Our Family Continues to Grow

After 10 years in Taiwan, Jeff and Becky returned to Canada with their two daughters. One year for Christmas I had a couple T-shirts made for the girls. On each I had a picture of one of the girls with the caption “Made in Taiwan with Canadian parts.” While in Taiwan Jeff earned a Master’s degree from the University of Calgary in adult education with an emphasis on curriculum design. They moved to the small northern Ontario town of Espanola. There our family expanded one more time when our third granddaughter, Piper Sue, was born.

Further east our family grew again when Tim married Sumaya Moore outside of Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia. I was again asked to officiate. We met in a small white, clapboard church across the road from the Pacific Ocean. It was our first extended visit to Nova Scotia. What a beautiful part of our great nation. Tim and Sumaya gave us two more grandchildren – first Oscar Thomas in 2009 and Elsa Lena Elizabeth in 2013. Our family just kept on growing.

Back in Saskatoon, our daughter Laura married Vin Plag and they have given us two grandsons – Finn Henry and John Forest. Again, I was given the privilege of joining them in marriage. The wedding took place on Vin’s grandparents’ farm east of Humboldt. They live in Saskatoon, and we are able to spend more time with them then we were able to spend with our other grandchildren.

One of our very best vacations took place just before Finn turned one. We had booked a two-week vacation in Cuba. Tim, Sumaya, Oscar, Elsa, Laura, Vin and Finn joined us for the first week and Iona and I spent the second week recovering from our joint vacation. I remember patiently (Iona would tell you that I was only patient in my own eyes) for the bus bringing our family to join us.

We had planned a day trip when Iona woke up and went to the window to open the curtains and she got dropped with a bout of vertigo. For a couple days she could barely move without feeling like the room was spinning out of control around her. Despite the discomfort and inconvenience, we had a vacation to remember.

For our 40^th anniversary we went to northern Ontario to vacation with Tim and Jeff and their families. Oscar was just a little guy; he wasn’t walking yet. We rented a pontoon boat and went to Blueberry Island. Want to know why it was called Blueberry Island? If you guessed it was because there were blueberries in abundance, you would be right. Oscar loved to eat blueberries. We would place him in the middle of a blueberry patch, and he would pick blueberries and stuff them into his mouth. What a great time!

Well, I think that our time of welcoming grandchildren into our family has come to an end but our time of welcoming new people into our family has not. We had a phone call from our son Jeff this winter telling us that his oldest daughter, our first granddaughter, Chandyn was engaged to be married on May 27. How could she be growing up so quickly? Iona is going to be married to a grandfather-in-law. That makes us both kind of old, but we are both looking forward to it. There has been a small roadblock placed in our way – WestJet pilots are scheduled to go on strike tomorrow, May 19, and we have seats booked to fly to Toronto on May 25. And right, our tickets are with WestJet. I am just a bit nervous as our departure date approaches.

When Chandyn was born, Jeff and Becky had to decide what she would call us. They had decided to call Becky’s parents grandma and grandpa. They didn’t want to confuse Chandyn by using the same names for both sets of grandparents. Their solution: they would use the Mandarin name for father’s mother to refer to Iona – Nini, but what about me? My heritage is Romanian and the Romanian word for grandfather is Bunicu. They shortened it for ease of pronunciation, and we became Nini and Nicu. We are probably one of a very small number of grandparents being identified in both Mandarin and Romanian.

We are enjoying this great adventure of grandparenting, and we are both learning to keep the Son in our eyes.