Coins, Skateboard, Dragons and Hockey

Two weeks ago, Danica had a sleepover, so it was JJ's turn on Saturday. I don't know if the kids do this to humour the old folk or because they actually like spending time with us. Whatever the reason, I'll accept it.

He recently got interested in sorting pennies, and then Sue remembered that we had some old coins from my mother, so she had them ready for him as his first activity on this sleepover.

The oldest coin that he found was a half penny from Hibernia, 1822. I found out that Hibernia was an old name for Ireland, and I had thought it would be Scotland. A little bit of Googling indicated that this coin might change hands for $20 - $50 today, depending on its condition. Not that one would want to sell it, but it was interesting to discover this information.

There is some Irish ancestry on both sides of my maternal line although it seems to go back a few generations, so I guess that's how the coin got into the family.

Sidetracking: My maternal grandmother was born in Canada, but she came at least partly from Irish immigrants. I am not sure if her parents were first or second generation Canadians though as I haven't traced that far back. My maternal grandfather came to Canada from England, but his family had moved from Ireland to England at some point. If I recall, without looking it up again now, he had been born in England but his father emigrated from Ireland.

Although it had rained earlier it cleared sufficiently to take the boy out to try out his new skateboard.

Then we walked the adjacent tail for a while. JJ wanted to find a tree to climb, but low branches seemed to be unavailable. There were stones to skip, however.

His sleepover present was a book, Dragonology, that he had seen when his cousin visited, and he fell in love with it. It was hard to get, but it arrived from the UK just before his sleepover after I had given up hope, thinking it had been lost in transit after more than a month of waiting.

We read the first few pages at bedtime.

Sunday morning and his first hockey game of the year. As so many things in Canada wind down after Thanksgiving, there is always hockey. 😄

He's the one with the puck in this photo, and he got off a good shot. What shocked me was seeing this relatively tall kid out there; I barely recognized him at first. It took me awhile to get used to his new size, for last year as a first year player in Novice, it just didn't look like this. Now, in his second year, he is one of the bigger boys.

That afternoon, Sunday, we had our Thanksgiving feast although officially, TG is always on a Monday. As I write this on Monday, I'm not sure what we are going to do today, if anything. The leaves are finally showing some colour and we would like to take them in, and there is a studio tour nearby which would be nice to visit, but it's gray now and there is rain in the forecast, so we may be housebound.