This Week in Harrison Grandkids

Freddie turned three months last weekend. This kid is coming on strong! He's tipping the scales. He's getting out and about. And he's looking stylish in his fall outfits. I'm excited to see him next month!

Lloyd and Freddie have started having some bonding time in Freddieville, otherwise known as the space you see here.

All of the grandkids are excellent video chatters, and for that we're grateful. As you can see, Rosie doesn't limit her chatting to humans. She and Tikka had some girl-talk this week.

Flashback Friday

On October 13, 2007  - already 17 years ago  -  it was John's senior year of high school and this was a big game against Pewaukee. It was also Senior Day, so we got our picture taken with our favorite football player on Shorewood's team.

Big Kids

Rosie's been under the weather with walking pneumonia, but I'm happy to report she's been on the mend. Today she and Peter visited one of our old haunts, the Sadyba Best Mall. It was a small mall near our house and it's still standing, over 20 years later.

Meanwhile, Lloyd's been doing his best to follow in his father's footsteps by making creations out of paper and glue. 

B x 4

It was hard to title today's post. I started off calling it Four Bs, but  since the title font is all caps it looked like FOUR BS, and that just wasn't family friendly. Then I tried the grammatically incorrect Four B's, but it looked wrong. So I landed on B x 4, which as you now know was not my first choice, but it works. With that long prologue, you are correct in understanding that the theme of today's post is Four Bs. Not as in Brad and his three brothers, all of whom have names that start with B. Instead I have four totally different Bs for you. My first B happens to be for brothers, as in the Bedik-Harrison brothers. The littlest brother Freddie is on the cusp of turning three months old and looking great, if a proud grandma does say so herself!

And here's the other Bedik-Harrison brother, Lloyd, enjoying some nice weather at the playground. They have Troy's sister and niece in town this week for the holiday, which brings me to my second B.

The second B is for bread. This is the beautiful challah that John made for Rosh Hashanah. Talk about impressing your in-laws!

The third B is for birthday, as in I had a birthday last week. This was on the day after my birthday, when we went out for dinner with friends and ate some yummy cake.

The last B is for boyfriend. In case you didn't know, October 3 was Boyfriend's Day. You know who did know that? Rosie's daycare, that's who. Rosie is fittingly not at all impressed by this silly day, and I couldn't be prouder of her for it. 

Flashback Friday

As I continue to scan in photos from a pre-John and pre-Mary photo album, it's another Flashback week with Peter. When Peter was born we lived in Oceanside, California. We lived in a condo that was more like a duplex, which is to say we had downstairs neighbors. We moved there just before or just after Peter was born, so we didn't meet our downstairs neighbors until after he was born. When we met them we discovered that they had a new baby too. When we got to talking we learned that both of our boys were born on the same day and in the same hospital! This is the two of them hanging out in front of our houses. Well, this little guy's name was Mendalson. Spelled like I spelled it. (I only know the spelling because I wrote it on the back of the photo.) He was a lot bigger than Peter, who weighed 9 pounds 6 ounces at birth. So even though Peter was no slouch in the weight department, Mendalson was definitely bigger. When I went to post this picture I thought that Mendalson is such an unusual spelling and maybe I can find him. So I decided I would Google him and see what became of him. I mostly wanted to see if his size figured into his future life and sure enough it did. One of the first results I got showed that he played D-2 football in college. That was enough for me and I stopped my sleuthing. Anyway, this is Peter and Mendalson at age 5 months, hanging out outside on the grass in Oceanside in February of 1989.

Flashback Friday

I'm excited that my newest project to enhance my blog has begun: the digitizing of all my photos! I bought a scanner a few months ago and it sat under my desk for awhile - I wouldn't let myself open it until I'd finished a couple of other projects. Those projects are done and now I've started down the long road of scanning in a whole heck of a lot of pictures. It'll be nice for Flashback Friday to have them at the ready on my computer, rather than having to find them and pull them out of albums. But this means that if I use my newly scanned pictures for Flashback Friday - which I plan to do for awhile if for no other reason than to give me new photos to choose from - the variety of the subject matter might be a bit lopsided. For example, the first album I chose to scan is from 1989 when Peter was our only child. So, if I don't get done with this album for a week or two you'll see a lot of Peter in the Flashback. Today's picture is from February of 1989. Back when a lot of Harrisons were still living in Southern California, we met up with other Harrisons to do some whale watching (I think) near the San Vicente Lighthouse in Rancho Palos Verdes. This is me and Brad and 5 month old Peter.

 

Making Up for Lost Time

Today I have happenings from Harrisons far and wide. Last weekend we were at Geneva's house in Sun City to celebrate her birthday.

On Friday night we went out for Thai food with her three Arizona sons and their wives.

On Saturday we had Friday's group, plus some grandkids and great-grandkids, at Geneva's house for a second celebration. It was a fun weekend.

Now it's time to talk about the newest generation. Over in Poland, Rosie's new bike seat works as well on Jessa's bike as it does on Peter's. She's starting to rack up the miles.

This is Rosie out on a walk with her daycare. Her walking skills are really coming along. I think she still mostly rides in a stroller, but she's persevering with her walking and can go for quite a way before falling.

Rosie is doing her best to study up for her job as everybody's favorite Polish tutor. Fortunately for us all, her daycare has a lot of books and as you can see she's already hard at work.

When she's not learning Polish, Rosie is taking in Polish culture. This weekend she and her parents visited everybody's favorite medieval castle, Malbork.

In 2002, her dad and the rest of our family made our own pilgrimage to Malbork. But I digress.

Over in Denver, there are two sweet brothers.

Freddie is enjoying the perks of being a younger brother. He fits into the cute frog outfit that Lloyd used to wear.

And he gets to wear Lloyd's barbecue onesie and use his bouncy chair.

Speaking of big brother Lloyd, he's a kid who's always on the move. 

Over in Baltimore, this kid is only on the move as much as his/her mom is, but you can see s/he already looks like a baby. Mary's graduated into her second trimester and March 27 is getting closer by the day!