Kenny and Thomas

Mike and Kenny came to visit tonight. Avril and Alex were sick so stayed at the hotel. Hopefully they'll be feeling better for Charlie's birthday party tomorrow.

Anyhow, like little boys everywhere, 2-year old Kenny loves Thomas the train and when he comes to Grammie's house, he plays the whole time with my Thomas and Percy.


He brought some of his own too - the smaller set - and integrated them into his play with mine.


It appears that Thomas had vision problems tonight and needed Mr. Potato Head's glasses.


I think this is such a boyish position - right down there with the trains.


It's very serious business, this Thomas the Train play.

First Snow of the Season

Today we woke up to the first snow of the season. It was nice wet sticky snow, perfect for snowballs, snowmen and playing in - and warm enough outside to go out.

I took Charlie and Max out to Sherwood Park to play with their cousins Brooklyn and Anson for a couple of hours. There was more snow there - 30 minutes from their place - than there was in Edmonton.

Brooklyn and Charlie wasted no time going out into the back yard to play. They started out building a snowman but didn't get very far on that project and ended up throwing snow at each other.
Brooklyn scooped up a huge handful of snow


Charlie and Brooklyn had a standoff...

Then Charlie came up with a much larger handful of snow and all bets were off....


Snow flew through the air.


Charlie liked it...


Brooklyn tried rolling the world's biggest snowball.


Charlie changed tactics and created a snow angel.


Brooklyn thought it was just a big laugh.

Anson...


just wanted to eat the snow. A great start to winter this year.

Haircuts and Scorpions

I looked after Aidan for Amy for awhile this afternoon. She gave him his first haircut yesterday - he looks like a little boy now without his cute little baby curls. Amy thinks she did a terrible job, but it's hard to cut someone's hair when they're constantly in motion like Aidan.


Here's the front view. The sucker he's holding and eating is one I got in Arizona in Sept. It's banana flavored but there's a real scorpion embedded in it. I was told that it's completely edible. He really enjoyed it. When Amy got home she took it away from him. Poor baby.


Here's a close up of the sucker. He almost got to the bug!

Although she can't stand on her own for more than 3 seconds, and isn't walking yet, Ellie has become a climber. Put any step stool, stair, or railing in her way and she's trying to climb it. Her latest favorite is the Thomas step stool in the bathroom that her big brother and sister use when brushing their teeth.

Of course the toothbrushes are right there and she knows what to do with them, although she isn't sure which end she should be putting in her mouth.


She ends up standing up on the narrow edges of the 'train', which is hard on her feet, then yells till someone comes to rescue her. Life is fun with Eloise!!!

How We Change...

I haven't taken any pictures for the past couple days so went through my files and found a few portraits of myself - there were a few I missed, but I'm sure you'll be able to notice the 'subtle' changes in my looks from the time I was 2 (1950) until this year.

Patsy McCarthy - 2 years old - 1950

Pat McCarthy - 8 years old - 1956

Pat McCarthy - 18 years old - 1966

Lloyd and Pat MacKenzie - 56 years old - 2004

Pat and Lloyd MacKenzie - 58 years old - 2006

Pat and Lloyd MacKenzie - 60th birthday- Family Reunion - June 2008

I guess the next portrait we have taken will be our 40th wedding anniversary portrait in March of 2011

Circle Journal

Early in 2006 a group of nine scrapbooking friends got together and organized a circle journal swap. Each one of us was to buy a scrapbook - any size - determine a theme, and prepare an instructions page, sign-in page, and the first layout. Then we passed ours on to the next person in the list. Ideally this would have taken us about 10 months to complete. Here it is, the end of 2008 and Mickey and I finally got ours back yesterday. It was such fun to see it again and to see all the different layouts our friends had added. I still need to get Emily to do her layout in it, and then it's complete. Here's what it ended up looking like. If you click on each picture, you'll see a larger image and can read the journalling.

The cover

My instruction page and sign in page - I had made a tag for each member of the group to sign and date, which tucked into two pockets on the page.

My page - interesting to note that when I did this 2 and a half years ago we only had 12 grandchildren. There are 17 of them now.

Elsa's Page

Elizabeth's page

Kelly's Page

Mickey's page

Renee's Page

Tammy's Page

Terrie's Page

A Quist-y Day

Jenn, Anders and the boys were in town today so we spent some fun time with them. The little granddaughters refer to their five boys as the "Quisty boys" and since they're the oldest of our grandchildren (at least the first 3 are) the younger kids tend to look up to them.

We went to Swiss Chalet with them for dinner - quite the experience with boys ranging in age from 11 months to 12 years. It was a fun time. It's also difficult to get a good picture of the whole crew.


I did manage to get a nice shot of the five of them earlier in the day. They are Jonah holding James (Jammers), Sam, Micah and Nate all blue-eyed blonds. Lucky for us they just live ah hour south of Edmonton so we see them quite often.