Four of Seven

DEBRA CHRISTINE NAYLOR

(AGE ONE)


OK, here’s No. 4 kid born to Doug and Marion Naylor, May 18th 1955. (Oh oh Debbie, you are NOT getting sensitive about putting your age online, are you?)

I’m going to go to a little different format here, using a few more pictures, and if it works OK, some full pages from one of my BIG BOOKS (photojournals).

Suffice it to say, Deb arrived right on time to celebrate her dad’s birthday. I already told the story in a previous post about the neighbors, Jim and Edie, driving me to the hospital in the middle of the night, and the receptionist on duty, figuring Edie was PERHAPS the one about to give birth!

Debbie was a treasure from the moment she arrived in this world…at the same time a very canny little person. Once, when she was 3, her dad was trying to get her to come sit beside him and watch a program on TV…..she didn’t want to leave whatever she was busy at, looked at him sort of quizzically, and said “What you not gonna give me?”, she had her dad figured out pretty good. And remember the story I told about her conning Uncle Tom out of “twarters” when he came over on his Sunday visit? She was a fascinating litle kid.

(scrapbook page here, like facebook, but on paper)

(again)



You’ll all have a laugh when you look at the picture of Debbie and Steve when they were 5 years old, together with their Primary class, with their teacher Helen Olmstead, standing behind them. Steve is in the first row, at the left. What a trial he was in Primary, he was so badly behaved it was unbelieveable. His mom, Betty, was Primary President and I was her counsellor at that time…we used to have our little prayer meeting just before Primary began (after school on a weekday, at the Whyte Avenue chapel). Invariably there would be sounds of mayhem coming from somewhere in the building, screams and shouts, a big ruckus, who knows where or what about. And invariably, Betts would say, “Oh that’s Steve, I know it is! He’s making trouble again! Excuse me, I better go check it out”. Debbie is in the back row, second from the right, she must have had a secret admiration for Steve’s wrongdoings even at that early stage!

As you can see in another picture, they started dating as soon as it was permissible, HEY! maybe before I was even aware of it! Well, all I can say, Steve may have had a rocky start, but she’s turned him into the sweetest, nicest, kindest guy imaginable, great husband and helpmate, indulgent dad and gramps.
Always doing kind deeds and never taking any credit for it. And best of all, he will do anything for FAMILY; I, for one, admire this kind of credo!

(woohoo, a party, with cake)

Can you see the page on Debbie’s 8th birthday? She had scads of friends, very popular in school. This was a special birthday, since she would soon be baptized, so I thought, and thought, and came up with the idea of a “cooking party”. My MIL had just given me some bolt ends of yard goods (curtaining material in this case), from her drapery shop on Whyte Avenue, so I used that to make up all those little aprons. Can’t remember what the food consisted of, but those girls absolutely had a ball! They were just at the right age for enjoying messing around in the kitchen, most successful party ever. Of course, they were all so proud to be able to take their aprons home with them, along with extra treats they had baked their very own selves!

(this tree gets around)

Please forgive me for not having any really “babyhood” pictures of Debbie. You must realize that we were very poor at that stage of the game, and money for film was a bit hard to come by when it was needed for a thousand other necessities. We tried very hard to make it stretch; I made most of the kids’ clothes, and we hardly ever went out for entertainment of any sort, and Dad made many of the kids’ playthings. At Christmas time the rule of thumb was one toy and one article of clothing, and some kind of goodies in the big green and red felt stockings. Remember those, my family readers? That was a chore, making those without anybody seeing them!

I have a bunch of pics of Deb and Steve’s wedding, but decided we’ve used enough pictures in this guest post, but if anybody wants to see them I’ll send them along to Jeff and he can put them on the blog as he sees fit. This is HIS blog, and he does a great job with the ramblings I send him, I’m sure he has a lot of converting to do.

(Not really. SOMEONE is overly concerned with whose BLOG this is, i don't care who it 'belongs' to...i'm just tricky, and lazy. But Mother never did my homework.....like She would have had the time.)

If you have any trouble with the fine details on the scrapbooking pages, just click on the pic, it goes full size, then move it around the screen. Works for me, but i have my laptop hooked up to the tv. Don't get excited, it's only a 29 inch LCD, crappy chinese made at that. But i'm about 2 feet away. Did i mention i'm BLIND as a bat, and without echolocation?
There was another pic that Mother wanted to include, of Herself, as She looks now, like an authour pic on the back of a book, but, the scrapbook page pics were huge files, and i used up my 8meg maximum with just these 5 pics. Sorry.

(See what happens when an 84 year old gets a new 3 in 1? Toils over a hot scanner all day.)