Here is a activity I did with Adam, Austin and Grace this past summer.  Baking bread.  I bake about once a week and if Grace is here she needs to help me.  Glen now is wanting to play with some too now.  When the grands are here they all get some dough to make their own creation and get to take it home.  I am sorry I didn't let my children be creative, but I really didn't bake bread then.  But I have to add, they all are very good at baking now.
Being Grandparents is a lot different than raising your own.  I'm thankful, that now at 70 I still have enough energy to keep Grace and Glen while Lana subs.  Also, keep the others as needed.  

Fun

 

On your mark, get set, GO!  This is the threesome speeding through the living room, dining room, kitchen and the foyer.......   Fast, faster and still faster.  Glen is in the car, sometimes not even steering or nor hanging on to the steering wheel for dear life.  Just rides along with a grin on his face.  Grace loves to be on her tricycle and we chase her and try to keep up with her.  I push the car and hang on to the top with my right hand and with my left I hang on to Glen's left arm to keep him from falling through the bottom of the car.  This car didn't come with a seat belt.  It's a good workout.  I am almost 70 years of age.  Thankful that I can do this and Grace really loves it.  Also, glad Lana trusts me with her kids. 

We go round and round chasing the other till one of us does a 360 turn and then we end up coming face to face with the other. 

I am hopeing that soon Glen will be able to motorize his own car and they will be able to do this activity on their own.  It sure is nice having laminant (fake hardwood floors) the vehicles really travel with a small amount of effort.

I don't have a picture but last week when we had out big snow I had the fun of being out with Amy and Lana's children making snowmen and even a snow cow.  Then the next day Grace was at our house and we built 5 snowmen and she even made a 'Christmas tree for the Holidays'.  That was her quote and her idea. 

Snow

We just had a significant amount of snow during this past few days.  I shoveled off the driveway and today while at Matt and Lana's I cleaned off their deck.  What a heavy snow.   With each shovel full of snow Grace hollared, "Don't take that snow, I want to eat more."  How cute.  But I commented that if we in Canada would have had heavy snow like that it wouldn't have taken long to get bath water melted or snow for washing clothes.  We did not have a water supply on our farm so we melted snow for washing, bathing and washing dishes and clothes.  When we got snow in we tried to get the snow  from lower down because that was filled with more moisture than the light weight snow that was on top. 

So in winter we only took bathes every other Saturday.  We had a galvanized tub behind the house.  This served as our freezer inbetween.  Food was piled under it in order to keep it froze and the tub kept the animals from getting to our food.  Then for the time that we took a bath we covered the food securely with something else.  We carried the tub into John's room and water was put in it.  First Peter and Ben usually took a bath.  Then Mom usually was next and then me and last John.  We just added more hot water with each person getting into the tub.  Dad usually did not bath in winter.  Why?  I'm not sure.  This now to me seems very grose.  We washed out hair in a basin seperately in the kitchen before we bathed.  We didnot wash our faces or heads in this water that was used by previous bathers....  Also, we did not have shampoo so I often washed my hair with hand soap or laundry detergent.  And often my hair was just as greasy as it was before I washed it.  Nor did we have deoderant.  Such items were  luxury that we couldn't afford.  For a long time we didn't have tooth pasted either.  We used salt water.   Then we would carry the bath water out Sunday morning and put the tub over the food again. 

In summer we used water out of our dugout or hauled it in barrels from a near by lake or used rain water that had collected in a barrel off of the house roof.  Then in summer we did take weekly bathes.

Things changed in 1973 when plumbing was put in houses, and also telephones became a household item also. 

No wonder we didn't have boyfriends before we left the farm and moved to the city.  But this was a common way of life amoungst the poor people there.  I believe we all smelt the same but maybe some more than others. 

1943 till 1948

Well, I don't remember much in my first 5 years.  But there are a few things I do remember.  I remember the house we lived in during this time.  We moved to another place in 1948.  It had 3 rooms.  The kitchen was in the middle, and on each end was a room.  Previous to 1943, when my grandfather died, my grandparents had lived in the room to the north.  I do not remember them living with us but I was told this was where my grandparents lived.  After they died, John got their room for his bedroom.  On the south side of the kitchen was the other room.  This was the living room by day.  At night curtains were pulled across the room and 6 of us slept in this room.   In 1948 when we moved, John was 12, Helen 11, Anne 8, Betty 5 and Peter 1.  Ben was born in 1949.

I remember when Peter was born. 
Also, one night our neighbors house burnt down.  
Anita Wiebe Schneider gave me a ring, but it was too big and I cried and begged for it so Mom gave it to me and I dropped it on the floor and it slipped between a crack in the floor and it was gone.
We had a well for water supply on this farm and it had a wall around it (but was like something you see in old pictures) where you lower a pail down with a rope and dip some water and then wind the rope back up on the rod that was across the top of the well and hoist it up like that.
I remember going to Aunt Helen and Uncle Ben's place (Anitas parents) and they had a small pump on a cabinet and could pump water by moving the handle up and down and they had a metal dipper from which we could drink and that water tasted so good.
I also remember the one time Dad took us kids along to Bournmouth, a small village, near out home and bought each of us an ice cream cone and us sitting on the store steps eating it.
I remember I was taken to the Dr. and he tickled my tummy.  I 'm sure there wasn't much more wrong with me except tummy aches from being constipated.  I remember taking some medicine, Alpincreter, not sure if this is German or English but I just talked to Helen and she said it seemed like a remedy medicine for most anything.
Then the most vivid and horrifing was one summer day our chimney caught on fire and John was taking pails of water up the roof to pour down the chimney, Mom was carrying our canned goods and stuff out of the house in case it burnt down, Helen I think ran to the neighbors for help and Anne and myself and Peter were in the garden crying.  Dad, I think, had gone to N. Battleford that day.  That had to have been the summer of 1948 and we moved to the new farm in Oct.  But also that summer I remember Dad, Mom and John digging the cellar at the new farm and a blanket was put on the ground for me to take a nap.  Somebody got stung by a bee and a mud plaster was put on it to make it feel better.

This is about all my brain can recall.   Good night........  If I think of more, I will write about it at a later time. 

Witches Closet

Carol has been after me to blog some about my life in Canada as a young girl.  Also, to let the grandkids know I lived much differently than they do now 55 years later. 

I remember that we moved to our home place which was about 1/2 mile from school, named Artichoke, when I was 5 years of age.  We were very poor and one year, not sure when it was but the janitor position came open at this school.  Each morning about 5 am Dad would get up and walk to school and build a fire in the furnace or re-kindle it, if the Coal had still held fire.  He then also would dust the desks from the dust that had been raised from the sweeping us kids had done the previous evening.  Even though we used some green sweeping compound there was a good bit of dust.  School started at 9 am, we had a 15 min recess in the am and also in the pm and 1 hour for lunch and school let out at 3:30pm.

This janitor position involved the whole family.  Two kids stayed after school to sweep the floor each evening.  Several times a year we as a family went to school on a Saturday and washed the floors and waxed them.  Then the windows got washed mainly in fall and in spring.  This was a two room school with 4 cloak rooms.  Cloak rooms were where us kids hung out coats and put our boots and also our lunch boxes.  NO BATHROOMS!!!  We had a two holer down the path from the school.  One for the boys and one for the girls.  Also, want to add that we got paid $30 a month.  We children didnot get allowance.  We all just worked so provisions could be made for us a home. 

This school remained in use till the summer of 1958.  After this we were bused to the next school, Glenbush, 5 miles from home. 

I remember, there was a closet in the basement underneath the stairs.  It really was a storage closet for some junk and also we kept our brooms in it.  Let me note here, we did not have electricity in the school so it was dark in the closet.  We kids at school called it the 'Witches Closet'.  It was a scary place for most of us especially when the older kids would try to shove the weaker and smaller ones in there and close the door.  I really hated to go to the closet after sweeping the floors in order to put the broom away.  The last school year from 1957-1958 only one room was was used for classes.  Eight grades in one room. (I'll blog about that soon another time).  So I was the only person sweeping each evening.  It was kinda creepy being alone in the building and then having to take the brooms down to the witches closet.  Also, my duty was to put a couple of shovels of coal on the fire to hold the fire over night so it wouldn't be so cold in the morning. 

This was a family job and we worked at it together to help earn a bit of money. 

Retirement Party

Well, here I am, a year later!!  Its been a busy year.  I had problems with my blog and when I had someone try to help me, and a big Thanks to that person. But some part of it disappeared into Cyber space and probably will remain there forever.  But I will come back to it later sometime after I talk to my sisters again about Christmas memories. 
This is Jan of 2013.  The past year I was too busy to do blogging but I will be retiring on Jan 31 of this month.  So hopefully I will have more time to just ramble on with some of my thoughts of my life in Canada growing up in the rural area of Glenbush, Saskatchewan.
Just wanted to try the system and bring things up to date.  I have been working full time at RMH.  But when Lana and Matt moved to Harrisonburg in May of 2012 I started thinking about reirement.  Since Glen is younger than me, I needed to carry the insurance till his 65th birthday which is in Feb.  So I have been taking many days off so Lana could 'Sub' at the City schools, when she gets called or she accepts.  So here I am with 3 weeks left to work, but only 10 work days.   I love this schedule but am ready to be OFF full time. 
Today was one of my days off.  No alarm to wake me.  But at 7am the phone rings.  My first words out of my mouth were "Lana must have gotten a call to Sub".  Sure enough, so I hurried made coffee and rushed out to her house to pick up the kids.  We got home and Craig called saying Shannon had a headache due to a injury at a Basketball game.  So I had 3 grands.  I had thought of baking cookies so that when Grace leaves my house and asks for 2 cookies for her to eat on the way home.  She likes Peanut Butter cookies.  So I mixed up a batch and was doing 3 test cookies.  Well, what do you do while those are baking??  So I told Shannon and Grace they could play with the dough like play dough.   Would I have told my children that?  NO.  Now that I am a grandma, I am more relaxed and always let the grands play with bread dough.  I wish, I had been more like that when my children were small.  Any how, the cookies turned out good, Shannon was a big helper and Grace made cookies into balls also.   I was carrying Glen most of the time and so Shannon transfering the hot pans was a big help. 
Also, Shannon took Grace out on the trampoline for at short time.  It was in the 50's and till now I have been going on the trampoline with Grace but was glad Shannon could help out with that also.
We just had a great fun day!!!  Glen and I had a little Pacifier game going, and he seemingly enjoyed that.  Neither of Lanas' children napped good today, so she had tired kids to take home. 
Well, then this evening I went a Wednesday meeting and supper and had a good time. 

Christmas memories from the past.....

I asked my siblings for memories of past Christmas'. This is what my brother, Ben, sent to me. 

Now what do I remember about Christmas. I remember it was always an exciting time just before leading up to Christmas, looking forward to the family being together. I remember going to church to practice singing etc for Christmas eve, and then Christmas eve, receiving the bag of candy and /or oranges, and we looked forward to that , as a treat like that was fairly rare. Then Christmas eve, having a cold meal-ham, mousse, other. Also the visits with Werstrohs and enjoying games with the family particularly monopoly.  The decorations that were put up in the house, the streamers and bells. I can remember the baking Mom would do, all the sweets and chocolates, candy. Also something that I haven't seen or tasted for years would be the Haluva that Dad would cherish. I remember with fondness, partaking in Artichoke school concerts and yes the Caboose rides , either to church or to concerts or just to go visiting.

With respect to gifts, the two most vivid memories of gifts would be the year Peter and I got a battery operated caterpillar, and also the year we got a BB gun. With the BB gun we did not waste any time going out and testing our aim on birds etc. Then also with respect to activities, there was skiing, skating and also being pulled along the ditches with ski s on.  Oh I do remember one christmas, and I am not sure how old I was , receiving  my first pair of skates. Mom & Dad not being too familiar with skates , were excited about having bought me skates, but didn't know that the pair they bought for me were goalie skates not regular skates. Non the less I was excited about the skates.

I am trying to remember whether you and Glen were ever home at Christmas time and the farm.Something tells me you guys were out there one time in winter. I remember proudly the first Christmas Betty came to Mom & Dads on the farm at Christmas time.

Any way many of the memories are very general and not too specific on incidents.

It would be nice sometime to sit around as a family and share stories.

The bottom line is that even though the times were tough and there was not a whole lot of flashy and expensive gifts, I have very fond memories of Christmas with friends, family and relatives, when the spirit of Christmas was very genuine.