October 6th, 2017

Hello everyone! How are you? I’m okay. Mom is pretty tired, so I’m afraid this will be kind of short this week. She’s the typist—I don’t want to be up all night typing this letter by letter! (I can type, but it’s definitely a long process!)

Mom recently signed up for a genealogy website called Geni. It’s a world family tree. You can figure out how you’re related to famous and historical people. Mom is distantly related to Charles Darwin, David Bowie, and a gentleman who served in King Henry the VIII’s court (he got beheaded!). Mom and I would love to know if any of you were on Geni, and we could be connected!
I hope you’re all having a great day! Talk to you soon!

March 24th, 2017

Spring has finally arrived here in Wisconsin. It really hasn’t been very warm, but it has been sunny and the plants have been waking up. (Although after Mom typed that for me, we looked up the weather for the upcoming week, and it’s supposed to be gray and rainy all week. Sigh.)

Mom’s parents are back home, so we all have to go back upstairs. Mom took Adelaide, Moira, Imogen and I to work for a few days this week. We sat in the car while she did the work, but it was a nice change of pace!
I’ve been watching Mom work on her genealogy for most of the day. She is currently working on some families that lived in Virginia and West Virginia in the 1800s. They lived in the same area as the Hatfields and the McCoys! They also lived in the same area as Davy Crockett’s family! (Technically, Mom is slightly related to Davy Crockett through these people!)
We have to go to bed soon. We’re writing this a few days before it posts so Mom doesn’t forget. But it is almost time for bed. I’m still pretty awake, but Mom has to sleep, so we all do!

August 19th, 2016

Good afternoon, everyone! How are you? Things have been pretty quiet around here. Mom’s week went by slightly better, so we will have a longer post today.
Mom’s nephew, Graham, has decided that my nose is tasty. Mom, Graham, and I sit on the rocking chair and rock him to sleep. When he’s falling asleep, he tries to chew on my nose! Mom catches him, but I’m afraid she’s not going to catch him just once and he’s going to chew my nose off! He’s got two teeth now and they’re sharp!
Mom is currently working on her family tree. She was contacted by someone who lives in northern Wisconsin about a gentleman named Warren Holmes. It lead her on a genealogy journey to discover that she is very faintly related to Elizabeth Cady Stanton!

My mom took this picture today. (She’s the blue jeans in the lower right corner!) This is Oliver and Graham waiting for Graham’s dad to come and pick him up! I thought it was so cute that I had to share!
Talk to you all next week!

July 15th, 2016

Hello everyone! How are you all? Things have been pretty quiet around here. We have mostly just been babysitting Graham. He comes over really early in the morning.

We sit on the ground and he kicks and talks and chews on things. Oliver watches him. Sometimes we watch cartoons on Mom’s ipad. We spend time rocking him too.
We have made one discovery. Mom is very interested in her genealogy. We spend a lot of time adding people to her family tree! We have discovered that we are faintly (very faintly) related to Benjamin Franklin! There are eighteen steps between Mom and him. It’s not straight through—it’s not like he’s a great grandfather or anything like that. But it’s still very interesting!
Mom has been rescuing some of our friends. Some of them she has found locally, but there were a few others she found on ebay. We have introduced Jefferson and Shirley. We’ve also found Gulliver, Stevenson, Oak, and Hilary. Mom needs to take pictures, and we will introduce them!
Talk to you all later!

April 29th, 2016

So Mom worked on her genealogy tonight instead of helping me write my blog entry. It turns out that one of Mom’s co-workers is distantly related through marriage and what not to her. This makes her the fourth person that Mom knows that she is distantly related to. And these things make Mom very happy.
So I thought I would write a little bit about something that both Mom and I love—Postcrossing. For the price of a global postage stamp, you can get postcards sent to you from all over the world. Mom recently got this one from Russia!

Mom shares these pictures on Instagram. We have a drawer that we keep them all in.

Sometimes, the postcards have different pictures on them! This is one that Mom got recently. It’s a picture of a bunch of people on a ferry that happens to be next to a warship! Neither of us read Chinese, so we have to deal with just the English translation on the back.
Does anyone else have a postcrossing account? Do you get interesting postcards? There really isn’t anywhere around here that sells anything but travel postcards. We just send Wisconsin postcards to people!

August 4th, 2011

My mom has been spending her time online doing other things then helping me update my blog. She says that some of humans who read my blog will understand the appeal, although I’m not quite sure.

A long time ago—well, at least a few years ago, Mom’s grandma was moved into an assisted living place. Her mom and dad found a packet of photocopied bible pages—of her dad’s family. All the way to her great-grandparents. She went to a website called MyHeritage.com and started entering the information. Soon, through her grandfather’s mother, she got literally thousands of relatives that lived in Europe—mostly the Netherlands. Through a little work using US Census records and googling, she’s expanded her family on all sides. (It turns out that she’s distantly related to a bunch of Quakers! And that her Mom’s side is mostly English!)

So she’s been using a program that came with the website and been adding people ever since. I don’t know if you can see the landing page, but here is the fruits of my mom’s online time. It seems to just sap up all sorts of time. She says that it will change once the weather’s not so hot and humid outside. (She admits she’s a bit of a wuss when it comes to the humidity!)

I think that she ought to do my genealogy, but she says that she doesn’t know where in China I came from. I know I came from a gardening store nearby, but she says that’s not where I was born. Maybe she can google that!

On an unrelated note, a few days ago, my mom used her nook-color to look up her sister’s name. Her book (which we knew about) is finally available as an ebook!

It’s called Medea in the Waters. Mom says that it is not a book for small bears or children. (It’s a link to amazon.com, since the place she bought it doesn’t do international stuff.) It’s supposed to be available as a paper book soon, but Mom bought it for herself anyways.

Talk to you all later!