Starting with my childhood.

My brother and me getting ready for snow. 

I wasn't quite sure how to start off my posts, so I decided that I would begin where my life did. I was born sixteen years ago. I was (and still am) the youngest of four. My oldest sister Kara [Car-ahh] was nine, Sarah was seven and Ben was five. Needless to say, I don't remember that. We'll go ahead and fast-forward to a time that I can actually recall.

As a young child, I was... strange. My older siblings experienced some pretty bad things in public elementary and middle school, so when my turn rolled around to enter first grade (I skipped kindergarten and preschool), they decided to switch all of us over to homeschooling. Public-schoolers: do not immediately dismiss me as a socially awkward kid that has hair down to my mid-calf; I assure you I am not representative of the home-school stereotype. Home-schoolers: please do not take offense to the above statement. My parents weren't super great at homeschooling at first, which caused a lot of intellectual problems in our family. For instance, I did not learn to read until I was nine. As a result, we decided that my mom didn't have time to mature into the super-home-schooler-mom that she aspired to be, modeled after the hand full of moms that had been homeschooling their children from the prehistoric ages in our church co-op.

Anyway, my brother and I were enrolled in a charter school starting in fourth grade (for me; eighth grade for my brother). Looking back, I have no idea how I made any friends. I was the girl that always-- as in every single day of fourth grade-- wore my hair in a knotted pony-tail, and wore the same turquoise sweatshirt and blue jeans repeatedly. This particular school was different in the sense that it was on-campus only two days a week. The remaining three days of the school week were spent at home. In many senses, I was home-schooled + social life. It worked out extremely well for me. By the end of fourth grade, I was one of the top readers in my class, and well on my way to achieving... nothing really, but at least I was caught-up to other kids.

That's when I started getting relatively similar to other ten-year-olds. Before then, I was left to way too much alone time, and, consequently, way too many strange, imaginative habits. I find that period of my life rather entertaining. My transition from "awkward" to "normal" was a long, hard one, and in many ways I'm still working on it. I'm not gonna lie I'm still super awkward (or so my friends tell me), but thankfully not in an uncomfortable way. I'm just going off what people say. Maybe one of my four followers (four followers!), that I assume are my friends, could better explain my strangeness. My point is, this "transition period," as I call it, makes for some funny and interesting stories. Perhaps I'll start there, then.