Button, Button, I've Got the Buttons

I've always liked buttons and have always had a jar of them somewhere in my house. I was just following Mum's example I guess. She always had a jar of buttons. When Wendy and I were pre-schoolers Mum would let us play with her button. We'd line them up according to color and have a button parade...the white ones represented nurses, the brown were soldiers, blue were sailors and air force men (remember, this was in the early 1950's when WW2 was still fresh in our parent's minds)...and so on. The button leading the parade was a large white one with a scooped out center into which we would place a red button...for Santa Claus, of course. I don't think I ever encouraged my kids to play with buttons when they were small, but a couple of my granddaughters have made parades with mine.

Here is my button stash -

Isn't it beautiful, resting there in all its glory on my cutting mat on my scrapbook worktable. There is every color imaginable there.

...and all sizes, from the teeny-tiny ones that would be useless for anything except embellishing a scrapbook page, to the large 1.5 inch ones.

Some are full of sparkles - these are my sparklies


Others have pretty patterns in them. I love the dark blue one near the bottom.

And they come in all shapes as well - square, rectangle, stars, ovals, flowers, triangles, flower pots, swoosh, alphabets, hearts, and even an angel.

Some are two-holers, some are four-holers, and there are even a couple of one-holer buttons, as well as one with slashes instead of holes...whoever said buttons are boring???


They have myriad uses, not least of which is to embellish scrapbook pages, as I mentioned before. And lets not forget games - I don't think we ever went to a birthday party when we were kids where we didn't play 'button, button, who's got the button'.

And what about button sayings....'he really knows which buttons to push', 'she's just as cute as a button'.

But I just like how pretty they all look


sitting there in my crystal cookie jar.

Brides and Grooms

I was wondering what to blog about today when Amy came to the laundry room where I was doing my wondering, dressed in her wedding dress. It still looks beautiful on her and fits perfectly eight years and three kids after her wedding. Way to go Amy!!

That got me thinking about all the brides we've had in our immediate family in the past few years. I've even located pictures of them - a beautiful bunch of daughters, sons, daughters-in-law and sons-in law...although the men are handsome, rather than beautiful! And I'll even go back a couple of generations here. I'm putting dates in here as accurately as I can remember them. I know that my hawk-eyed kids will be sure to point out which ones I've mis-remembered.

This first picture is of my parents, Robert and Meta McCarthy, who were married on August 10, 1946, soon after Dad got home from serving in the Canadian Army overseas during the second World War.

This is Lloyd and me on March 27, 1971 - he was all of 21 years old and I was 22.


Jenny was the first of our children to get married. She married Anders Quist on January 3, 1995. Too close to Christmas Jenn!! Hard to imagine that sweet young couple as parents of 5 boys!


Our son Rob married Cindy White in on April 24, 1998. Jenn didn't appreciate having to share her birthday with her big brother's wedding, but she didn't have any say in the matter. Cindy's a lovely addition to our family.


Mary married Greg Bourne on May 6, 2000 when they were both only 20 years old. Now they're an old married couple with two lovely children and are happier than pigs in mud!


I guess I should have put a picture of Amy and Curtis here instead of just Amy, but when I started planning this blog it was just going to be about the brides. But I don't have solo pictures of all the brides so ended up with the couples. Sorry Curtis. Amy doesn't look much different now than she did back on August 10, 2001 when she and Curtis were married.


Sara married Quincey Hardwicke-Brown on September 20, 2002. He started out as her boss and is now her business partner, life partner, and daddy of their three children.


Mike married Avril Laqua on September 17, 2004. We don't see as much of them and their two little boys as we'd like to - they've chosen to live a 5 hr. drive south of us.

Then finally, our 22-year old baby, Emily, married Allan Taylor on August 23, 2008, and Lloyd and I heaved a sigh of relief that we don't have any more children to get married!


And that's it for now.

Layla Layout

As I've been sorting through all my scrapbooking stuff, I've come across some layouts I had planned to do 4 or 5 years ago, some started, others just put in plastic holders with pictures and papers. One series of pictures I started working on almost 5 years ago is of Layla's first professional photo shoot when she was 6 weeks old. She'll be 5 years old on July 8.


The layout you see here is nothing at all like I had envisioned back then. I didn't even use the paper I had thought was perfect for the pictures. I love this paper with the brown line drawings of flowers and the bird on a pink and white background, so I stayed with the brown and pink theme and added ribbon, a button, a bling flower and letters in her name, stickles sparkles on the bird and hearts, and used my Slice to cut the words - things I wasn't using, or weren't available, 5 years ago.

Sometimes it pays to procrastinate! I love this layout.

Tradition

I arrived home today just in time to capture this photo of granddaughters Kenzie and Sydney on Syd's new tricycle - Syd on the back and Kenzie on the seat. I'm glad I didn't miss it. This is becoming a traditional photo shoot in our family, going back three generations.

Syd and Kenzie are Amy's children.



Back in 1977 when Amy and Jenny were 2 and 3 years old and we were living in High Level, AB, I took this picture of my two oldest daughters. Amy is standing and Jenny is on the seat.



That pose was based on this picture that my mother took of Wendy and me when I was 1.5 and Wendy just one year older, way back in 1949 0r '50. I'm the one on the seat of the tricycle.



Wendy and I both really like this picture of us and both of us have it reprinted, framed and on display in our homes. Mum didn't take a lot of pictures but I'm glad she took this one. It started a tradition in our family.

Jenn's Boys

When we were on our way home from Lethbridge a week or so ago, we stopped at Lacombe to visit Jenn and her men.



When I posted a blurb about Jenny on her birthday in April I didn't have a current family picture to include. When we arrived at their home two of the boys were sitting on these steps so I decided then and there to get a picture of the whole family right there on the stairs.

Jonah (12), her oldest son, is our first grandchild; Sam (10) is our second; Nathan (7) is our third. Micah (4) comes in at number 1o and James (1.5) is our 15th.

At 5'1" Jenn is destined to be towered over by her sons, who seem to have inherited their father's tendency for height. That's what she gets for marrying a man a whole foot taller than she is. Jonah already is taller than his Mom.

A lovely family with cool kids.

If you've been following DD Sara's blog and her daughter Charlie's blog, you'll know that they've recently introduced a new member to their family - a sweet little grey kitten. You probably also know that they named the kitten Mickey after my friend Mickey, who they've come to know pretty well this past year.

I decided I needed to post a picture of the two Mickey's together - as Max says "Mickey 1 is human and Mickey 2 is a cat". The picture is kind of blurry, but you get the idea.


Then they all wanted to have their picture taken with the kitten, except Elly, but I got a picture of her with it the previous day.

Mickey 2 is a very trusting animal - she isn't afraid of the kid and lets them pet her and love to be around the family. She was born at the end of March so she's still very young.


Max is still a bit unsure about the correct way to hold a squirming kitten so he tend to hang on tight. Sydney and Kenzie had come over to play with their cousins and were totally captivated by the cat.


Charlie is completely in love with her new pet.


Kenzie wants one too and I suspect that before the summer's over there'll be a new animal at their house - her mother, Amy, wants a St. Bernard puppy! Holy slobber Batman!


Here's me with the three granddaughters. Sydney finally got to hold Mickey 2 but the kitten is out of the picture at the bottom.

And finally, here's a very short video of the little furball playing.

Yorkshire Pudding Anyone?

For years whenever I've made a roast beef dinner, I've served it with Yorkshire pudding - so delicious with gravy. When I first started making them some would raise and hollow out and some wouldn't. Then Mike took over the job when he was around 15. They were delicious, but because of their failure to raise, the other kids (and Lloyd and I) started calling them hockey pucks. And the name has stuck. We looked forward to eating Mike's 'hockey pucks' with our roast beef dinner.

When we were in Winnipeg last weekend, my sister made a traditional roast beef dinner for Mum's 88th birthday and my niece, Meredith,



made the Yorkshires. This is what they looked like - all 12 of them, although I just took a picture of one.


Definitely NOT a hockey puck! Wendy gave me the recipe Meredith uses which I'll post here for those of you (my kids especially) who want to make non-hockey puck Yorkshires.

Whisk 3 eggs.
Add 1 Cup flour, 1/2 tsp. salt and 1/4 c. milk
Whisk until smooth.
Whisk in an additional 3/4 C milk.
Don't use a mixer as this works the mixture too much.
Spray a medium/large size muffin pan with cooking spray, then put 1/4 - 1/2 tsp oil in each cup - just enough to cover bottom.
Divide mixture among the 12 muffin cups.
Bake in a preheated 425F oven for bout 20 minutes, till they're nicely puffed and brown.

Good luck. Let me know how they turn out (you especially Mike).

Oops! I almost forgot. The roast beef portion of this meal was especially good. Wendy cooked the roast in her slow cooker with a tin of cream of mushroom soup, a packet of dry onion soup mix, and 2 cans of diet Coke. It made the nicest gravy! Try it - you'll like it.