challenger school

i went to challenger preschool.
my boyfriend/husband's name was brock and we would sit next to each other on the circle rug.
everyday for art everyone would copy what the teacher drew with a black crayon on white paper (ciricle, now a square next to it, now a line), and then we could paint it with watercolors.
once we drew the bill and hillary clinton at the inaugural ball.

i had two teachers, one with brown hair and one with blonde hair. we learned the alphabet and how to read. they gave us a book to take home called "nat bug", my dad loved nat bug. and we still talk about it today.
there was another book that we got, i only remember one line from it though "kit was a hep cat"
it was about a cat, but what does hep mean? is it just a made up three letter word that they put there because we wouldn't be able to read "happy". i always thought that when i grew up i would figure this out.

orem, people still working together

we moved to orem
into a house that my mom still complains about.
i didn't mind though. we lived in a cul-de-sac and there were a lot of kids in our neighborhood.
the cleggs and the fairbanks lived next door to us. they both had trampolines (or "tramps", can i jump on the tramp? yes.)
life was good. the only downside was having to go to bed at 7, while all the other kids played kick-the-can and hide-and-go-seek and other hyphenated games outside our windows.
i can remember nearly everything about living there, thats probably not really true but it is close. its hard to put everything in chronological order however so random stories interspersed with cold hard facts (1st grade, 2nd grade) will have to do.

utah ,people, working together

we moved to utah
i was probably around 4
i don't remember the move, the drive or anything.
my parents didn't want to move to utah (who does?) but we still did. to provo even!
and lived in a little apartment on 9th east, right past center street.
it was on the bottom floor of the south corner. and it is still there, i have rode past it on my bike many times. and my bus passes it every day.
i have a few memories of that apartment that we lived in before we bought a house in orem.
probably the best one is when we found a kitten. and took care of it until the owners came and got it.
also the little playground by the apartments had two black swings and one blue swing. the blue swing was the best one and we would always race the neighbor kids to get it (the swings are all broken now, but one of the broken swings is blue!)
there was also a "pigloo" there.
once in that apartment i opened up all the drawers in my dresser and it fell over, kind of on top of me.
once i got a hold of the scissors and cut holes in my bedspread, puppy doll, and many other things around my room.
i also remember hitting my cousin keith while he was visiting us from washington.

i have always been a really good kid.

spanish trail

my preschool was called spanish trail. i only went a few times a week, but other kids got to go more, and it seemed like exciting things always happened when i wasn't there. things like nap time, and petting zoos. my teacher was named ms. everheart i think, because we used to draw he pictures of hearts all the time. 

riding in the car to preschool i couldn't see out the window, but i could straighten out my legs all the way so they could touch the air conditioning vents. 

once i got to stay for nap time but i kept getting up and a scary woman kept getting mad at me. 

my class picture is probably the best preschool class picture ever, one girl looks like mini bus driver, one boy looks like he is running for mayor. 

vitamins

once i chewed up my flintsone (or sesame street) vitamin and the spit on the kitchen floor. 

it was pretty colored spit. 

but my mom got mad at me. 

kids

i don't remember too many friends from arizona and i definitley do not remember their names. but i remember a few random playdates.

i remember this brother and sister who would come over sometimes and we would go to their house sometimes. they lived near a dry creek bed ( like everyone else in arizona) and once we made christmas ornaments there by gluing an ornament to a colorful ice cream cone. 

they always had the croup, or talked about having it, and i didn't know what it was. 

there  were some other kids that my mom babysat that said they could have two bowls of sugar cereal for breakfast!i always imagined their breakfast table looking like those cereal commercials, with orange juice and milk and bananas and cookie crisp.

once i had a dream about me and the girl fighting over who got to eat some frozen spinach for lunch. 

ABC

my mom made me an alphabet book out of construction paper and pictures from magazines. 

it was all laminated and bound by these big rings. 

i loved it

my favorit picture was on the Y page. it was some yams in a bowl. i would always look at them and wonder if i had eaten something like that before. and if i ever would again. they looked good. 

IBM

my dad worked for IBM and sometimes when we would be waiting to pick him up we would break small rocks open with big rocks, in the parking lot. 

also i think there was a playground there with an igloo, that my dad called a pigloo.

footie pajamas

my mom always cut the feet off of our footie pajams

i am not sure why  

but i remember looking into one once and being scared to put my foot in because it looked gross. 

living room, bedroom, kitchen

we used to do exercises with my dad every night. we would crab walk across the living room, then worm crawl, then do sit ups and push ups and things like that. 

we had a really big living room i think. one side was all these glass windows and a sliding door. and the other side (next to the front door) had a "stage" it used to be a big planter box ( in the living room... classy) that the lady before us had fake trees in and was also used as a built in cat litter box... my mom covered it and used it as storage. i even remember when she painted it white, i asked if i could help and went and got my very small paintbrush and it made a gray mark on the stage because it wasn't very clean. 

we used to dance on the stage or make it into a covered wagon, using the clothes drying rack, and play pioneers. 

i remember my bedroom very differently than it actually was, according to my mom. 

i remember it as scary. 

it had a picture of a "scary prince"  the room was dark wood and always seemed dark to me, my mom's little ladybug stool was in there, which wasn't scary, but sitting on top of it was a scary doll with curly hair and a cigar. i guess it was a groucho marx. that doll is still in my parent's basement and it is still scary, just ask my sisters, or jon, or anyone. 

once my mom gave me a big box of makeup to play with in my room, by myself. i think it ended up being messy but i don't remember that. all i remember is wondering where that box went and looking for it for a long time afterwards.

our kitchen had doors that swung both ways. i ate pizza in there for the first time. my mom told me that the sauce was ketchup. 

mexico

one day, while we were living in arizona, we went to mexico. 

i brought along an extra hair bow ( yellow with white polka dots) just in case we had to stay the night. 

i don't remember much about mexico except for a little store that we went in, and some tissue paper flowers that i wanted.

i had white blonde hair when i was a baby.

when i was younger my parents had taken me to mexico and a little mexican girl had come up to me and said "rubia rubia!" and kissed me and hugged me. 

so i guess my popularity with people from latin american countries started at a young age. 

:)

mr and mrs powers

mr and mrs powers lived next door. i think they were irish but maybe their cookie jar was just a leprechaun. 

they had a cookie jar and ever day we would run over to their house to visit and to eat a cookie. 

i remember they had green astroturf stuff on their front porch. 

and i liked them just as much as our grandparents but we never got to stay at their house as long. 

when we ran over to their house, across the rocky front yard, it was my job to always hold sam's hand because they had a cactus in the middle of their yard and sam would run into it without fail unless someone was holding his hand. 

animal encounters in arizona

coco our dog lived in the backyard obviously.

and all around our yard we had a tall cinderblock wall. behind it was a dry creek bed. 

there were lots of lizards in arizona and we would catch them sometimes, sam was braver than me and would actually catch them, sometimes their tails would fall off, which is a funny thing about lizards. 

a lady that we knew ( i don't remember her last name but i think her and her husband lived in a house with a big shaggy white dog) brought us a lizard she had caught in her office, in a styrofoam cup. 

once coco caught a little robin, he chased after it and cornered it and tried to eat it. 

we saved it and let it stay in our shed on a pillow ( one of my pillows that had a green edging and little green bears on it i think) 

when it was well my mom took it out to the backyard and we sat down and held it. 

it stayed on my mom's finger for a little while before it flew away.

once i was just walking down the hall, minding my own business when my mom ran up to me screaming "stay right there stay right there!!!!!!" so i stayed. i heard her scream at sam to do the same. i don't think i was scared, i just thought something was horribly wrong like a stranger was coming into our house (strangers are bad). 

it turned out that it was a giant bug, either a giant cockroach or another massive beetle. 

my mom killed it with bug spray. 

and then it sat on our porch for a long time, probably waiting for my dad to come home and clean it up. 

my mom told the story of it forever afterwards i remember, at church and everywhere. 

she always said "and i sprayed it! and i sprayed! and it finally died"

once sam ate a dead cockroach off the ground. 

i don't remember that actually, but i have heard the story. 

sam, coco, and the wizard of oz

i mentioned sam

sam is my brother who is two years younger than me. i don't really remember when he was born, i do remember getting a toy doctor kit when he was born though. 

but after that i remember a lot about him because he was my best friend and companion growing up. 

i always thought sam was the favorite child because he was better at eating than me. he would eat anything, including vegetables and stroganoff, i wouldn't eat anything that was red or green or chunky or anything. 

once i threw up stroganoff into my mom's hands

( i was wearing my white turtle neck with red green and blue hearts on it, i don't think we lived in our house then)

sam also really liked grapefruit juice and old people, i probably liked old people too, just not as much as sam. 

we would play outside all the time with our little dog coco (he took forever to name i remember because my dad thought chocolate was a dumb name and that is what we wanted to call him, this would be repeated ten years later when we wanted to name our cats moon and shadow) 

coco was a chihuahua/terrier mix and was small and yappy and could jump high and eat bubbles. we would drag him around the yard by his teeth holding on to a blanket and we would climb in his doghouse to hide ( i always went in first cause i didn't want coco to get me) 

sam and i would also act out the wizard of oz. i would be dorothy, glinda, the scarecrow, the munchkins, and every other role in the show. sam would be toto and would follow me around on all fours the whole time. 

he was a very dedicated performer

philosophizing

i lived in arizona from when i was 8 months old to about 4 i think. so my memories are just glimpses of time, not very chronological or even full stories sometimes.

i remember living in our house across from the junior high, at night sometimes me and sam would go over to the junior high playground (basketball courts/blacktop) with our dad and he would trace our outlines on the ground with these white rocks and then we would color them in. i think some girls from our ward went to that school and sometimes they would see the outlines we drew at school the next day.

our house was a rambler i believe with a big backyard with an orange and a grapefruit tree and a sandbox and a big awning over the porch. i could climb up the poles that held the awning up and i remember doing it for people more than once, it was my party trick.

the main thing i remember from this time in my life was thinking how strange it was to be alive. i think i was more conscious of being alive than i am now, i would think about how the world was so strange and how do i know if it is real, how did i know we were really alive, and it was so weird that i was a person, contained in a little body, how did i know there were really other people and things outside myself?
i didn't think about it all the time but it would come to me in waves of realization.
this doesn't happen to me much anymore. i am relatively sure i am alive, and i also have a firm base of beliefs assuring me that this is all real. but i still have sudden bursts of consciousness regarding my life, how "grown-up" i am, and stuff like that.
i know lots of people who still feel the way i did. who question, or who can't fathom life. and i can't really judge i guess, i was just on a faster track than them.

i got all my philosophizing done at the age of 3.

rocking chair

my earliest memory is being on the porch in my diaper while my dad was staining a new rocking chair for my mom. i remember knowing it was for my mom, it was a present. this was in arizona and i was a little over one years old i think. in that apartment i was an only child. i remember my pink asian-ish pajamas. and sitting in the sink. and brushing my teeth. i do not remember my room. but i kind of remember the pool outside (but that might be from pictures)