Se7en + 1 are Discovering the “Then-a-Days…”

It is that time of year when we all start to long for Spring and the warmer weather we love. Every extra rainy day seems like a rainy day too many. Normally my kids play outdoors most of the day – rain or shine, but it has been unnaturally rainy and by our standards particularly icy!!! We have had couch days and piles of books, game days and puzzle days… but the time has come for some treasure hunting around the house and peaking into nooks and crannies we normally pass by…

We have been looking through and sorting through all sorts of little boxes of treasures. Whenever we go on a trip we pop the resulting treasures into a box, whenever we do a really special project we store the remaining artefacts in a memory box… and my children have been dying to see inside one particular box from my childhood, it is incredibly special to me and spills open whole corner of my childhood…

This box was given to me when I was a child, by my grandma, who was a doll collector. Once a year at Christmas she would have an exhibition of all her dolls at a local store. A vast collection of special dolls that were mostly untouchable. But this box was filled with very beautifully crafted clothes, tiny details and all handmade by my grandma for a doll that she had chosen for me to play with…

So I sat with my children, exploring the treasures in the box and remembering the teeny tiny milk chocolate that came with the letter!!! My Grandma was interesting and would invite me round on Tuesday afternoons after school. We would begin with lunch, inevitably canned pea and ham soup, followed by roast chicken and canned vegetables… I don’t think my gran owned more than a small refrigerator, and no freezer, hence the cans. Dessert was canned guavas (never my best!!!) and Bird’s custard. This meal was accompanied by endless a cutlery, and that’s where I learnt how to really set a table. Meals were also accompanied by a the huge treat of a tepid soda, from a small glass bottle, stored in a soda crate under the kitchen sink. She lived in an era before folk had cars, she must have carried all those cans home from the store. After lunch we would sit at her large card table in the sun and we would paste christmas cards into scrapbooks… which were really large pages of newsprint stapled together!!!

Anyway, since we are in the middle of our journaling project and it was time to write a letter to our great great grandparents (and that would be my children’s great great grandpa in the first photo) we were thinking about grannies and grandfathers and…

And here is the grandparent gallery from our journal pages…

Can you spot the similarities to my parents…

And if my children could write a letter to their great grandparents, way back in the “Then-a-Days”… then this what the would say…

1. Hood #1: Did you know that some folk live in space station nowadays?
2. Hood #2: Did you know that we buy our food from a store instead of growing our own?
3. Hood #3: Did you know it takes less than day to fly around the whole world?
4. Hood #4: Did you know that most people just don’t wear suits anymore?
5. Hood #5: Did you know that their are tall tall skyscrapers in our cities?
6. Hood #6: I love drawing, what was your favourite thing to do?
7. Hood #7: Did you know we don’t cook on a fire, we have an oven in our kitchen?

And the se7en + 1th thing…

8. Hood 8: Did you know that I love you? Oh my!!!

After all this discussion maybe we will be able to try and create a family tree one day, after all…