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SwankiVY's Babyhood!
Be sure and click links and thumbnails while reading for the multimedia swankivy experience! Or see them all in one place here:
Click Here For Babyhood Extras: Photos: 30; Keepsakes: 10
On Tuesday, January 17, 1978, at about 6:30 in the morning, I was born.
My parents, Marcia and Marlon, had been married on June 25 the year before. It was a Jewish wedding as per my father's family's traditions; my mother came from a Catholic family, but converted to Judaism, which meant our family's children would be Jewish. I was the first child born to anyone in both families, so I turned mothers and fathers into grandmas and grandpas, brothers and sisters into aunts and uncles, and two crazy kids into Mom and Dad.
I was born in a hospital in Summit, New Jersey, and I weighed in at a whopping 5 pounds, 12 ounces (haha--yes, I've always been small). My mom's labor was pretty typical and there weren't any complications that I know of. I had a little bit of blonde hair at birth, and I had blue eyes and light skin. I didn't fit in normal newborn clothes; my parents had to put me in doll clothes. My grandmother on my dad's side, a Capricorn, was pleased to have a granddaughter who was the same sign, and she had my astrological chart done. (I don't know much about that sort of thing, but some people might find it interesting.) Obviously there's not much to tell you about my life in those first few months, because like any ordinary baby my job was to learn things, make a mess, and get bigger. I did those things well, and my parents took very good care of me.
My first big milestone was rolling over at four months. I started sitting up on my own about a month after that, and soon my mother was pregnant with my little sister so I stopped breastfeeding at six months. It became apparent early on that I was a very verbally advanced child, because my intellectual milestones came early. My mother says I babbled myself to sleep often at seven months, and I used single words at eight months, started combining words when I was a year old. (I of course had my own baby code, though, and called apricots "googots" and Laughing Cow Cheese "cowchee." I thought "cheese" was the plural of "chee.") On my first year checkup, I weighed about 18 pounds and had grown to about 30 inches.
On May 9, 1979, my sister Patricia was born and I became a big sister. (We called her Pattie until she was in fifth grade and wanted to change it.) I learned to walk at fifteen months or so, which was a good thing since my parents had a baby to carry around.
I could say my ABCs by eighteen months and started reading little words. I got potty-trained around the same time, and I loved when parents and relatives read to me. Even at a very young age I loved music and books, and the combination of my long attention span and my very good memory (plus tons of attention, of course!) made it possible for me to start actually reading books--even books I hadn't seen before--starting right around my second birthday.
During this time we still lived in New Jersey, and both my parents had to work to take care of my sister and me. My dad was working a collections job at a bank (which he was told to cut his hair for--yup, hippie parents!), and when he would get home my mom would go to work at her waitressing job. My mom also had a sort of side business going with her macrame, and she made huge hanging tables or art or plant holders out of the coarse string.
Our little family picked up and moved to North Carolina sometime in 1980, when I was still a toddler. They didn't like the NJ neighborhood we were living in and had had a good experience camping when we'd gone to NC on vacation, so we went there with little to go on and my dad picked up another bank job while my mom started managing the apartment complex we lived in. I remained a relatively happy and healthy kid as I grew past toddlerhood and started beginning to communicate more extensively with the world around me. I think that's a good place to end the story of my babyhood and let you click the next link if you want to see what my early childhood was like!
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