Winter, 2003
A friend recently posted on her blog, some memories she had of her childhood with her sisters. Reading through her post sparked off memories that my sisters and I have of when we were "knee high to a grasshopper".....
We led a pretty interesting life when we were little; favorite things to do included:
1. Playing cowboys, in which we would tape paper cow heads that we drew (we never could figure out why people couldn't tell right away that they were cows) to our bed posts and then have cattle round ups. Unfortunately, bed post cows don't move very fast.
2. Playing "Indians" which involved bows and arrows that were all constructed out of apple tree twigs and bright yellow yarn.
3. Catching Bumblebees and keeping them as pets in mason jars. At night, we would turn all the bedroom lights off except for one lamp and then watch our pet bees hover and buzz around the light. I think mom was blissfully unaware of what we were doing...
4. Playing town. It is really hard to play town with a total of three people. Emily was the banker (but never got any business since we didn't know what to use as "play money". I think Megan was the grocer, and our huge collection of Beanie Babies was used to fill her store. I was a detective and my job was to find out where all of our socks kept on disappearing to. I think I did occasionally get a bigger mystery, such as what happened to the Beanie Babies that were missing from the grocery store.
5. Having horse shows. All three of us were Certified Horse Delirious, and we would put all sorts of obstacles in our spacious backyard (everything from plastic lawnmowers to lawn chairs) and then pretend we were on imaginary horses as we ran at top speed jumping over our "fences" barefoot, and tried to avoid stepping on any bees that were hiding in the clover. If you managed to get over all the jumps without knocking any over, or getting stung by an annoyed bee, you won. ;)
6. Preparing to be Olympic champions. I kid you not, we did all sorts of stretches for about 1 hour every single day, preparing for stardom. Megan was going to be a gymnast, focusing mainly on being on the balance beam. We had no real balance beam, so we either used the 3' long edge of a bed's foot board, or we would unhook the ladder from our bunk bed, Em and I would hold it very firmly on its side and watch Meg precariously wobble from one side to the other. I was going to be an Olympic ice skater, but I can't remember what Emily wanted to be....
7. Go "spelunking" in the garage on rainy days. We would leave the lights off, and just use a flashlight as we pretended that we were in a dangerous cave that had hidden treasure in it.
8. Sing as terribly as possible and then laugh our heads off at whoever sounded the worst. Oh wait, we still do that...!
9. Start clubs that would disintegrate within two weeks. We still have a "secretaries notebook" from one of our clubs, and we laugh our heads off every time we open that thing. The dues were the funniest part. Here's a sample of what a club meeting looked like:
1 'o' clock p.m.: Old business discussed.
1 'o' 1: No old business
1 'o' 2: Dues counted. 13 cents.
1 'o' 3: Decided to use our funds to help homeless animals.
1 'o' 4: Changed our minds about the homeless animals. Not enough funds.
1 'o' 5: meeting adjourned.
We thought we were brilliant. ;D
10. Going "Ghost hunting". Now, I'm sure if mom knew what we were doing, she would have put a stop to it, but I don't think we ever told her. We painted smiley faces onto cotton balls and then hid them in our bedroom. Whoever got to be the "ghost hunter" had to use a flashlight and hunt down all the "ghosts" in our dark bedroom. We wanted to have spooky music playing while doing this, but since we didn't have any, the other two people who were not hunting would hum a song.
So there you have it. Now you know why we are who we are. Those of you who know us personally probably understand know why we are such a queer trio, but hey, those pet bumblebees sure were fun.
And you thought we were respectable... ;)
~Caitlyn
