Me and My Big Ideas

This is my kindergarten picture. It was the days of bobbi pins and curls and pretty checkered dresses with white collars and cuffs on the sleeves! Wish I looked that cute these days, some fifty years later.....time does take it's toll....ao does life.

Anyhow, I think I was a disappointment to my mom. She wanted a girly girl, I was a tomboy. She wanted me to have short hair, becuase I was so tender headed and I wanted it long and beautiful like Peggy's hair(blonde and glorious)! She wanted me to love my bride doll she had saved her green stamps for so long to get and I wanted to give her a haircut, so I did. She wanted me to like kittens, but just about fainted when I brought a handful of bare skin baby rats into the kitchen.

My mom, hated the farm, I adored it. Times were hard and she went to work in town when I was eight years old. I think the five of us made her want to run away. Who would have wanted to be around us, always scrappin' and hollerin', somebody cryin' and somebody screamin'. She had very little help from my farmer dad...he escaped on his tractor to the fields.

Sometimes Bill went with him....he learned to drive the tractor when he was about five.

I remember one time she and my Grandma, the one who slid down the ditch with us, wanted the five of us to take naps. The boys could lay in their room and talk til they fell asleep, but I had to have naptime in my own room all alone....no one to talk to, no one to get into trouble with except myself. So this particular day, I tried to talk my brothers into participating in the most brilliant plan ever thought of. I tore bits of magazine paper, wadded it up and stuck it in my eyes. It would be that sleepy matter you sometimes have when you have slept and wake up. My brothers couldn't make it stay in their eyes, so I proceeded downstairs to tell my gullible adult keepers, I had been asleep and successfully completed my nap. I don't know if the giveaway was the magazine bits in the corners of my eyes or the fact we had only been upstairs for about five noisy minutes. This day my brilliant plan met with failure.

My poor Mom....she wanted so much for her daughter.