Category Archives: Kathleen’s Personal History

Things I learned from Barbara

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Barbara liked to teach me things. My dad says she Barb and I (5)potty trained me, but I should probably ask my mom to confirm that story. I do remember the time she brought me into her bedroom where she had gently laid a pair of underwear on her bed. She told me that she thought she had her period. She continued by telling me it wasn’t like the period at the end of a sentence. She then pointed to the underwear. There on the top of her panties was a little red fuzz ball. You could barely see it. Later she told me that she discovered that she hadn’t had her period because the fuzz ball had moved.

Another time she brought me into the bathroom and demonstrated how to shave my legs. I gave it a try after she left by shaving one line along the front of my leg. I decided that I wasn’t interested in shaving and put the razor away without shaving the rest of my leg. A short while later we were in Barb and I (8) Tennessee and Barbara noticed a short patch of hair on my leg. She teased me mercilessly, but promised she’d stop if I’d just admit that I had tried to shave. I refused to admit it and eventually she gave up.

The summer before I was to enter Jr. High my sister approached me about my handwriting. She told me that if I was to be “popular,” I’d need to work on my handwriting. She gave me a paper with a list of samples of “popular” handwriting and advised me to learn one of them. I don’t know how long I spent practicing, but I do remember working on one or two of them.

Barbara and I(2) The last lesson I can remember is when I was taking my first French class in high school. We both had Mrs. Hamp as our French teacher. She told us that we could get extra credit by learning a sentence in French and then telling her. Barbara taught me two sentences which supposedly meant “I am Kathleen. I am smart” what they really meant was “I am Kathleen, I am silly.” Mrs. Hamp laughed when I told her I was silly and taught me how to call Barbara a “pighead” in French.

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Childhood Roommates

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When I was very little I shared a room with my older sister Barb and meBarbara. We used to share a double bed. I remember we’d have this imaginary line down the middle of the bed delineating my side from hers. We had this rule that any part of your body that crossed the line was fair game, meaning that the other person could do whatever they wanted to it. She loved to torment me by putting a foot or an arm on my side. I would do my best karate chops to the offending appendage, but she’d just continue. I think I even tried to give her an “Indian burn” but  nothing worked. I remember being frustrated and annoyed and I suspect she thought that was funny because she continued to cross the line each night.

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Changes to our Tiffin Home

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The point of this blog is mostly to post the pictures I didn’t have when I initially blogged about my childhood home.

When my parents bought our house it was the mustard color you can see in the picture below:
in front of the house

My parents painted the house “Shadow Grey” and added black shutters which I always thought improved the look significantly.  The also built a porch on the North side of the house.  Prior to the porch we had a door to nowhere.  The door was on the second story and opened up to a two story drop straight down.
house

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Childhood Pictures

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My mother sent me some pictures from my childhood and a few of our house.  Some of these pictures will be used in upcoming blog posts, but for now, I thought I’d post a little preview.  Most of these pictures are from when I was very young, but some of them were taken during that awkward middle stage where it looks like I should be old enough to know better than to look so dorky.  My mother claims that when I first got glasses that they didn’t make many glasses for kids and that’s why my glasses were so dreadful.  Enjoy:

Also, feel free to comment on the pics, particularly if you can provide a memory or some additional info about the picture or the day it was taken.  If you can’t tell, I’m generally the girl with very short hair.

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My Occasional River

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Our yard flooded regularly. Whenever there was a particularly big rain storm, all the water from the fields that surrounded our house would drain through our yard to the little brook just past the weeping willow on the Drolls’ side of the fence. Our house, garage, and barn were all on hills with a valley between the house and the barn. It was this valley where the water flowed. If it rained enough we’d get a fast flowing stream with water as high as our waist in some places. It was always exciting to see how high or fast the water was flowing. I’m sure my mom was much less excited because when the river stopped and the water dried up, we’d find a path of gravel and debris in the yard. My parents tried to build a small wall to stop some of the debris from crossing the gravel driveway into the yard, but I think they were disappointed by the results.

flood 1
The day I held my high school graduation party, it was raining and the yard was starting to flood. The party was held in a room in my dad’s warehouse (in the former barn). We had to build a bridge for my friends to cross out of pallets and scraps of wood. I know my family has pictures somewhere of some of the deeper and more severe floods, but all I have is a few of the flood from my graduation party (an example of one of our milder and smaller floods).
flood 2

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Our Home on State Route 18

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I should apologize in advance for the woeful supply of pictures I have of my old home. I was able to get some images from Google, but they’re from very far away and show several things not present in my childhood.

Sometime after my brother Lee was born, but while I was still 2 we moved from Marion to Tiffin. Tiffin is located about 40 minutes North of Marion. We moved into a two story house with a flat roof. We used to say it looked like a lunchbox without a handle. It was about three miles to the edge of town, technically located in Clinton Township.

We were mostly isolated from neighbors with cornfields partially surrounding our house  and a small forest and a farm across the street. Satalight image of my house in Ohio
We had one neighbor, the Drolls, who lived next door to our property. Our houses were separated by a worn out old wire fence and a line of trees. It was roughly about 100 yards from our front door to the fence and then maybe the same distance from the fence to the Droll’s house. The Fence ran almost the entire length of the yard.  It ended just a few yards before the street.  Where it ended, there was a small patch of trees with a little brook. The brook had a small bridge over it on the Drolls’ side of the fence. Considering the fact that we lived next to the Drolls for most of my life, I hardly knew them. They were elderly with no children living at home. They had a dog that used to come into our yard and take our toys. We would get in trouble for leaving toys out where the dog could get them and every so often we would go to the Drolls house to see if any of our toys had been dragged over. I think I was inside their house one or two times, but I can’t say that I remember anything about it. I picture him wearing dirty old jeans and her with dark hair done up “old lady style.” I’m not sure I’d recognize them if I ran into them on the street—that’s how little we saw of them. I can remember him bringing over things from their garden a few times. The only other thing I can say about the Drolls is that in later years they put a sign out that said “Droll’s Hair Fashion” and they outlined the sign in reflectors so that you could see it from a distance. The sign eventually became my landmark to slow down so I could turn into our driveway.

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Happy Birthday Zachary!!

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Scan10007 Today Zach is 32 years old.  Next week we will celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary.  Tonight as I reflect over the years we’ve spent together I’m grateful for the man that Zach has become. 

I admire his Zest for learning. He’s always reading and studying one subject or  another.  He’s incredibly smart and has an answer for almost any question I ask.  He can talk intelligently on almost any subject (he claims to know just enough to sound intelligent, but I think he’s just being modest).  I always thought I had a fairly good vocabulary, but Zach’s vocabulary is much broader and deeper than mine.  He is really good at defining words and spelling them and he’s much better at grammar than me (I still don’t completely understand the uses of the semicolon).  I’ve heard that he’s also very good at diagramming a sentence, but I don’t know exactly what that means.Zach and Kathleen

He has a good head for music, although he laments that he is out of practice on everything.  I wish I had some of his musical ability.  When I did try out an instrument or two back in school, I didn’t have the commitment or the musical background to succeed at them and I quickly quit.

Zach has a good sense of humor.  He sometimes makes the best jokes, and it makes me smile.

Where I tend to be stingy, particularly when money is involved, Zach is generous.  He is always willing to give to others and he has a compassionate heart.  11.19.05 Ike and ZachHis philosophy is to "Cast your bread upon the water.  . . " and as you do, you find out that you have enough for yourself as well.  When he knows that a family member is having a hard time, his heart goes out to  them and he wants to be with them to comfort and help.

I admire his knowledge of the scriptures and of history.  I know whenever there’s a question relating to historical events or scriptural knowledge in Sunday School that Zach knows the answer even if no-one else does and I’ve never been aware of a time that he didn’t know. 

I admire the way he accepts less than ideal situations sometimes in callings and other things, 12.14.08 Zach, Isaac, and Charlotte (3)and he has a mature attitude about them.  He respects authority even when he disagrees with it.  He sustains his leaders in spite of their flaws.

Of all the things I appreciate about my husband, one of the things I appreciate most is that he’s a good dad.  I appreciate when he takes over with the kids and reads stories to them or takes a child who is having a rough time into his arms and helps him or her calm down.  He’s a kind and thoughtful dad who loves his children and they love him. 

Zach, I’m lucky to be your wife!  Have a great birthday!

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My earliest Memories

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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.

image1I 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  me3remember 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.

meI 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.

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When I was a child. . .

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My mom describes me as a very happy smiling baby. She says I was a very easy baby, Mom and Iwhich 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.

Barb and IShe 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 pregnant with a dollexpressing 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.”
short hair

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My Parents

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My friend Erin has been writing about her childhood and as I’ve enjoyed reading her blog post, I’ve thought I ought to write my own.

Maybe the best place to start is with a short description of my parents.  (I copied the pictures from a little book my mother made me, so they’re not ideal)

In many ways my parent’s upbringing couldn’t have been more different.

My dad was an only child. All four of his grandparents me and Dadwere Lithuanian immigrants. His father, Leo Joseph Bird, was a heavy drinker and smoker who died of lung cancer when my dad was only 7. So for most of his life he was raised by his widowed mother. He recalls living above a bar as a child and watching the drunken men stumble out and deciding that he would never drink alcohol. His father’s death was traumatic. He said he saw his father coughing up blood and running from room to room trying to hide what was happening from his son. My dad grew up in PA. He became interested in agriculture at a young age, through 4-H I think. In his twenties he started to investigate a variety of churches. As he learned about each sect of religion, he would study the Bible to find passages that conflicted with the beliefs of each church. While trying to disprove the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he had a spiritual experience which changed his direction and he stopped trying to disprove it and started learning the doctrine of the church. He was later baptized. None of his family joined and I think my grandmother was unhappy about his decision.  <<Don’t you just love the suit?!  My mom now helps him with his wardrobe>>

My mother on the other hand was a descendant of Mormon Pioneers and raised in aOBryant 0658  big family with both of her  parents. She was the second oldest of 7 Children (3rd of 8 if you count the sister who died before she was born). My grandpa worked for the military and they moved around a lot. Mom was born in Idaho Falls and graduated from High School in Idaho Falls, but her family moved several times between her birth and graduation. Being raised in a big religious family like I was, I suspect our upbringing was fairly similar in several important ways.

The details are all from my memory, so if I’m off a little or not as descriptive, now you know why!

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Memories of my Grandmother

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Today wasP1020896-1 the graveside service for my grandmother Ila Terry O’Bryant.  She was a remarkable woman.  From the time I was very young, I always remembered feeling an intense sense of love when I was around my grandmother.  As I got older, I longed for and cherished the moments I had with her.  I have felt a special closeness between us, partly because I was named after her first child who suffered a tragic death when she was 2. 

Grandma was a wonderful storyteller.  I loved to liOBryant 3210sten to her tell stories of her childhood and family life.  I remember when we’d go to visit, I’d  sometimes stay up and just listen as she talked with my mother.  When I was older she’d tell me stories and show me pictures.  I have fond memories of sitting on her bed listening to her tell stories.  She kept all her picture books in the front room and I enjoyed looking through them and imagining what life was like when she was young.

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Dealing with Death

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This is an intensely personal subject for me, so this particular entry is not for the casual reader.  I feel an almost therapeutic need to describe my emotions and the events surrounding my grandmother’s death.  There are times when voiced words seem insufficient and bland, when only the written word can satisfy the need to pull out the emotions brimming beneath the surface–this, perhaps is one of those times.

On Friday August 1st at 8:00 AM my mother called me from Tennessee where she had justOBryant 2279 arrived the night before and told me that my grandmother had what they suspected was a stroke sometime during the night.  My thoughts were immediately turned to the idea that my grandmother was dying.  I remember another time that my grandmother was very sick and in the hospital and I wondered if it could possibly be the end, my thoughts were different this time than they had been before, it was as if I already knew that this was the end.  I knew it inside, but felt the lack of confidence in speaking those words.  So as I went about my day, the words ‘my grandma is dying’ seemed to echo in my head constantly.  I stood in line at the post office and when I looked over at the elderly lady next to me I thought ‘my grandma is dying’ and I started to cry.  At the gym as I peddled on the bike I thought ‘my grandma is dying’ and I cried again. 

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When does one become Old?

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So, I turned 30 last month, and I honestly didn’t freak out or anything, but then an elderly lady told me that she cried the whole day when she turned 30 and a gal in her 20s asked me how old I am and then apologized for asking when I told her my age. 

Since then I’ve started to wonder about middle age and when one moves from young adult to middle age.  I find that I associate myself with the young married crowd more than with the middle aged group.  I’ve stared to look at the things in life that would qualify you for either group and it’s not looking good for my youth.  We own our own house, we’ve got three kids, my husband has a real grown-up job and hasn’t been in school for probably close to ten years, and I’m in the Relief Society Presidency while he’s in the High Priest group leadership. 

Whether I’m old or young, I think most importantly I’m happy.  I’m happy with where I’m at in life and that’s probably why I still don’t care that I’m 30.

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The Math of Having Children

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I’ve been rather overwhelmed with the addition of the third child.  I was wondering how we could ever get to six or twelve or thirty if I’m so overwhelmed now an7.16.08 Kathleen's 30th B-dayd it occurred to me that I’ve gone through a stage of being overwhelmed with the birth of each child and each time things have eventually gotten easier and it didn’t take too long before I realized that I actually could handle the amount of children that I have.  This realization should be encouraging to Zach because he has started talking about number four and I think my response has been a look that indicates I might just kill him in his sleep!

So I think the math goes something like this:  Two kids is three times as hard as one and three kids is barely holding on to sanity (at least at first).  I got to a point where if I made it through the day without losing it, I counted it as a good day and I despaired that I’d never accomplish anything ever again because I was too busy with all my children to even sit down and write a letter or check my email!

Luckily things have gotten better–look I’m even blogging again!

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Isaac gets a haircut

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I have no exciting story to go with this picture, but in an attempt to post more often, I thought I’d post this. Now I have all this space to fill so that the picture can be encapulated by text.

On an unrelated story Charlotte is doubling her teeth count to four–two are just breaking through on the top.

Hmm. . .what else could I write. I cried twice in class last night because I missed my kids and wanted to be home with them. I called Zach as I walked to the car after class and cried again. I guess I can be an emotional person–I am dreading this semester and how busy I’ll be–I need more time with my kids!

Posted in Kathleen's Personal History, Kids
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