from destruction -thankfully!

One was this little tiny book containing a different fortune for every day of the year, that had been published in 1938, and given to my Mom's older sister apparently as a little birthday gift from a friend of my Aunt's in 1939! That was neat to look up different people in our family's birthdate and read what whoever had put the book together felt was a reasonable fortune for anyone born on such and such a date. And my Aunt had penned in by many of the days in that book, the birthdays of this or that family member. Brought back a lot of memories then reading the names of family members, remembering then oh yes, this was Uncle Oscar's birthday, cousin Karen's, my Mom (okay -I remember when her birthday is without that reminder, I'm not quite THAT far gone on the senility trail -not just yet, anyway.

Along with coming across that little book, Mandy also stumbled upon a fairly good-sized box too filled with -of all things -old photographs too!

Now that was a nice discovery she made there in my mind! There weren't tons of pictures dating back to the early 1900's of ancestors who were unidentifiable to me, thankfully. But there were a goodly number that seemed to start in the late 30s and worked their way up to about 10 years ago!

And they were a nice mixture of pictures too -some of cousins of my Mom's, some of Mom's siblings, my children too when they were growing up as well. And in looking at some of those pictures -of myself when I was preschool age along with several photos too of my older daughter, it reminded me once again, how much my older daughter looked like me when she was little -as well as how much Miss Maya looks like her Aunt Carrie still today too!

I scanned a good many of these old photos last night and tried to match some of the pictures of me by age to a few of the pictures of my daughter at about the same age -did them side by side, ya know -so I figured I'd show you a few of those picture here tonight. I haven't gotten around yet to looking through pictures of Maya at the same ages yet -mainly because there are way too many pictures of Maya to even think about getting that done in a matter of a couple of hours time!

So ready or not -here goes! (Keep in mind, these are old photos and some aren't the best, for sure, but they are clear enough I think that you can see the likeness in each one fairly well anyway.)

First off -the picture on the left is me when I was probably 8-10 months old. The photo on the right side then is my daughter Carrie, sitting in my Aunt Ethel's lap and was taken at our family reunion probably in 1968, when Carrie was just a little over a year old. (The lady beside my aunt is a cousin of my Mom and my Aunt but who was referred to by my kids and me as "Aunt Dee" although she is not really an aunt to us.)

In this picture above now, that's me on my tricycle taken in 1946 -when I was almost 2  years old and the picture taken of my daughter -standing near my old Chevy Nova -was taken of her when she was just over 2 years old. A whole lot of looking like there are clones involved there, right?

And then in this one, the black and white picture of me on the left, holding the cat I had back then -with the really original name of "Blackie" (he also had a playmate too -called Whitey, but no photos of that one. Both cats mysteriously disappeared sometime about that year and my Mom told me that they had run away from home because they didn't like the big dog we had then -a collie/shepherd mix, also with a very original name too of Lady. I was in my 30s before I learned my Mom had actually given those two cats to a neighbor and had asked him to get rid of them for her! We won't discuss here exactly how naive I was nor how nasty I thought my Mom had been when I learned what had really happened to those two cats. I'm thinking though she probably did that on orders from my grandmother who was very far from being a cat lover!)

Anyway -back to the photos -the one of me was taken when I was 4 and the one of Carrie -well not exactly sure if she was 4 on that photo or 5, but in that general age range anyway.

And the last photo I'm going to share tonight though is one of my daughters, all three of the grandkids around their grandfather -who they rarely see but who happened to come east when Maya was about 4 years old or close to that age, Kurtis was just over a year old and Alex -the older grandson, was then 10.

I do happen to like this picture of at least my girls with their Dad -a rare thing to have of them together! But anyway, that Mandy on the far left, holding Maya, Kurtis is sitting on Poppy's lap, then Alex and finally Carrie. Too bad my son, Clayton wasn't present then too so we could have had a full family photo then! But if you look at Maya on this picture, you can see how much she looks like her Aunt Carrie there and look up at the photos I posted above too at Carrie at ages 2 through 4 and you can see the look -a-likes there then too. And Alex, my older grandson, looks very, very much too like his mother -more so it seems every day!

Want to know something else I find fascinating but can't locate the picture of this right at the moment to share it is a photo that was taken back in 1918 and it is of my Dad, standing behind an old sled with his baby sister seated on the sled. My Dad was 16 or 17 years older than his youngest sibling so on that particular photo, he is about age 18 and my aunt, only a year old and on that picture of her, if you  were to compare it to any photos we have of me at that age, my daughter Carrie at that age and of Maya and Alexander too, you'd definitely be able to see in each baby photo, the resemblance that is/was there. What's more, on that picture of my Dad, his stance, the way his hair is combed but falling sort of in his face, the way his shirt even isn't quite tucked in to his pants the way it should be and the look on his face -if compared to a photo of my son at about the same age or actually, many even more recent pictures of Clayton, you can definitely see how much my son looks like my Dad's side of my family! And yet, in many of those same things I mentioned, one can also see that my son looks very much like his Dad too!

Gotta love the way genes show up in each of us don't you? It's a process that totally amazes me, for sure!

As I have time to post more old photos on here, I'm going to try to share more of the old pics we came across because seeing so many of them last night, really took me back to times in my life when I always felt safe, secure, with so many of my Mom's cousins, my aunts and uncles and my first cousins -all frequently around me, keeping me in such a great frame of mind. Seeing so many of those old pictures brought out the realizations again and again too of how much I miss each and every one of those individuals who were all so important in my life for so many years too.

Not enough years though -but then, is it ever enough?