Happy Birthday Son

So, we married and moved into our little cement block house in town. Hubby made $60.00 a week and we somehow managed to stretch it just about as well as we do now.  Gas was $0.39 a gallon and we bought groceries every week for $10.00 to $20.00. 

We had naugahyde vinyl furniture and fiberglass curtains. FYI - do not wash fiberglass curtains with anything you wear. We climbed up in the loft of Dewey Childers' sale barn to find a used coppertone cookstove to buy. I think we bought our second-hand coppertone refrigerator from the furniture store Glen Yarbrough had on West Main Street. It was not frost free and was a chore to defrost. We cleaned them up and they worked fine. We heated with an open flame gas heater and used a water cooler in the summer. We survived.

Two days after our first wedding anniversary, our son was born. Grandma said she was afraid I would have a difficult delivery because I was such a little girl. That was a Grandma talking. I was little when I was little but not so much after I was grown. Anyway, Greg weighed less than six pounds when he was born.

Don't you just love these pictures where your 6 weeks
old baby is about to topple over.

We washed Birdseye baby diapers in the Whirlpool washing machine we had bought on credit from Mr. Hammonds and hung them out on a clothesline in the back yard. In the winter they freeze dried on the clothesline.

Baby food was 10 cents a jar in the early seventies. Blueberry Buckle tasted pretty good. We fed Greg baby cereal at bedtime every night and I think he still has a bedtime bowl of cereal from time to time. I rocked him to sleep until he was two years old. His sister would not go to sleep unless she was alone in her own bed. This is one of my favorite pictures of him eating his daily breakfast of oats and raisins. I loved those cute little flannel pajamas.

Not sure why we ate oatmeal from a plate.

Right before hubby left for basic training. Pretty solemn, huh? Note the
fiberglass curtains and vinyl furniture. 

This was taken at Granny's when he got back from basic. I bought the
red dress from Florence and Pauline's dress shop downtown. Notice
Greg's  cloth diapers.

At Granny June's playing with his eight months older cousin, Billy.

My daddy loved to make him scowl.

Helping his daddy dig the septic lateral lines - by hand.

We moved to our little house in Knoxville right before Greg's second birthday. We had built it ourselves with a lot of help from Mr. Hammonds at the hardware store downtown. He seemed to know how to do just about everything, as well as what and how much supplies we would need. No extra charge for the advise. We paid a lot of it out too.

At Aunt Lizzy's egg house. I made the little corduroy coat and my
Aunt Dorcas knitted his cap. He is wearing leather work boots his
Daddy bought at the commissary at Fort Leonard Wood.

Greg with my Uncle Sam.
We love each other's kids.

Taking his little dog for a ride in his Radio Flyer wagon.

Someone help me here. This was taken at Easter time in Clarksville but I am not sure where. That has to be the Presbyterian Church but what is the brick building in front of it?

This is in the front yard at Knoxville when we first planted a mimosa tree. It got really big and beautiful but played havoc with Greg's allergies. A nest of seed ticks fell out of it onto Laura when she was little. It looked like dust all over her white shirt...crawling dust.

This is the kindergarten picture where I sent a little comb with him to use before the picture was taken. He did.

I have another school picture of him wearing a little blue shirt with a picture of a dog and some cute little saying on it. I promised I would never post it though.

Now you all get the picture. He was a sweet little kid who never gave us any trouble. Well, there was that one little off-campus fifth grade Knoxville School incident that we are saving for when we need to get one of his girls out of trouble.

Happy Birthday son. Your dad and I love you.