and your heart was an open book...

i received a baby journal as my first baby gift. there are a few pages to fill in about the pregnancy, and "all about mommy" and "all about daddy", so i started filling it out. one of the questions is "mommy's favorite childhood memory?", followed by 3 teeny little lines. i'm gonna need more room than that!!

i have a lot of really fantastic vacation memories with family.. we went to texas every summer, disney world twice, and hawaii once for my brother's wedding. i also went to central park in new york city, every wednesday of ever summer, as long as i can remember, to watch my dad play softball.. the most valuable player, the pitcher! i rode the carousel almost every time, got a hot dog with just ketchup (from a vendor with a striped umbrella, just like on the packages!), and played on the playgrounds. we parked our red minivan at tavern on the green.. it was the closet parking to the fields, and cheaper than parking on the street, believe it or not! we were so silly.. in our tshirts, shorts, tank tops, and sneakers, amongst the tavern lunchers in their fancy dresses and suits.. but we were certainly recognized by the parking attendants year after year.. there's bill barnard and family, off to central park again!

i had great friends as a child, too. my good friend alice's father worked as the head electrician at the brenden burne arena, across from giant's stadium. it's where the devils play hockey. every year, more than once a year, i think, he got us free tickets to the ice capades, the ringling brothers circus, and the horse show. i cant count how many of those i went to, for free!! i would go with alice and her mom, and sometimes one other friend. my mom would pack me up with $10, for either snacks or a prize to shop for (the shops went allllll the way around the arena, so much to see!) alice and i liked to buy the snow cones to drink, because it was a real plastic cup to keep.. so that was my prize for the night with a drink, all for one price (i was so frugal!) we usually didnt get home til after 10, often on a school night! so we always slept in the car on the way home.

i also had countless amounts of imaginary games with my best friend wendy. apparently, our names for these games werent half as imaginative as the games themselves. we would make up something to play, with intricate and specific characters - anywhere from pretending to be babies, teenagers, or adults (we never pretended to be just regular kids.. what fun would it be to pretend to be the age you are now?!) so anyway, we would think up these characters, and then the next time we wanted to play that again, we would say "do you wanna play that thing where.." so our games became "that teenager thing", "that thing in the basement", "that thing outside", "that thing outside at your house" (wendy's house.. usually we played at my house, but sometimes we were at hers, so she would say "that thing outside at my house." "that thing outside" alone, meant we were at my house). that teenager thing, we played in my room, and it started because my mom gave me an old notebook or dayplanner to play with, so wendy and i would schedule all these dates and events with whatever popular celebrity boy we desired at the time.. one of them, dont laugh, was doogie howser.. hahah (ok so i laughed). "that thing in the basement" was definitely our favorite.. we were pretending to be the olson twins, who at the time, were babies on full house. i was mary-kate, she was ashley, and when her sister kristen came over (about half the time), she was michelle. we would play in the basement, under the ping-pong table; that was our little house. we had mostly kitchen stuff.. play dishes, and anything "miniature" that came out of the real kitchen.. like those small cereal boxes or sample bottles of ketchup or spices. we also raided the attic and got out old baby toys and played with them.. we set up the entire fisher price little people set.. the garage, playground, merry-go-round, school, church, train set.. it was basically like playing with a dollhouse, really. "that thing outside", we pretended to be a married couple.. i was the mom, she was the dad, and if kristen was there, she was our child. we would dig holes in the backyard, make forts, cook with dirt and water (kids LOVE to play with dirt, sand, and water, it's crazy!) we were just a cute little couple living in the jungle. "that thing outside at her house" was completely different. we would sit on the swings (there were 2), while the third person (kristen was always there in this case, of course, being at their house) would run around the length of the yard in a big oval (her yard seemed sooooooo long!), and make up songs to sing while we ran, and then when we came back, the other two on the swings would say which parts of the song they could hear. kids are weird. heh.

years later, i was babysitting for marissa, a little girl i often babysat for, and her friend who had come over to play. they reminded me of wendy and myself. the cutest thing was, they were pretending to be mary-kate and ashley olson, but as junior high kids, which was then the current age of the olson twins. i was thinking, kids just love to pretend to be those twins, whatever their current age is. hah. i wonder if kids today pretend to be the mary kate and ashley as drugged out and bulemic :-/ actually, i know they dont, they pretend to be hannah montana now.

anyway... years, miles, death and adulthood are between me and all those memories now. but that's what memories are for. i'll always have texas, central park, the ice capades. and i'll always have that thing.