Feeding Baby

Feeding Time 1948

Things got better the way they sometimes do. Here I am grinning ear to ear around Christmastime 1948 while my mother tries to find and pick up something I've thrown on the floor.  It was not the first nor will it be the last time I threw something on the floor while sitting in my high chair.

I'm not sure I remember this particular high chair -- although it seems sort of familiar. The one I remember clearly was painted white and had a flower decal on the seat back. This one could be it, if my mother packed it into the trunk of the Packard Clipper with her various house dresses and Cuban heel shoes, and then painted it, but somehow I doubt she did that. More likely she used some of the money she got from my father in the divorce to buy a new high chair along with various other furnishings when we got to California. I know that some of her friends gave her furniture and other household items when we got settled in.

This picture was taken in the kitchen of my father's house in Iowa. I remember that room as being the largest in the house. It was in a one story addition on the back of the house, an addition that was almost as wide as the house and about 12 feet deep, not counting the screen porch.

This is a Google street view picture of the backside of the house taken in 2013. The kitchen is the part with the french doors beyond the triple window.

The room wasn't that wide when I was a tot. Beyond the french door -- which was a window back in the day -- there was a screen porch that was later glassed in and here you see it is completely enclosed.

They cleaned me up after feeding me, and here I sit on my father's lap after a good scrubbing.

Some of the things on the  bookshelf are intriguing. The photo I believe is of my (half) brother Terry whose mother died giving birth to him in the hot summer of 1935. If that's who it is, it is the only picture of him I've ever seen.

There is a laughing Buddha figure on the same shelf and a Chinese enamel vase or perfume bottle. My mother took the Buddha and vase when we left Iowa in 1949 and they were on a different bookshelf in our various houses for many years. I still have the bookshelf, but not that laughing Buddha. I have another, much larger one that sits on a Chinese style knick-knack shelf along with a seated Buddha and various other things of that sort. I also have a similar Chinese vase. These are not things I consciously acquired. They "just happened."

I have some of the books from my father's house, including some that are in the shelf seen above.

And then it was time to take a spin in the runabout stroller.

Let's go strolling 

I remember that particular stroller, and it may have come with us to California on that long drive in the Packard on Route 66 the next year. How much stuff could fit in that car anyway?

Things seemed to be working out, but no.

We'll get to that another time.

-- To be continued