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SwankiVY's Early Childhood!
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 Early Childhood Extras: Photos: 35; Drawings: 9; Writing: 2; Sound Clips: 2; Videos: 1; Keepsakes: 2
So our family of four moved into little apartment 8-B in Kernersville, North Carolina. It was around that time that my sister got old enough to be a playmate--she was only a year younger, so we really were raised almost like we were twins--and we were always playing together. In the early days of course it was repetitive games like hiding in a box and popping out to surprise Daddy, or singing the same songs over and over.
We also enjoyed make-believe games, such as playing house and pretending I was the mommy and she was the daddy. (As Pattie got older she did a lot of tomboy-ish things; in all our games from young childhood, if there was a guy role she took it.) We'd also invent scenarios and play them out, like I was drowning and she had to save me. I do remember that when we were very young it was hard not to make the games too complicated, because my sister was a year younger and she didn't always get what I wanted to do. Like, we'd play the drowning game and I'd say she had to save me, so she'd just walk over and grab my hand and that was it, I was "saved." I wanted more drama than that and a long rescue scene. It wasn't always easy to remember that she had a while to go to catch up to me!
I loved to read and draw and sing. I was kind of a melodramatic child sometimes and loved to perform, though outside the family sometimes I could be pretty shy. My reading ability continued to develop, and when I sang it was generally on pitch. (My father's side of the family included quite a few musical folks, so that wasn't surprising.) Learning nursery rhymes, counting games, and songs was very important to me.
Our family moved to the nearby city of Winston-Salem in 1982, where we got our first house. It was a two-story brick job with a yard, and my sister and I shared a room. My sister and I also attended a daytime nursery school sometimes, though I don't recall how many days a week we went. It happened to be a Jewish day school, and I don't remember much about the teacher, Mrs. Allen, but I do know we did frequent art projects and got some experience playing with other children. There were a few neighborhood kids we had contact with too.
I was still very precocious in my communication skills, plus I was on the small side, so people were often surprised to find how well I could talk. My mom said she used to take us to restaurants and ask us what we wanted, and when we responded the employees would be surprised that kids as young as we were could express our wishes so well. I knew my ABCs very well and could write (with spelling assistance sometimes). In my pre-school days I also seem to recall that the ice cream man could sometimes be the highlight of the day, and I liked getting the mail with my mom. Sometimes we played outside.
Click to see a YouTube home video of my sister and me--probably shot sometime in 1982 or so!
Our family preferred reading and interacting to television, but we were Sesame Street kids, and I also developed a fascination with Woody Woodpecker and The Smurfs. This was the beginning of what would be a long career of interest in cartoons. I also loved trying to draw the characters I liked.
Our mom liked to wake us up with songs on the record player, and I liked to play dress-up and dance to the music. Like many little girls I thought it would be nice to grow up and be a ballerina, so I liked to draw ballerinas, often on the backs of discarded extra paper with my dad's bank's letterhead on it. I got very interested in the schedules of other people and the order of things, which prompted me to one day draw a series of pictures depicting my father getting ready in the morning and going to work. (The link goes offsite to my childhood doodles page. The drawings on that page continue into later childhood, so I should say only the "Daddy's Schedule" set is what's applicable here.)
When I was five and my sister Pattie was four, my mother got pregnant one more time, and she did a very good job explaining the basics of sex ed to us so we would understand what was happening. I thought the whole thing was fascinating and asked for more info, so my mother told me as much as I wanted to know, complete with diagrams and drawings. She even taught us about forms of contraception before I was satisfied that I knew everything there was to know. I had an interest in other aspects of the human body too, though at that point I started picking up the knowledge from simple books my parents gave me.
I'm pretty sure that holiday season was when we got a puppy as a gift, and our family named the dog Chelsea. I wasn't interested in the pet thing, but I think my sister liked her a lot. Sadly, we lost her when she got hit by a car. On March 7, 1983, my mother left my sister and me with a friend's family so she could go off to the hospital and have her baby. I remember not being able to sleep that night, so the friend's mommy put me on the couch with a stack of Little Golden Books. I read them all, and then when I looked up the sun was coming up. I was shocked that I'd been up ALL NIGHT LONG, and declared to everyone once they got up that I was "the tiredest kid in the world."
But my mother had also been up all night, apparently, because my sister Lindsay was born on March 8, 1983. We had been told she was going to be a boy, so they didn't know what to name her and they deliberated for a long time before choosing her name, unaware at the time that it was going to turn out to be a fad name. For some reason I remember not liking the name and telling my dad that I didn't want her to be named that because I "didn't like the letter L." But then later, the first time I saw my sister, I told my parents I had changed my mind and that actually L was my favorite letter.
So, Pattie and I were both big sisters, and our scrawny baby sister had no hair so she had to have a bow taped to her head when we dressed her up for her naming ceremony thing. My sister claimed to have developed a tummy ache that never went away for years, which when we look back makes us think maybe she had that middle child syndrome that came with being bumped from the special youngest child in the family. But we got along--even though our new sister was LOUD--and I remember Mom bringing the baby in to show off to our nursery school class.
The summer after the baby was born we used to go to a community pool called Bolton Pool, and had a lot of fun with that swimming in the kiddie pool. I also got my first couple of loose teeth (listen to me talk about it here in my five-year-old voice!), and we got to see a fireworks show for July 4th that year. By the time I was about ready to start kindergarten, I could read very well, count backwards from a hundred, and have a fairly complex conversation. (I still had some trouble explaining concepts and tended to get frustrated when adults didn't understand me; some of this comes out in a conversation where I'm relating the experience of going bowling with my dad.) When it was time for me to start school, for the first time I felt like I was a lot older than my sister--after all, she still had a year left to stay home and play, and I was such a big girl that I had to get on a bus and go to school! (Well, even though I still sucked my thumb and slept with a blanky.) I was excited to be going someplace that would involve reading and learning, but I was pretty nervous about having to be around so many unfamiliar children. But now that I'm about to talk about what happened after I was enrolled as a kindergartner at South Fork Elementary School, you'll have to click the next button to get to the next section of my life, 'cause that's a landmark!
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