vintage photos

Mom’s favorite class ever

February 1, 2013 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Mrs. Daquila (Mom) poses with her kindergarten class of 1972-73 in our Willoughby basement.

I can’t decide who was more fortunate that year—the teacher or the students. In the fall of 1972 Mom’s friends, who had children the same age as Phil and me, devised a brilliant plan: Instead of sending their children to various kindergarten programs around town, they proposed sending them all to our house! Mom was a certified teacher, and her friends knew that she would be wonderful for their children. I don’t know how much cajoling it took to get Mom (and Dad’s) agreement to this plan, but convince them they did!

I have some pretty great memories of little moments from that year, like saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “Begin the day with happiness” together each morning. Or getting to sing a solo of “Away in a manger” for our Christmas program (yes, the parents came to our basement for the show). I also remember the day I spilled my drink during snack time and having to skip my snack the next day (I certainly give Mom a ribbing about that rule!).

But can you even imagine what a joy that year was for my mom? First, there’s the honor of being asked by your friends to teach their beloved children. And what mother who’s also a teacher wouldn’t want the chance to keep her own children home for one more school year, while at the same time providing them with a good curriculum surrounded by their friends? If we talked about teaching like the movies talk about gangsters, Mom would have pulled off the biggest heist in history!

Product/technique notes:
I am so happy to have had the chance to try the chalkboard look for the title treatment on this layout, and I’ll do a separate post to describe the technique I used. All the patterned papers came from BasicGrey’s Clippings collection. I used the sketch below from Creative Scrappers and am entering it in their challenge.

The gift of song

December 20, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

This layout celebrates one of our Daquila-family Christmas traditions.

Have you ever read about the importance of family rituals to children’s development of identity and feelings of belonging? When I do it impresses upon me, yet again, what a wonderful job my parents did in providing Phil and me with such a stable, loving, tradition-filled environment. Our family’s rituals were many, but it will come as no surprise that my favorites revolved around Christmas.

Over the years we developed many Christmas traditions, but today’s layout celebrates the way we handled Christmas music. Although we had quite a few Christmas albums that we played over and over throughout the season, we had one particular favorite. It was the Anita Kerr Singers’ “Spend this holiday with me.” There was just something different about it that we all loved. In fact, we all knew every note of that record and sang along faithfully.

Our ritual became making sure that this was the first album we played at the beginning of each Christmas season. It HAD to be played before any of the others could be cued up on our huge stereo. Playing this album for the first of many times in the season was our auditory signal that it was time for Christmas.

And now this tradition has made its way into our celebration of Christmas. That sounds like a testament to a good album and a great tradition!

Product/technique notes:
I used papers from Simple Stories “Handmade Holiday” and My Mind’s Eye “Festive” collections to complete this layout.

Believe

December 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Isn’t this a sweet photo of my husband’s sisters on Christmas morning? I date this photo at circa 1980 because Thyia, the baby of the family, was born in 1976, and she looks to be about 3 or 4 years old in this shot, don’t you think?

I really love Thyia’s little Dorothy Hamill haircut and Tyna’s filmy pink nightie, which is why I opted to use papers from the Echo Park “Holly Jolly” collection. It’s colors and images go perfectly with the bright, happy, girly look I was going for on this page.

I’m entering this layout into color story challenge #161 at the Play Date Cafe:

Counting blessings & candles

November 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

I was born on Thanksgiving Day. If I was given my choice of another birth date, out of all 365 days of the year, I couldn’t come up with a better one.

One of the biggest reasons for my love of my turkey birthday is that it always meant getting together with family. Now, because Thanksgiving is a little bit of a moving target on the calendar, my birthday only actually falls on T-day every several years. My 17th birthday in 1983 was one of those years.

I have just a few photos from that Thanksgiving celebration at my Aunt Doo Doo and Uncle Ron’s house, but they’re enough to show that it was my birthday as well. In these shots with me are my cousins Rob, Colleen and Mike as well as my bro, Phil.

After everyone was stuffed with Thanksgiving fare and could barely sit comfortably or stay awake, Mom would pull out a carefully hidden cake so everyone could sing to me. But I noticed that people usually went for the pumpkin pies over my cake, and let’s face it, who wouldn’t?

Product/technique notes:
All the patterned papers came from My Mind’s Eye’s Indie Chic collection (the Saffron color scheme), which I thought worked so well for these photos and the theme of my page. I’m entering this into the MME November challenge, which is to demonstrate gratitude on your project.

So grateful for you

November 16, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Unfortunately, this is the only photo I have from Thanksgiving 1990.

Sometimes you have only one photo from a whole day of celebration. And sometimes that’s actually all you need to be able to tell the most important story of the day.

When Phil and I were growing up, our family always made the two-hour drive to Pennsylvania to spend Thanksgiving with the extended family from my Dad’s half of the union. Those were good times: at least four generations of family all piled into Aunt Doo Doo and Uncle Ron’s house to catch up with one another and eat obscene amounts of delicious food. But then cousins started getting married and having their own children, and the families that made up that big group started breaking off to celebrate Thanksgiving in smaller units.

So in 1990 our family stayed home and had a cozy turkey day on our own. We no doubt started the day by going to Mass and then came home to spend hours cooking “the fixins.” Here, everything is ready to go—Dad even carved the turkey before this photo was snapped—and we’re about to dig into the feast. Seeing as the importance of this day is to recognize what’s most dear to you and count them as blessings, I think this one photo summed up the day perfectly!

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