Memorabilia

This morning I found myself thinking about days of yore. You know, those carefree days spent in the sun playing outside for hours on end.

And I have found that I rather enjoy basking in the joy of these memories that feel as if they were just yesterday.

I am the 5th of 9 children. Mormon family to the max, and I loved growing up in big family more than pretty much anything in my lifetime.

There was laughing, fighting, trampolines, broken bones, broken windows, sprinklers, weird smells, burnt feet from the hot pavement, playing outside on hot summer nights, hiding food when mom came home with something good, and fighting for the corner seat on our L-shaped couch.

I remember brothers threatening to give me swirly's and I also remember those threats manifesting themselves and becoming a reality, and those were just really unfortunate moments of my life.

I remember mattresses being put on top of my head and brothers sitting on top of them.

I remember my mom making up songs for each one of her kids. She would take their name and come up with the greatest of songs we had ever known. She was just that kind of mom you know. My song went like this:
"She's just the baby lubber that I love.
The baby lubber. The baby lubber.
I said I love, I love, I love the baby lubber."
My nickname was 'raeber baby lubber.' Normal. And also really short. I loved it. Though in my later years I would wonder why I was being compared to the skin on a whale. Lubber. Blubber. Same thing.

I remember putting a shirt on my head, you know like when you pull it over your head but then you just don't all the way and then the neck part is covering your hairline and the rest of the shirt hangs down your back? (think for a second, visualize it. Got it?) And then my sisters and I would run around the front yard pretending we had long, beautiful, blue hair.

I remember birthday mornings when my mom would make Orange juice with a side of animal shaped pancakes with candles stuck in them and the wax would always reach the pancake before we could blow it out.

I remember one summer, my parents told us to pack our bags but they wouldn't tell us where we were going. And it was the greatest adventure we had ever known! And so pack we did. And then we drove for what seemed like a million years to my 7-year-old mind and went to Phoenix, about 30 minutes away from where we lived. We ended up at a beautiful resort where we packed on the sunscreen, went down water slides, floated on lazy rivers, ate twizzlers while we played games and then wore big t-shirts inside-out because our skin still ended up burned from the Arizonan sun.

I remember getting left at home one 4th of July because my parents forgot to count the kids before heading off to fireworks and so, being all smart and small in stature, I went and asked the neighbors if they would baby-sit me for the night.

I remember climbing in our grapefruit tree waiting for my dad to get home, and at long last, after painting houses all day long, he would pull into the driveway in his old Chevy truck and step out, covered in white from head to toe. I would run up to him, not caring whether the paint on him was wet or dry and he would pick me up and ask me how my day was. And then I would tell him about all the locust skins I had picked off the neighbors trees and the cartwheels that I had learned to do.

I remember leftovers and lots of job charts, sleeping on the trampoline and having all parties involved rolling to the center of it by morning and being woken up at 5 a.m from the blazing hot sun.

Oh the memories! How I loved my childhood that has made up me. I loved the mad times, and the happy times, the fighting and the hugging. (that's what my mom made us do after fighting)
Oh I just loved it all, and from time to time I wish that I could go back to the simpler days of cartwheels, locust picking, and animal shaped pancakes.