Weekend Re-Recap

My dad reports that they got Kathy all settled in and she seemed happy as a lark. I hope that she will stay that way. I think she will.

Anyway, the past couple of days at work have been hectic and I wasn't able to blog about everything yesterday, so here's more weekend news.

As I was getting ready to leave my parents' house on Sunday, my mom told me to go through a couple of boxes before I left and see if there was anything I wanted. My sister is having a garage sale and I think they're going to clean out some stuff and give it to her for her garage sale.

So I started going through these boxes and found old birthday cards from the day I was born all the way through some I got in college. What is one supposed to do with cards from her first birthday? I mean, I kind of feel an obligation to keep something that's been around for 29 years. Doesn't that make them antiques?

I also came across my "baby book" and another memory book that my sister had made me.

I'll get to the baby book later.

My sister started working on my memory book when I was way little (she's 15 years older than me)and it has all of my report cards from preschool up through high school and all of my school/class pictures, and a few workbook pages that I got 100's on, special achievements, etc. in it. When I was in 7th grade, my sister moved away and she gave me the book. Up until then, I didn't know it existed. She said she had planned on giving it to me for my 18th birthday, but she wouldn't be able to keep up with it after she moved away and she knew my mother wouldn't keep up with it. So she gave it to me to manage. My idea of managing it was to just stuff important papers in the box with it and forget about it.

It was fun to look at pictures of my preschool and kindergarten classes. I have very little memory of my life at that age and I had forgotten who my classmates were. It turns out that I'm good friends with at least one of my classmates all these years later.

Now for my baby book.

The book is actually called "My Whole Life" or something like that. It has space to put everything from birth stats to my grandchildren's names. Interesting concept, right? I GUESS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN IF SOMEONE WOULD HAVE TAKEN THE TIME TO RECORD MY INFO IN IT! Here are a couple of examples of the information that is included:

About the baby's birth, the mother said:

"She was born on her due date"

The father said:

"Well good."

About baby's first birthday:

"She got lots of nice gifts."

About baby's second birthday:

"She had a Big Bird cake."

About baby's third birthday:

"She had a Miss Piggy cake."

About baby's fourth birthday:

"She had a Disney character cake."

Apparently my life stopped at age 4 because there is no further maternal mention of me in the book. I told my mom that if anyone picked up the book and looked at it, they would think I died as a child.

It's SO SAD, as a matter of fact, that much of the handwriting in the book isn't my mom or dad's. Do you know who filled out most of the book? ME! My juvenile handwriting is all over the place. Like in the part where it asks about my 5th grade teacher and my big, messy handwriting says, "Mrs. Hill. She's very mean!"

So it was no surprise that I ended up with the responsibility of picking through my childhood relics and figuring out what part of my history was worth preserving.

I left my leg cast from when I had a broken leg at age two at my mom and dad's, along with a melamine plate that I decorated with a drawing of a house (it looks more like a deformed foot) and a tree in preschool. I kind of hope they don't throw away some of the stuff I left behind.