Happy Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday. I had a lovely day. In the morning my son and grandsons called from Saskatoon to sing Happy Birthday to me. My sister took me out for lunch and we had a great visit. My one brother is in a very remote place in India but managed to find an internet connection so he could send me birthday wishes. My other brother who is on a business trip in China sent me a birthday text. Dave and I went to a movie in the evening with a friend and then out for cake and chai.  My Dad called at the end of the evening to wish me a Happy Birthday. I received lots of messages and cards and phone calls and e-mails and texts wishing me a Happy Birthday. It was a good celebration of another completed year of my life. Here are some highlights from that year. 
October- Great trip to Newfoundland with Dave and my cousin Lynne and her husband RodNovember- continuing to work on our church’s Little Free Library with these three great guys

December- Hosting our Hong Kong friends Meena and Anil

January- hiking with my brother in ArizonaFebruary – Good times with family and friends in ArizonaMarch- creating our own great masterpieces with my T-4 friends’ groupApril- Attending the Manitoba Book Awards with friends from my writers’ group

May- Visiting my Aunt Viola in SaskatoonJune- Giving a Winnipeg Art Gallery tour of the Picasso exhibit to a group from ChinaJuly – trip to Ontario for a family gathering August- time at Moose Lake at my brother and sister-in-law’s cottage September- Trip to Iceland

My 64th year has been a good one. Thanks to so many of you who sent me birthday wishes and affirmations about my blog posts.  Looking forward to the adventures the coming year brings and sharing them with you. 

Other posts……..

Birthdays Past

A Sunny Birthday on a Rainy Day

Happy Birthday with the T-4s

Dave is 65

My husband Dave is celebrating his 65th birthday today. He’s changed lots in physical ways over the years as these pictures attest, but his sense of humour, his love of adventure, his avid interest in so many different things, his vast network of friendships and his love for his family has stayed the same.

Other posts………….

Dave’s Birthday 2016

Dave’s Birthday 2015

Dave’s Birthday 2014

Happy Birthday with the T-4s

I celebrated my birthday with three good friends who I meet with regularly. We call ourselves the T-4s.  For our October party we were spending a crafty Saturday afternoon together. But……… we started with lunch.  We each made our own little pizzas on naan bread. 

Delicious!We had each brought projects to work on after lunch. Esther was using different pencil shadings to complete a picture in her English countryside colouring book, while Glenys was making plastic covers for take home reading books for her grade one classroom. 

My friend Debbie was helping me make a Christmas stocking for my new grandson. I had bought a kit but would never have been able to put the stocking together without Debbie’s expertise and sewing skills. My friend Esther and I both have fall birthdays and Glenys had made us a beautiful cake to share. There were gifts for both of us too. 

It was a perfect way to mark my birthday.  

On Sunday Dave and I hosted sixteen people from our family for a turkey dinner and we celebrated Thanksgiving and both my birthday and my Dad’s birthday. 

And so another year has begun! 

Other posts……..

Birthday’s Past

A Sunny Birthday on a Rainy Day

 

 

Happy Birthday Dave

Happy Birthday to my husband Dave. Dave is almost always smiling so I thought it would be fun to post a few pictures where he is not smiling just to show that he is capable of taking life seriously at times. 

Here’s to you Dave ! Glad to have spent another year together with you. 

Other posts……

Happy Birthday Dave

Dave Driedger Nature Photographer

Dave’s Vision Quest

She Would Have Been 90

Today is my Mom’s birthday. She would have been 90 years old. Happy Birthday Mom.

Other posts about my Mom
Dorothy Marie Peters

My Mom’s Friends

My Mother’s Button Box

Aprons

My grandmother almost always wore an apron.  She put it on in the morning and kept it on throughout the day.   Grandma worked very hard in her house, garden and kitchen. She cooked, canned, cleaned, did laundry, collected eggs, separated milk, sewed and tended to the needs of her six children and her husband. Her apron was a uniform of sorts for her job as a homemaker.

My father’s five sisters

When my father and his five sisters were cleaning out my grandparents’  home, my aunts donned a selection of Grandma’s aprons and posed in them. On Thanksgiving weekend we celebrated the holiday and my Dad’s birthday in our home. 

I asked Dad to carve the turkey, and like his mother and sisters he too put on an apron to tackle the turkey. He kept his apron on to listen to us sing Happy Birthday,

blow out his candles,

and visit with his grandchildren.

Like his mother whose apron was really a sign of her care and devotion to her family, on Thanksgiving Dad’s apron signalled much the same thing to all of us. 

My Dad and his sisters dressed up in their parents’ clothes visit Grandma in the nursing home. This family knows how to have fun.

Other posts about my Dad and his mother…….

My Grandmother was a Guitarist

He Hasn’t Lost His Green Thumb

Grandma and Embroidery Hoops

 

Sharing His Birthday With Someone Special

Dave’s birthday was on Monday but instead of having a  celebration of his own he chose to go to a party for our friends’ Tom and Sylvia’s new grandson. It is a Chinese custom to have a big celebration when a baby is one month old and Tom and Sylvia hosted a party for friends and family at The Golden Terrace Restaurant so we could all meet their grandson Thomas Alexander, the new little son of their children Will and Violet. 

The food was amazing! Lobster, chicken, pork, scallops, beef, shrimp, vegetables, soup, rice, and taro soup for dessert. There were also eggs dyed red to symbolize happiness and new life. Little Thomas was a contented sweetheart throughout the party and I got to enjoy holding him for a nice long time. 

When they brought out the cake for Thomas his Grandpa Tom insisted Dave pose with the baby and the cake since it was Dave’s birthday too.  

Although Dave throughly enjoyed his party with Thomas his favorite part of the day was coming home and listening to the “Happy Birthday Grandpa” message on his phone from our two year old grandson. He listened to it two times that night and then another two times the next morning. 

Other posts about birthdays……

Happy Birthday Dave

Children’s Party With Aunt Olly

My Dad’s Birthday

 

Happy Birthday Dave!

It’s my husband Dave’s birthday. Happy to have shared 41 of his 61 years with him. 

Other posts about Dave……

Baseball in His 60th Year

Forty Years Ago Today

Driedger Reunion in Arizona- Hiking Adventures

I’m Her Namesake

Last weekend we celebrated my Aunt Mary’s 80th birthday. Aunt Mary is my Dad’s younger sister and she came to Manitoba from her home in Arkansas for a visit. Her four sisters and brother who live in Manitoba decided to surprise her with a birthday party. Her children flew in from Oklahoma and Minneapolis and nearly fifty members of our extended family turned up at her party. That is not surprising because Auntie Mary is a very special lady.

She lived in Newton Kansas for many years and that was where the Mennonite Church had its headquarters. My son Bucky wasn’t even a year old when I went there for a Parenting For Peace and Justice workshop. Auntie Mary invited me to stay with her and volunteered to care for my baby while I was at the workshop sessions. Bucky had a wonderful time with her. 

When Dave and I, and our two boys, were on our way to the Hopi Indian Reservation to do voluntary service for a year in a Mennonite Mission School there, we had to stop in Newton for a week of orientation. Again Auntie Mary offered her childcare services and planned a week of non-stop activity and excitement for her two great-nephews while Dave and I were busy with meetings. She even made a photo album for Bucky and Joel cataloguing all the fun things they had done together in Newton. 

Auntie Mary is a nurse and for many years she was the manager of her husband’s medical office. Uncle Herb is a retired surgeon. But she still found time, while raising three children, to go back to university and get a degree in art. Dave and I have a beautiful painting of hers hanging in the front hallway of our home, a wedding gift from Auntie Mary. 

Auntie Mary is an avid reader and I remember that on the occasions I visited her home, she always had a stack of books she’d read placed on the night table by my bed. These were books she had selected from her personal collection especially for me because she thought I would be interested in them. 

 When I was born my Auntie Mary stayed up all night with my Mom.  This was before the time when husbands were allowed in the delivery room, so my Aunt Mary was my Mom’s support as she laboured through the night to give birth to her first child. Auntie Mary was writing her final exams to become a nurse the morning after I was born, but despite that, she stayed awake all night with my Mom. In this photo, she is holding me just after I entered the world. It is no wonder my mother and father decided that at least part of my name should be a tribute to Aunt Mary. 

On our recent trip to Ukraine, I took along the transcribed notes my Auntie Mary had given me of several lengthy oral interviews she had conducted with my grandparents about their life in the Soviet Union. Those notes are what made it possible for me to find the places where my grandparents and great-grandparents had lived. I read my grandparents’ stories as I walked through their home village of Gnadenthal, and their life there came alive for me because of the work Auntie Mary had done collecting and transcribing her parents’ stories.

Auntie Mary is a warm, compassionate, positive person, family orientated, hospitable, easy to talk to, affirming and a lifelong learner. I am proud to be her namesake.  

Other posts……….

Visiting Uncle Herb

Flight Behaviour

Aprons