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I feel like my memory is Swiss cheese. I have all of these disjointed memories with no order to them, so hopefully writing them down will help me make sense of them all.

I was born at Marion General Hospital in Marion, Ohio. I have only three memories and one story from the time we lived in Marion. My very  earliest memory is rather morbid and comes to me now almost as a memory of a memory instead of an authentic memory. I was in the back yard of our home in Marion and my mother was holding me. We were looking at a dead dear slung across a ladder in the back yard. That’s it. Isn’t that a wonderful first memory? My dad has never been a hunter, he’s way too soft hearted for that so I’m sure he hit the dear with his car and then brought it home to be cooked and eaten, as this was the case on a few other occasions when we ate deer.

My other two memories surround the time we moved when I was about two. I faintly  remember staring into a big box and seeing my teddy bear inside. The other memory is of my friend Matthew giving me a strawberry shortcake doll just before we moved. I can almost picture us in a room with our parents and I’m too shy to properly accept the gift. It seems like I’m standing between one of my parents knees. I do remember the doll had a big hat with oranges on it that smelled like oranges. I know from my parents that Matthew and I were good friends and that I couldn’t say his name so I called him “muffroom.” Years later we visited his family and he told me what he remembered of me as a girl. He was a little older than me and must have had a good memory, because I couldn’t remember a single thing about him. The sad thing is that I can’t even remember what he said that he remembered about me.

I know we used to walk home from church sometimes when we lived in Marion. I think it was about two miles away. I have this image in my mind of skipping along next to a large hill, but I’m not sure where that comes from. My dad made up songs for each of his children. My song originated on one of these walks home. It went something like this “yippee-kai-ay-kai-ee galloping all the way, here comes Kathy Alicia (sung like A-LEEEEE-sha).

I have a very limited selection of pictures from when I was little here in Utah.

My mom describes me as a very happy smiling baby. She says I was a very easy baby, which was good because my older sister (Barbara) was not well pleased when I was born. My sister was 10 days away from turning 2 when I as born and I am told that when my mother brought me home, my sister took one look at me and “promptly peed her pants.” According to my mother Barbara was already potty trained at this point.

At some point Barbara become intrigued by the way I was fed (nursing on mother’s milk) and tried feeding me in the same manner, which  didn’t work. She also tried feeding a doll and feeding herself.

She was jealous of the attention that I got as a baby and would try to hide me from my mother. I’m told that one day she tried to bury me in toys and clothes, but that when my mother found me I was just laughing and cooing. At least once when I was walking to my mother in my walker, Barbara pushed me out of the room and shut the door.

Of all of my siblings I nursed the longest, making it an entire year. Sometime before my  first birthday, my mother was in a car accident and spent a few days in the hospital expressing bottles of milk for my dad to feed me at home. Mom says she’s not sure what my father did, but when she came home she was frustrated to find several full bottles of expressed milk in the fridge.

Mom says I enjoyed pretending to be a mom and that I’d stuff dolls in my shirt and pretend to have babies.

For some reason, I always had a very short haircut as a young child. You can recognize me in all our old pictures as the one with very short strait brown hair. I also had very long eyelashes and apparently when asked about them I would say “Heavenly Father gave me my eyelashes, he also gave me my bottom.”