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.
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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!
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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!
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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.)
I hope things are looking up in Your neck of the woods.
The whole family was entranced with this new little person, and he grew and flourished, and was a source of such delight, easy to satisfy as long as his stomach was kept well-filled, a peaceable child…well named, because that is the meaning of the name Jeffrey, PEACE. Not that we knew that bit of homily at the time! I mentioned somewhere in a previous guest post about how I was allowing his dad to pick out his name, and he was all set to call him RUSSELL, and Judy piped up and said, "Oh good! The kids at school will all call him “RUSTY NAYL”.
When Jeff started talking it was with a lisp! And it lasted for about 2 years, until he managed to get his tongue around those “esses”, meanwhile I was still keeping a record of the funny things our children would say, and the fact that Jeff “lithped” only made his sayings more hilarious. So I have a bunch of them documented in OUR KIDS big book, and I am sending the funnies page to Jeff so he can post it on the BLOG.
Unlike our other boys, Jeff had little or no interest in sports or athletic stuff of any kind. Hanging from the top bar of the swing set in our back yard was about as athletic as he ever got, and I had to cross his palm with silver when he turned 8 and still had not attempted to ride a two-wheeler.
(Interjection from Jeff, i liked recreation, but not sports).
I will remember always a couple of events that perfectly describe how adventurous Jeff was as a little kid; because they were so upsetting to me! When he was 3 years old, he got away from the back yard where his dad was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, and toddled three blocks through 4 lanes of traffic on the Bonnie Doon traffic circle. He was trudging across the middle of the circle, when a teenage Chinese boy caught up to him, decided this little stray needed help and intervened in the situation. He asked Jeff where he was going, and when J. said “Im going to tthhee my mummy!”, decided he’d better go along with him, so Jeff guided him to the shopping centre, to the office entrance half way down the mall, and upstairs to the very door of my office. You can imagine my surprise when a knock came at my door, and it opened to reveal my 3 yr. old and a perfect stranger! Who hastened to explain how it all came about, and how he was convinced this little guy was completely lost. Not so, he knew where he wanted to go, even though he’d only been there a couple of times. I remember phoning the house, and saying to Doug, “Is Jeff playing in the back yard?” Duh! (Poor guy, he’d worked all night and was exhausted.)
And the time when Jeff was still 3, in Washington Park in Seattle, where we had gone to the zoo for the day (we were on holiday, tenting). With all the great animals to watch, somebody (!) wasn’t paying attention, and Jeff disappeared! Mind you, you have to understand that Jeff wanted to watch what he wanted to watch, and the heck if it didn’t happen to please all the rest of the family. So, we (all of us) became quite, quite frantic, calling for him, searching everywhere, No Jeff! Where was he, had he been abducted? Fallen into the lion’s den? Finally, on the brink of calling the authorities, and getting really desperate, we made our way back to the car, in the parking lot a few blocks away. And who should be sitting on the hood waiting for us but Jeff! Of course, the car was locked and he couldn’t get in. But up that high (on the hood) he could spot us all as we wended our way to find it amongst the hundred or so cars parked there. Jeff was again the source of a near-heart attack for me!
Last, but never least! In fact we had NO LEASTS! Dave joined the Naylor crew some five years after No. 6, Jeff, arrived. So I like to think of him not as an afterthought, but as a BONUS! Because he truly livened up our lives. I was 42 when he was born, so the prior 9 months were not the easiest; suffice it to say that having babies is definitely for the young, or younger than 42, anyway!.
Dave truly filled our lives with joy; (after a rocky first month or 6 weeks due to a lung deficiency which showed up mostly as a slight duskiness in his colour), he began to thrive and turned into an incredibly happy and contented baby. The whole family doted on David, and yes! spoiled him ridiculously! He never had to ask for anything, he just pointed at it, and BINGO, he had it! So, as a consequence, he never really bothered to talk as early as our other kids, but once he started, he’s never quit since!
In school, David was the source of a great deal of riotous merriment on behalf of both teachers and students. His teachers never had to sing “Send in the clowns”, they already had one in the classroom. Consequently David had a very good time in school. For example, usually hours before Hallowe’en, David would come to me practically on bended knee, pleading, “Mom, can we whip up such and such a costume? I have to wear it to school in the morning”. One year in high school, he blackened his face, hands, etc., wore his hair in an Afro and went to school all decked out as a ni……..(whoops! Not allowed). His classmate, who happened to be a colored boy, had the locker next to Dave’s, both were rifling through their lockers at the same time, and the other kid gets a little worried, and says to Dave “Hey, man, whatcha doin’ in Dave Naylor’s locker?”
Dave was immensely popular in school, and to top it all off, if he didn’t join the football team at Bonnie Doon High! What were they called, seemed to me it was The Lancers, but maybe my memory’s faulty on that one. Anyway, I lived in constant fear that he would really get CREAMED, skinny 140 lb. stripling that he was, up against those big beefy 200 lb. bags of muscle and testosterone. I was immensely glad when that petered out, and he got back to normal. Or at least as near normal as David ever was. David’s “normal” was to say the least “Unique”.
Dave’s name, if I remember right, means “Loved, Loving” and he SO lived up to that, he was dearly loved by his family, his skillion friends, and he loved everybody in return! I don’t think he ever had an enemy in the whole world. So helpful, so kind, helped me paint the whole outside of our house at 9257 just a few years back now…..plus the never-ending fence! Took his whole summer holiday that year just to help his aging parents. 
(I read a post today about a girl named Heather, who visited Edmonton, some time back in the two oh oh's),...It's my favourite place to live.
