Pre-preschool

I'm going to try to pull together the memories I have between the time I moved into our new house and the time I entered Wishing Well Preschool--basically, memories from between the ages of 2 and 4. Inevitably I'm going to miss something, since I have many memories. I'm also not going to include things that are included in other memory posts (but there aren't many of those). I'm also not including memories where I don't know whether it was before or after I was in preschool (for example, my sister's "crazy years").

I can remember some early church memories. I remember playing "Ring Around the Rosie" in nursery with Martha Steagall and other kids. As a sunbeam I remember singing "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam," only I thought it was "sunbean." Every time I sang "A sunbean, a sunbean!" I would laugh hysterically because I thought it was so funny to be singing about beans. When I started laughing, another girl would start laughing. Sometimes I didn't like going to my classes, so I would go to Relief Society with my mom. I remember looking at the curtain against the back wall and resting my head against my mom. When she sang, it sounded really funny, since it was muffled with my ear next to her body.

I can remember one night being in our family room and David pulled a seed out of my belly button. I'm not sure whether this was a dream or whether I really did have a seed in my belly button for some reason. Regardless of whether it actually happened, I thought it happened, and sometimes I would say, somewhat distraught, "David took the seed out of my belly button!" I thought that I was supposed to have a seed there, and he ruined my body.

I can remember sitting in my bedroom, listening to the train whistles from the bottom of the hill, playing with various toys. I had a little red duffle bag and a plush Ernie that you could practice dressing. I can remember reading a little pink book called The Rose Petal Place that had an evil spider woman with an assistant fly. I would look at the back and wish we had the tape and the purple and green books in the series. I remember looking at the package for the Pull-Ups I would wear and imagined that the kids on the package lived in a special room that was out of the picture and I would go visit them.

I can remember my dad putting me in a backpack when he went jogging. I remember him giving me some fruit snack or gummy candy on occasion, which I loved. I would hear the bird call that has a high pitch followed by a lower pitch, and I imagined that the birds were saying, "Big Bird!" They were friends with the Sesame Street character. On one occasion my dad pulled some papers out of the post of a gate near what is now the Eaglewood Golf Course (I don't know what was there before). I thought it was a special mailbox for him.

When I was mad, I used to lie down on the ground and say dramatically, "I'm dead!"

We had a gold Subaru that would make a beeping noise if you had the door open with the keys in. I always said it was saying, "Dave don't! Dave don't!" That would make David really mad. 

Once I remember being at my aunt Susie's house, and she was offering me a candy or a popsicle or something. She asked what color I wanted, and she made fun of me for saying "lellow."

I remember going to my grandparents' house. They always had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fruit snacks, and we would always ask, "Can I have a turtle snack?" We called them turtle snacks even if they bought other fruit snacks. Sometimes they would get pizza from Pizza Hut, which came with little plastic things to keep the lid from smashing into the pizza. We would fight over who got to keep the little plastic thing. While we ate pizza we would pretend we were Ninja Turtles and would argue about who should be who. Our cousin April was always April. (I actually don't remember anything about TMNT, except that I used to know all the characters.) Grandma and Grandpa also always had apple sodas that we loved to get from their basement, but they had bottle caps so we had to have someone open them for us.

Once I spent the night at my grandparents' house. The next day, my grandma took me to a store and bought me a Pinocchio book and some Tic-Tacs (both were things I wanted). Then we came back to their house and I fell asleep in their family room while watching The Jungle Book. My grandparents had lots of movies we would always watch. I used to laugh and punctuate my laugh with a dramatic sigh, and all the adults would laugh. Once while watching Robin Hood, one of the kids in the movie sighed like I did, and all of our parents laughed, probably because they realized that's where I got it from. But I thought they just thought that kind of laughing was funny, and I didn't understand what was so funny about it.

I remember wearing my Mickey Mouse slipper socks at my other grandparents' house in Fillmore.

One day my mom presented me with a gift of a St. Patrick's Day troll. It had little plastic, green shamrock-shaped glasses. I broke the glasses twice because I wanted to see what color the troll's eyes were. After that, I had a great liking of trolls. 

Once, on one of the days after Easter, I was watching cartoons in our family room, eating Easter candy. I liked to bite the ears off of my Peeps bunnies because when they didn't have ears, they looked like snowmen.

My mom worked at a preschool/daycare called Kids Klub. I had a class of my own, but I was so shy that I rarely went to it. I remember once I got to choose a prize, but I wondered why I got a prize since I didn't go to that class often enough to have very many stickers. They used to feed us macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. There was a girl there who would wear a dress that was like a watermelon slice. I remember playing on the monkey bars in the back, and some girls once made mud pies. Once I remember a kid crying because he got hurt, and my mom told him there was a bone called a tailbone. Once my mom found a lock of hair. She took the kids one by one and asked them if they were the ones who had cut their hair. They each denied it, but when one boy said no (I think the same one who hurt his tailbone), she knew he was lying and he got in trouble.

We used to take field trips. On one occasion, we went to a park, and when we were walking back, one of the older kids said, "Quit stepping on the cracks! You're hurting your mom's back!" I hadn't heard anything like that before, and I felt guilty. On that same trip some kids had tried to burn ants with a magnifying glass. I had also brought one of my trolls in the car, a special one that stuck its tongue out when you squeezed it. One of the delinquent kids broke the tongue and I was really upset. On another occasion we went to the zoo. When we were back at Kids Klub, we were drawing pictures. I said I wanted to draw a picture of a little boy listening to the radio. A girl drawing a turtle told me we had to draw pictures of animals we had seen at the zoo. So I drew a picture of a fish listening to the radio.

I'm sure that I'm going to remember more things after I post this, but this should be a good sampling of what my life was like as a 90s kid.