Baby, Pets, Antiquing and Uncle Ole's Purple Heart

The newest Elgin family member is Aidan...my cousin, Lisa's grandson. Some of the Elgin pets are featured here....Scrappy with Paul, Mom W with Snickers (longest eyelashes ever!!), and Pumpkin, the cat.

One of the pictures we had to take in Elgin was little Cubby in a Cubs hat that Aunt Marlene's cement goose was wearing. (Cement geese are decorator items that are fully-sized geese statues and there are all kinds of outfits that can be purchased for them, like seasonal outfits, or specialty outfits....such as a little Chicago Cubs suit.) Aunt Marlene's goose was wearing a complete Cubs outfit, but we thought it was pushing things just to get the hat on Cubby....so we waited until he was very, very tired. (Cubby, if you haven't already guessed, was named after the Chicago Cubs. Dad and many of my Elgin family are big Cub fans, even though the Cubs haven't had the best of luck in the last 100+ years where the World Series is concerned.)

When we were in Elgin we had some great times out and about with Aunt Audrey and Angela (my cousin). We had lunch and browsed for antiques in a couple of different towns in Illinois as well as a town in Wisconsin. One of our lunches was in Rockford, Il and the restaurant had some interesting antique decorations, including the Speakeasy Bar that came from a Chicago hotel that was owned by Bugsy Moran. And, of course, Mom was drawn to some of the hats that were in one of the stores...she especially liked the gold hat that had a matching purse. A very flashy gold color for sure, too bad we couldn't find little white gloves to wear along with them.

Dad wanted some pictures that told of Uncle Ole's military career. He was awarded the purple heart after being wounded in action in Korea. Angela put together a collage of various military souvenirs (including the purple heart). My cousin Brian's wife, Robin, put together a memory book as a surprise for Uncle Ole a few years ago. Uncle Ole's Mom had saved so many things from when her son was in the service, including letters that her son sent her from overseas, the telegram that told of his being wounded in action and the letter advising of his purple heart recommendation. Robin did a great job on the book and it was fun to look at. What a great surprise for my uncle and how wonderful that his Mom saved all of those things for him. I had never seen a purple heart before...interesting!