On August 21 we traveled to Strathroy to celebrate Uncle Maynard's 68th birthday. When we arrived we saw a silver van with a Pennsylvania license plate sitting in their driveway. That was our first indication that John and Annette and family were there. We had seen John and Annette at Charles and Rhonda's wedding, but hadn't seen their children in several years. They have really grown. Theo, the "baby", is one week shy of being two years old. The twins, Kristina and Myko are seven and Leanna is almost nine. The three oldest children swim competitively every summer. They also are multi-lingual, speaking English, Dutch and German! They live very near the Pittsburgh airport and the Beaver County line, so they are familiar with some of the places that Granddaddy and I know in the area. It was fun to talk about Pennsylvania again!
We stayed for afternoon tea and then a Little Caesar's pizza supper. It was fun.
Besides John and Annette's family, only Katrina and Jonathan were there. Eric and Rachel were camping somewhere with Bill, Kate and their family. Janine had gone with her worker, Maria, for the afternoon. Uncle Maynard says Janine is so set in her ways that apparently she "has" to go to KFC every Tuesday for "Toonie Tuesday" and she opted to do that rather than stay around to celebrate her dad's birthday. He thought it was pretty funny. When she came home, though, she was glad to see everybody, especially Uncle Arend who is one of her favourite uncles.
Marguerite is in The Netherlands on a two-week tour with her choir. Jan Arend Eibe Oudman is planning to attend one of their concerts, so she hopes to have a chance to visit with him while she is there. Aunt Theresa and Uncle Bert didn't come. I guess maybe they find the distance from the Welland-area to Strathroy just a bit too far; however, Uncle John Dykstra was there in the morning and he lives in Smithville, so maybe that wasn't it. Uncle Peter and Aunt Grace are in British Columbia visiting Janet, Jason and family, so they weren't there either.
Uncle Maynard has done a lot of landscaping around the house. He pulled up all of the reinforced cement between the house and the pool and has replaced it with brickwork and a little semi-circular garden beside the garage. In the front all of the trees close to the house have been taken out and a new walk (also brick) has been installed plus lots of plants in front of the porch (including some ivy from our backyard). It looks very nice and he is quite happy with how it turned out. I guess that is part of his creative side coming out.
When we left Maynard and Susan's, we stopped at the new Wal-Mart in Strathroy to pick up a few things then came back to Ridgetown. It wasn't as tiring a trip as our last trip with Granddaddy and was a lot of fun.
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