SPC: With Someone, Week 2 - Four Generations

The September theme for the Self-Portrait Challenge is "With Someone" and the instructions are to "...include someone else in your self portrait. Someone meaningful to your life or to the moment or to a specific event that you wish to document." This is one month I wish had more Tuesdays as I'm having a terrible time choosing who to feature! There are so many people who are special in my life and I don't want to leave any of them out. Maybe I'll do some bonus "self-portraits with..." on other days besides Tuesday, just for fun. But anyway, for this week I want to share a photo of me as a baby with my mom, Mom's mother, and Grandma's parents - four generations of family on one sofa. My parents were young when they married (both of them were 20 years old) and I'm an oldest child, so I was lucky enough to have all four of my grandparents still around when I was growing up and even five out of eight of my great-grandparents were still alive when I was born, although they all died when I was still quite young. I have vague memories of three of them, especially my great-grandma Elliot seen in the far left of this photo. One of the reasons I love this picture is the story my mom told me about my great-grandpa's reaction to it. He'd show it to people and tell them, "This is my daughter, and this is my granddaughter, and this is my great-granddaughter and she's the grandest of them all." I wish I remembered him more. Everyone should be "the grandest of them all" to someone. "Four Generations: MaryLindy, Ace, Erna, Anita and Deb" (clickable if you want to see it larger in a new window) And here's a bonus photo just because it's another of my favorites from my childhood. This is a photo of me (on the right, in the blue dress) and my cousin Michael (on the left, in the red pants) sitting on my Grandpa M's lap. (Grandpa M was Mom's dad.) Michael and I are almost the same age so whenever we got to see each other we were nearly always either best of friends or worst of enemies. I'll give you one guess about the state of things in this photo. From the way my grandpa is eyeing me like he has a loaded grenade on his lap, I'm guessing I got the blame for instigating whatever had just happened, but I'm sure that can't be right. Surely that sweet little girl in the blue dress could do no wrong. Ahem. "BabyWars" (I'm counting these photos as my DATs for today, since they were both damaged and I used Photoshop to restore them.)