2023 - It was a Quiet Year. Until it wasn't

 

2023…It was a quiet year. Until it wasn’t

In January our plan for the year was quite modest. We had planned one quick spin over to South Africa to touch base with the family in March and then head on home to spruce up the garden in the Spring and lounge around on our deck for a nice looooong summer break before needing to face the Fall leaves and incoming winter snow again. Simple. Clean. No sweat.

As it turns out, the year developed a momentum of its own and it’s turned out to be a hectic but good year.

1950s vintage cars abound

January – we were contentedly shovelling snow and huddling around the fireplace when our neighbors popped over to invite us to join them for three weeks in Cuba at the end of the month. Well, shovel snow or beach it in Cuba?? Is the sky blue? Before we knew it, we were winging our way to the land of rum and sun. The beaches were gorgeous, the hotel was a tad run down, but still nice and we were waited on hand and foot for two weeks by a multitude of staff who were eager to earn $1 tips at every opportunity.

Idyllic Beaches everywhere

February – we had no sooner unpacked from Cuba and re-huddled around the fireplace and mourning our loss of warmth than we began to gear up for our only planned trip this year, to sunny SA in March to see family and friends.

In early March we joined a 
Pro Life Rally in Ottawa

March

It was sad to start packing 
up Nev and Mau's house

Our first stop in SA was with Maureen Cornish in Benoni. Mau’s husband Neville, Rob’s brother, had passed away in May the previous year. She was beginning to pack up her house to move down to St. Francis Bay on the Eastern Cape coast, where she was going to live with her son Doug and family.  Mau’s eldest daughter, Janine, had been living with her since Nev’s death. We stopped in for a week to help Mau and Jan with whatever we could. A week was enough to convince us to get home and start thinning out our own accumulated treasures, rather than bless our kids with that job. 

Beaches and blue skies. 
Perfect antidote to Canadian cold. 

Then we flew down to East London to see Lynne, Cher’s sister, and Cher’s Mom. Cher’s Mom who was 97, had been suffering from dementia for quite a while and wasn’t doing well. We began to get a hunch we might be needing an unscheduled visit to East London sooner rather than later.  We had about 10 days in East London to continue thawing out, visiting with friends and before we knew it, we were heading home again.

Mom, bottom right - surrounded by much 
love and care to the end. 

April – Home to get the garden in good shape before the spring greenery started to emerge. Rob has been playing quite a bit of pickleball in the last year and he took the opportunity to continue honing his skills. Unfortunately, his competition had the same idea, leaving Rob no further ahead than previously. Pickleball is the fastest growing sport amongst all ages in North America. If you haven’t tried it yet, carpe diem and Just Do It. It’s fun.

Rob has been increasingly exercised by the madness that has taken over our schooling system. The wonderful world of woke has taken hold at many levels of our society and particularly noticeably in our schools. Parents are finally waking up as to the nightmare that is enveloping their kids schooling and beginning to push back. After Rob complaining and griping about this miserable state of affairs for too long, the Lord finally tapped him on the shoulder and said, “So when are you going to stop complaining, and do something…”, or words to that effect. So, to cut a long story short, in April and May we embarked on a three year grassroots campaign, which we are calling Back to Basics to return the schools back to a level of common sense and sanity. We have recruited a team of other retired grandparents, who share similar values to us, along with an Advisory Group. Our objective is to oust all of the existing school board trustees in our area, in favor of candidates who are more to our liking in the next municipal trustee elections in 2026. Beware of ticking off grumpy grandparents. They are a force to be reckoned with.

Great Wolf Lodge- a lot of fun for the family

May

Slides and more slides

- In May it was Cher’s ….th birthday. We cannot mention the actual number. A clue she is entering her …th decade. Cher was adamant that no party was welcome. In fact, a party was banned. All she wanted was to take her grandchildren to Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, where waterslides, wave pools and lots of fun, find opportunity. The adults were graciously allowed to join in, so a fun 24 hours was enjoyed by one and all. We wrapped up with a show of Prince Caspian at Niagara on the Lake.

June

Kairo, Mariah &
Gianni

The rain held off for a wonderful outdoor wedding

On June 2nd our great niece, Mariah, was married to Gianni. They had met online during Covid. Gianni was in UK and Mariah was coping with Kairo, her new baby, where she was living with our daughter Julia and husband Chris and three kids. Well, it turns out that it was a match made in heaven and wedding bells were soon to be heard. Kairo loves Gianni. It was a very special wedding. There wasn’t much money to go around for a big plush affair, but it was wonderful to see how their community of friends and family rallied around and contributed in kind and time towards a lovely, warm, happy occasion.

Proud grandparents - Rob's sister 
Rose and husband Roy
with Mariah

Mom - the last of her
generation in our 
family

No sooner had we got through the wedding than we heard from Lynne that Cher’s Mom was ailing badly and then shortly thereafter passed away. We hopped on a plane asap to South Africa to join Lynne and many others in bidding Mom a fond farewell. We flew into South Africa via Cape Town and were reminded that travelling isn’t always unmitigated joy, by being delayed for our final one-and-a-half-hour leg to East London, by nine hours.

Mom’s memorial service was special. Two of her grandchildren, Kerry from Zambia, and Ian from Wales, joined us. Mom’s pastor, Chris Moore, did a wonderful job of leading the service. He also led a small private service for the family as we buried Mom’s ashes under the wall of remembrance alongside the church. Mom was a special lady and the final one of that generation to pass away. We are now entertaining the rather uneasy notion, that we are now “the final frontier generation”.

Our breakfast room included a bird's eye 
view of Table Mountain in Cape Town

We had no sooner arrived it seemed, than it was time to leave and fly home again via Cape Town. Well wouldn’t you know but our plane was delayed for over 24 hours in Cape Town due to a technical problem. Emirates Airlines were very good and put us up in a nice hotel. This gave us a chance to see Verena Salzwedel a long-time friend from our Scripture Union days in East London. Amazingly my brother Alan and all of his family were in Cape Town from all over the world that day. We were able to meet them on Table Mountain briefly to say a quick hello, so as it turned out our delay was not a waste of time. 

Dubai - amazing architecture

By the time we got to Dubai 36 hours late, our connecting flight had long since flown and they put us up for another overnight while Emirates Airline figured out how to get us home. We took the opportunity to do a short tour of Dubai, which was wonderful. What an intense display of unadorned wealth in a small area. Finally, the next day Emirates airlines flew us to Warsaw in Poland and then on to Toronto via Polish Airlines. Go figure. Our trip home spanned five days versus the normal 24 hours.

Dubai - even has nice beaches

Rob and Sammy taking in the Japanese gardens
in western NY State

July– We arrived home, a bit frazzled, from our long return journey with a few days to spare before we left on an RV trip we had planned with Elaine and her kids to western New York state to visit Alex’s brother Charles, and family. This was a fine opportunity to use our RV. We spent a few days exploring the Finger Lakes which was fun before we dropped Elaine and kids off with Charles while we went camping for a few days on our own. We wrapped up our time by all spending a day at Kingdom Bound a large 3-day Christian music festival, complete with fun fair rides and the whole bang shoot.

Cher, Esther, Sammy & Elaine enjoying some
of the gorgeous scenery in western NY State

Kingdom Bound - a great
day's outing for all

We managed to find a weekend in July to go RVing with a group of long-time church friends. It was great getting out, enjoying lovely weather and the company of good friends around the fire at night.

August – We have a set week each year, where our whole family goes to Fair Havens Camp for a week of Christian programs and lots of fun and games. This is the one time in the year when we all commit to being there and spending a full week together. This year we broke a record with about 22 family members joining together each evening for a meal and to chat over the day’s events. What made it special this year, was that Cher’s sister Lynne was visiting for a few weeks and was able to join us.

The full family group

Fireside chats - just the job

Fair Havens week - a chance for the cousins
to spend some quality time together

The final week of August Cher and I normally set aside to host our 5 grandchildren at Beavermead Campsite in Peterborough, in our RV, while the parents get ready for the upcoming school year. We are now getting to the stage where some of the kids sleep in a tent outside of the RV, which makes things a bit more manageable space wise. Julia joined us for part of the week which was good. 

We fitted in a half day trip to the Warsaw Caves, which involved a lot of crawling around in dark, creepy, tight spaces trying bravely to find ones’ way out without yielding to the urge to scream for help. Grandad nobly agreed to accompany the kids, forgetting that he is double their size and half as supple. Cher wisely stayed outside to take photos as the survivors emerge victorious at the end.

All accounted for - But wait, Where's Grandad?

John emerges victorious 

Finally Grandad emerges shedding a whole
new light on not having much "wiggle room"

L-R - James, Julia, Peter, John, Chris

September - Saw Julia bracing herself for a big change. Chris, Julia’s husband has been experiencing mysterious excruciating pain in his extremities for at least a year. Unfortunately, the combined wisdom and resources of our health care system have not yet managed to diagnose what the issue is. This has involved a large number of medical appointments which Julia has attended with Chris – all of this whilst trying to homeschool her three boys. Eventually Julia cried uncle and realized she couldn’t keep doing home school effectively and the decision was made to put the boys into a local Christian school in September. This has been a big adjustment for her and the boys. Most parents get to send their kids off to school one at a time. Poor Julia and Chris had to say goodbye to all three on the same day. It was tough. The boys are making the adjustment quite well, but it has been a bit of a shock for them too.

L-R - Esther, Elaine, Sammy

Elaine continues to teach Bible at People’s Christian Academy in Markham. She loves it and both Cher and Rob wish they could sit in on her classes, where her kids are getting a five-star introduction to the Bible. Samuel, at 14 is now a fully fledged teenager. He is a diligent student, loves his church youth group and was recently baptised. He is playing saxophone at school and some tricky piano pieces at home and recently played the piano for the youth led service at church. Esther at 12 is also doing well at school. She sometimes is teased because Elaine is her teacher, and  Esther seems to effortlessly get 100% on her Bible tests. She is keen on ballet and is currently branching out into doing some Polish dancing. She faithfully attends her Awana Bible club most weeks which we are pleased to see.

Esther - 2nd from back
looking graceful

Cher and I had been feeling for some time that we were losing touch with friends and family in UK. We decided to carpe the diem and do something about it. We left for UK in mid September for a three-week tour to see how many nights we could sleep in different beds before our bodies told us to stop and sleep in one place for a while. We had a lovely trip down memory lane as we visited with friends from our early Northern Rhodesian days, and our Bible College days. 

With John and Wendy Roberts
from our N. Rhodesian days

Tenby in South Wales - so much beauty everywhere

Lynne's family in Wales
L-R - Lowrie, Ian, Lynne, Caleb

We joined a large family reunion with Cher’s side of the family, near Norwich and then ended our time with a four-day hiking trip in the Cotswolds with Cher’s sister Lynne, cousin Lynda and Viv and Simon Tuley, friends who go way back.

Hiking in the Cotswold's

L-R - Rob, Lynne, Chery, Viv, Simon, Lynda

Cher's UK Cousins - sorted by size
L-R - Pat, Lynda, Jan, Lynne, Cher, Simon

October – We returned from our UK odyssey in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with all of our family. We are so blessed to have most of our direct family within a one-hour drive of us.

A few days after our return from UK we took a drive to Niagara to collect our very good SA friends, Boots and Ali Horsfall who had been visiting their daughter Jenny in Pennsylvania, USA. Our kids and their kids used to attend Scripture Union camps together in East London 35 years ago. Our pastor at that time was George Anderson and his wife Audrey. George and Audrey are now living in Burlington which is on the way to our home from Niagara. We had secretly arranged to visit them and surprise Boots and Ali. It was a lot of fun, and it was as if we had never been apart. Thank you, Lord, for good friends.

L-R - Rob, Cher, Boots, Ali, Audrey, George

We spent a few good days with Boots and Ali taking them to Elaine and Julia’s homes and generally letting them see how life is for us in Canada. We waved them goodbye, took a deep breath and wondered if we could make it to the end of the year without any more travel or major events.

November – We have been bracing for Christmas and arranging the normal surge of kids Christmas concerts, outings and so on. We’ve wrestled with our inside and outside Christmas lights. What a nice time of year. We’ve also been working at checking off some of the entertaining of friends and neighbours who have been on our good intention list for too long.

December – And here we are. The end of another year. We are grateful to the Lord for good health, friends and family. The rest is all gravy.  

Mostly at this time, we are grateful to God for His gift of Jesus, so freely given for us. Thank you, Jesus, for coming to rescue and redeem us.

“In Him was life and that light was the light of all mankind” (John 1.4)

And so good friends, we wish you all of God’s richest blessings at this special time of year. May he make His face to shine upon you in the upcoming year.

God Bless

Rob and Cheryl

December 2023