It’s almost Christmas

This is one of my favorites.

It’s my sister and me sleeping in the gameroom on Christmas Eve.  (Sometimes we slept in the loft, but this may have been before Dad built it.)

I can still remember pretending to listen for reindeer on the roof, whispering together for hours on end convinced we’d never fall asleep, and then waking up in the middle of the night, sneaking out into the den, seeing presents under the tree, and thinking, “Santa’s been here.”

It’s the feeling I was trying to capture in one of the songs I wrote in my songwriting class sophomore year at Vandy.

Time To Be A Child

Verse 1:

Stockings on the mantle

Tiptoe softly past

Two sisters lie awake

How long can one night last?

If morning ever comes

We’ll open impatiently

That mountain of presents

Under the Christmas tree

Chorus:

And at least for a little girl

There’s nothing better in the world

All I can do is look around and smile

It’s the perfect time to be a child

Verse 2:

Laughter fills the kitchen

Gingerbread fills the air

And brightly colored lights

Are twinkling everywhere

Squished together on the couch

Watching Who-ville on TV

So joyful and peaceful

Here with the family

Chorus:

And at least for a little girl

There’s nothing better in the world

All I can do is look around and smile

It’s the perfect time to be a child

Bridge:

We celebrate the Christmas season

In such a hurry

With so much worry

We lose the real reason

Jesus came for me and you

All because He loves us so

More than we could ever know

It’s time for God to be a child too

Chorus:

At least for a little girl

There’s nothing better in the world

All I can do is look around and smile

It’s the perfect time

Even for a not so little girl

There’s nothing better in the world

All I can do is look around and smile

It’s the perfect time to be a child

Christmas is the perfect time to be a child

I feel pretty

Jumping a few years to junior prom!  I had to do this one today, because prom that year was actually on April 17.  (Prom was open to juniors and seniors, but this was my junior year so I call it junior prom.)  This picture was taken on our way from dinner to the dance.

5 of us stuffed into the backseat of Kim’s Corsica on the way from Spaghetti Warehouse to the Hyatt – SQUISHY! (So says the caption in my high school scrapbook)

Kim is driving.  Her date took the picture.  Then there’s Sammi, me, and Suzy sitting in seats like semi-normal (semi-formal?) people, with Kate and Lisa lying across our laps.  Hey, it was less than a mile…

We’d bought my dress the previous summer (on sale at Dillards for like $30 I think) and I was super excited, as evident in my journal entry from July 11, 2003:

Oh hey, I got a prom dress!!!  It’s REALLY pretty – ankle length (longer, maybe), light green with light blue mesh on top, beads on the front, and detachable straps (but I am sooo not wearing it strapless).  I can’t believe I get to go to prom this year!  🙂

I wrote tons more about the actual event, but that would make this post way too long.  So I’ll just stick to other assorted comments scribbled in my scrapbook:

• yay for lotsa random adventures!
• no, I’ve never eaten pizza from the dumpster
• yay, we’re all so PRETTY!!!
• yay DANCING!
• cool people dance in circles!
• blow-dried eyes!
• yummy Spaghetti Warehouse
• rawr at evil straps – I ended up going strapless
• yay for pool at the Union afterward

Felt like a movie star with everyone taking pictures of us!

I can’t imagine my high school life without these girls.  They were with me during my “soap opera” year, whether that meant struggling through it side by side, contributing to the drama, watching in amusement, being there for support, or some combination of all the above.

Prom itself was relatively drama-free, thanks to a robotics competition the same weekend that kept the person responsible for most of the drama (at least in my case) from attending.  So I could just have fun with my girls without getting distracted by guy-I-was-totally-in-love-with-even-though-he-already-had-a-girlfriend…

…but that’s another post.  If I decide I feel brave enough to write it.

You’ll be forty and I’ll be nine

In today’s edition of actions-have-consequences: listen to your mom’s warnings even if you’re in the middle of a tantrum.  Otherwise, you might throw your glasses across the room one more time and get your birthday party taken away…

But even though I didn’t have a party for my ninth birthday, my parents still made it memorable.  They set up a scavenger hunt with clues all around the house, ultimately leading to a dresser drawer in Monica’s room where I found my American Girl of Today waiting for me!  (Yes, that is a Pocahontas birthday cake in the first picture.)

First clue

Another clue

Hidden treasure!

Happy Birthday!

We’d been fans of American Girl for years.  Monica got Samantha for her eighth birthday, and I got Molly for my sixth birthday a few months later.  As soon as I saw the new American Girl of Today in the catalogue, I had to have one.  I think later they were available with different hairstyles, but in the original release they all had long hair and bangs.  I did too.  So I just had to get one with brown hair and blue eyes (and add glasses) and she’d actually look like me!

I named her Brandy, after one of my heroes at River City Twirl & Dance where we’d been taking dance classes for four years.  (I don’t think I ever told Brandi I’d named a doll after her though.  Still not sure if she would’ve thought it was flattering or creepy, haha.)

She came with six blank books, which I recently rescued from our library.  The inside cover of Meet Brandy: A Family Story (Book 1) says, “Finished on Jan. 17, 1996,” and the inside cover of Brandy Learns a Lesson: A School Story (Book 2) says, “Finished on October 23, 1996.”  Rereading them now is highly entertaining.  Most of the plot details came directly from my own life, and then I gave her things I thought would be cool to have.  Like a bigger family, with an older sister AND older brother, plus younger twin sisters.  And a kitten named Snowball.  And a TREEHOUSE!

I wrote plot outlines for Happy Birthday, Brandy: A Birthday Story (Book 4) and Brandy Saves the Day: A Summer Story (Book 5), and I know I had a draft for Book 4 at least on an ancient computer.  (I’m really hoping that’s one of the computers still hiding in the pile of stuff in the gameroom, and that it’s possible to pull files from it!)  I don’t think I ever started on Brandy’s Surprise: A Holiday Story (Book 3) or Changes for Brandy: A Winter Story (Book 6).  But what better time to finish the series than now?  It’s only twenty years later…

Life was easier then

I’m turning 30 this year *gasp* so I’d like to find some extra special way to celebrate.  I’ve recently been scanning boxes of old photos, which gave me an idea: one blog post per week in the 30 weeks leading up to my birthday, each post based on a picture (or series of pictures) of me.

Since it’s Easter, this seemed like a good one to start with.

As best I can figure, I’m not quite two-and-a-half here.  And I totally just noticed the “Jesus is alive” button on my shirt and that makes me super happy.  You can also see the end of the slide on the epic playscape that Dad built.

We had an Easter egg hunt at our house every year since I can remember until I graduated from high school.  And we never had to cancel because of the weather.  There were a few years it was pretty close, but we always got to hunt eggs outside in the backyard.  My sister and I would each invite a friend and their family.  The kids would all be banished to the front yard or somewhere in the house where we couldn’t see out the back windows, while the parents hid the eggs in the backyard.  Then we’d get our hunt instructions (everyone gets the same number of eggs, one big egg each because they had special prizes inside, etc.) and be released!  Sometimes the parents would give us “hints” about where to look, but I mostly remember them laughing when they knew how close we were to an egg…

After we’d found the eggs (or decided we just weren’t going to find the last few stragglers), we gathered at the deck table to open them and discover our treasures: Easter stickers and stencils, plastic rings, bubblegum, candy (but never chocolate in case we didn’t find everything), fun hair accessories, tiny little bunny erasers!  In later years, there were also little slips of paper in some of the eggs with a “1” or “2” or “3” on them for bigger prizes that didn’t fit in the eggs themselves.  Whoever had the most points got to choose first.  Then the kids would all play in the backyard while the parents prepared dinner – backyard cookout of hamburgers and hotdogs!  With a cross-shaped Easter cake for dessert!  (Yes, Mom actually has a cross-shaped cake pan.)

This year, Mom decided she was tired of not doing anything special for Easter (besides church, of course) so we brought back the cookout portion of the tradition for the first time since I graduated from high school 11 years ago.  I spend a lot of time at the house still, but I couldn’t actually remember the last time I went outside in the backyard.  So even just being out there, all sorts of memories came flooding back.  Add in the beautiful weather and a few of my best theatre friends, and I felt super happy and contented.  Like being a kid again.  When things were simple.