Memory Lane Monday - Childhood pets

Growing up, there were always pets in my house. I believe that at some point throughout my childhood there were at times various dogs, cats, fish, gerbils, and a mouse.

Our first pet was a dog - a Shetland Sheepdog (like a miniature Collie) which had been my dad's before my parents got married. His name was Toddy - my dad had named him after a pet alligator that he'd had (briefly!) as a child. Don't ask me where the name had come from for the alligator...

Toddy was a one-man kind of dog. He was loyal to my dad but never really connected with my mom. As I was basically an extension of my dad, Toddy tolerated me. By that, I mean he let me pet him, let me carry him around (my mom tells a story of me as a toddler coming up to her one day carrying Toddy around the neck saying, "Look Mommy, puppy!"), and feed him table food. In return, he knocked me over as I was learning to walk, nipped at my pant legs and chased me around at times. For some reason though, Toddy never warmed up to my little brother either, so he was basically my dad's and my dog.



My parents made a rule when we were kids. On our 7th birthdays, we could each pick out a pet of our choice. I wanted a horse. My brother wanted a rabbit.

I got a cat and Donnie got a dog. Go figure...


My cat was a little black-and-white sweetheart that my dad named Jellybean. However, she only lived for a year - we never really knew what killed her. I got a replacement cat, dubbed Sassy, but she really became my mom's cat - probably since my mom was the one who ended up feeding and taking care of her mostly. Strange how that seems to happen, huh!


When Donnie turned 7, he got a dog - a beagle that he named Rex. I thought Rex was an annoying little dog (sorry Donnie!), but then again I've never really been a huge dog lover either.


When Sassy was just about a year old, she had kittens. For some reason we hadn't gotten her fixed yet and my mom says that she did try to keep her in the house when she was in heat, but when Sassy peed on her lap, she gave up and let her out. I think I would too in that case! So we had 7 little balls of fluff running around the house for several weeks...


I can still remember the names we gave them - my favorite was a black ones I named Coal, and Donnie's favorite was a black-and-white kitty he called Midnight. Then there were Caramel, Jellybean II, Tiger, and the twins (at least they looked alike) who we called Boots and Paws. When they were old enough, we found homes for all of the kittens - I had wanted to keep Coal but my parents said one cat and two dogs were enough. However, the people who took Jellybean II ended up bringing her back because she didn't get along with their other cat - and she stayed. And became my kitty.


Now in there too we added a fish (originally two, but mine died off - Donnie's was a goldfish he named Silver who lived to a ripe old age, for a goldfish anyway), then Donnie and I each got a couple of gerbils one year. His didn't last long (I think the cage got knocked off his dresser, probably by a cat) and one of mine got out and was killed by a cat (cats and gerbils are not a good mix - something we didn't realize at first!). The other lived for a couple of years. Later on I had a mouse for several years as well.

Toddy died when I was in high school, and we all decided together to replace him with another dog. This time we chose a Golden Retriever puppy that we named Taffy. She really became Donnie's dog.

None of those original pets are living anymore. My Jellybean II pined for me after I moved away to college and my mom ended up having to put her down when she got sick. Sassy, Rex and Taffy lived with my mom (after my parents divorced) until their deaths.

Nobody in my family has any dogs anymore, but we all have cats. Ron and I have 2 (Misty and Snuggly), my mom has 3 (Callie, Toby and Antigone, who used to be mine), Donnie has one (Galileo), and my dad and his girlfriend just got a cat.

Apparently we seem to be cat people, I guess!

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Memory Lane Monday - My first apartment

Wow, does this question bring back memories! And when I read it this morning, I immediately got the song from Barenaked Ladies stuck in my head - you know the "Welcome to the old apartment..." one? Ok, never mind. Back to today's topic. I'm a bit late with this, but technically it is still Monday - for another half hour anyway.

My first apartment was in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was transferring to school there and a friend of mine from high school and I had decided to rent an apartment together instead of live in the dorms. She was already going there and living on campus so we put her in charge of finding an affordable, decent place in an okay neighborhood within walking distance of campus. I signed the lease before ever seeing the apartment.

The apartment was in what we referred to as a 'cut up' house - one of those older, huge homes that someone had purchased and divided into (in this case) three separate dwelling units. The upstairs was one unit and there were two downstairs ones. Ours was the smallest (only one bedroom) and right in the front of the house. We shared a driveway not only with the other residents of our building but with the house next door, creating a confusing system of deciding who would park behind who and who would be relegated to parking on the street overnight and therefore subject to the 'no parking between 2am and 6am' on various sides of the street on various days rule. Getting a parking ticket because you forgot that if you parked on the street on Friday night, then it was really whether you could park there legally at 2am on Saturday that you had to be concerned with = lots of revenue for the City. That must be why they used such a confusing system to begin with... There was one parking space allotted to us in a gravel lot behind a house a couple of doors down as well.

So the apartment itself - was small. Basically two rooms - a living room and a bedroom. Plus a tiny bathroom and a kitchen about the same size. So small in fact, that the refrigerator and a cabinet had to go into the living room since they didn't fit. At one point after I'd been there about a year or so, the landlord did renovate and opened up the kitchen to the living room, added a breakfast bar/counter between the two and replaced the stove and fridge. They did this because the unit hadn't met building code before. Oops.

The bedroom was newly painted and carpeted in a lovely mint green shade (must've been cheap) and the living room had rust-colored carpet and cream walls. All windows had mini blinds that we kept shut 24/7 since it wasn't the greatest neighborhood and we were on the ground floor. It was - cozy. Definitely cozy.

So how much did we pay for all of this opulence? Can you guess? This was 1990, 'student-ghetto' area of town... My roommate and I paid a sum total of $275 a month. That's together - we each paid $137.50. Yes, you're reading that right! I'll spell it out for you even - one hundred thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. Each. And that included water, trash, parking (well kind of - see above) and heat as well since we didn't have our own thermostat - it was controlled by the apartment behind us. We just paid for our own electric, phone, and cable.

You can see why I lived there for the 4 years I was in school there, right? However, I was pretty anxious to move out somewhere a little - less student ghetto-ish once I graduated. Getting over the sticker shock of renting an apartment in a nice complex on my own was - well let's just say that I had many moments of missing that tiny little (cheap) apartment! Or at least missing the rent payments, LOL.

I had five roommates over four years in that apartment. Two of them are still my closest friends today. I remember staying up until hours talking, midnight runs to Meijer for chocolate, building a loft bed so that we could double our floor space in the bedroom, mini Christmas trees, massive amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough, watching tv on my 9-inch television, bringing boyfriends home, consoling each other through breakups, and many more awesome memories.

In a few weeks, we'll have lived in our current house for four years. Until then, the longest I've lived in any apartment or house (since I moved away from my parents' house that is) was that college apartment. Weird to think about.

I wonder what inflation has done to the rent on that place now? :)


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Memory Lane Monday - Favorite vacation

I've been sitting here trying to think about my favorite vacation. Not that there are too many to choose from - we really haven't had a 'vacation' as a family yet and those from when I was growing up were also few and hard to remember nowadays. I remember a trip to Houston, two trips to Florida involving lots of sand and sun (not my favorite things at the time!) and a trip to Boston/Cape Cod/Toronto. Then there was the fiasco vacation to New Jersey with my dad and stepmom in 1995 which I'll have to address if there's ever a topic of worst, or most stressful, or 'help, get me out of here!' types of vacation memories. And of course, there was our honeymoon, but I don't really count that as a 'vacation' in the general sense.

For the past 20 years or so, my 'vacations' have involved work-related trips which, with finagling, allows time for sight-seeing or family involvement. We just haven't been able to afford to take a trip on our own yet. Otherwise, I travel to visit friends for a weekend or extended weekend a few times a year, and that's about as close as we get vacation-wise. Someday I'd love to do a cruise, or a Disney trip with my kids.

So after all of that (sorry for all the detail, but you got my thought process as it went along, LOL!), I think I'll have to talk about the trip that I took with my family when I was 11 - to Boston, Cape Cod and Toronto (we also hit Niagara Falls on the way back as well, if I remember correctly). I think I even have a few photos somewhere that I can dig up as well.

I know it was a work-related thing for my dad, but since he was a self-employed manufacturer's representative (salesman), he was pretty free to do whatever he wanted with it. We had a full-sized van so drove there and back and I remember sprawling out on the bed in the back playing board games and stuffed animals with my brother most of the trip. Those were the days, huh - no car seats, seat belts or portable DVD players! I shudder to think of it now - we were lucky my dad never got into an accident.

We stopped in Boston first and hit the market area, walked the Freedom Trail, went aboard the USS Constitution and saw a replica of a Boston Tea Party ship. We visited (and climbed) the Bunker Hill Monument. Here's a few photos from Boston:

(me and my dad on the replica Tea Party ship)

(love the pose, huh! Not to mention the knee socks... Ugh!)

After Boston, we went to Cape Cod. This was late August, early September and it wasn't warm enough for swimming of any sort. I remember visiting the guy that my dad had to do business with at his house and my first experience with eating seafood (I wasn't impressed at the time). The only other thing I remember is that our vacation got extended because a teachers' strike at home delayed the start of school and we didn't have to hurry home.

On the way home we stopped at Old Sturbridge Village and drove into Rhode Island (so we could say we'd been there, I guess?). We drove through New York State and into Canada - with the extra time we had, my parents decided to swing by Toronto and Niagara Falls.

I remember seeing the CN Tower in Toronto:




We checked the news daily to find out about the strike - and made it home easily in time for the start of the school year. Although I don't remember a lot of the details, I just remember how much fun this trip was and how I loved traveling to and seeing all of these different places, especially the historical ones. I wrote an essay about Boston for history class that fall and it was awesome being able to include details that I had seen in person.

I want my own kids to have experiences like these as they grow up - now that they're getting older, I think we're going to have to try to do some family vacations in the next few years.

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Memory Lane Monday - First speeding ticket

I have to admit - I've never actually gotten a speeding ticket. Yes, I am aware that I am probably jinxing myself here so keep an eye out for a post in the near future about my first speeding ticket, LOL.

I have however, been the unhappy recipient of two auto-related tickets in my lifetime (so far). Neither was for speeding, although I was originally pulled over for speeding in one of the two cases.

More about that one in a minute though. The first ticket I ever got was a few months after I moved to Kalamazoo for college in 1990. I lived in an apartment in the 'student ghetto' as it was affectionately known. My particular street was a standard residential one, but about a block down from my apartment it ended at a cross-street, which was a one-way street for traffic headed out of downtown Kalamazoo. You can probably see where this is going...

In my defense, I was driving to the library. Normally, I walked there but for some reason this particular time I was driving. My usual route was to walk to the end of my street, turn right on the sidewalk and walk straight downtown to the library. No problem. When walking, that is. When driving - big problem. I came to the end of my street and started to turn right, as I was used to doing when I walked it. But - that was the wrong way on the one-way street. I realized this as I was turning, but there just happened to be a cop sitting right there and he caught me as I was then turning into a driveway in order to turn around. He was pretty incredulous that I lived right there and had made this mistake, but I was in too much shock at actually being pulled over to explain why. Ticket #1.

The next time I was pulled over was several years later when I was working at my first job out of college. I was in a hurry to get home and was speeding - doing 45 in a 35 mile an hour zone. But - for some strange reason, I hadn't put on my seatbelt that day. Probably the only time in my entire driving career that I had neglected to put the seatbelt on! But in this one case, it saved me from a speeding ticket since the cop saw I had a pretty clean driving record and cited me for the lack of a seatbelt only - at the time it was a fine, but didn't put any points on my driving record. Phew!

I have a couple of friends who've gotten out of tickets by bursting into tears when they got pulled over. I have the feeling that might happen with me (the tears part, at least) if I do ever get pulled over again - we can't afford either a ticket right now or the extra cost that our insurance would go up either. Like I said, I'm probably jinxing myself here, so I'll have to be sure to drive nice and carefully, just in case!

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Memory Lane Monday #2 - My first car

My first car was a 1981 Ford Escort. I loved that car! It was the summer after I turned 16 - I'd gotten my license the previous November, and was saving toward a car of my own. I ended up 'borrowing' the last $500 from my dad, who later on forgave the loan. I think I paid $1,200 total for the car and paid for my own gas. My parents paid the insurance while I still lived at home, since I agreed to drive my younger brother to and from school. I also drove a friend of mine who lived on the way as well.

My brother got spoiled after getting driven for his freshman year and hardly ever took the bus after that - my mom let him drive her car to and from school every day after he got his license... Lucky kid!

Part of the reason we hated the bus so much is that we lived literally 4 houses down from the elementary school, so had always walked. Our middle school was at the other end of our street - we either walked or our mom drove us. I'd never actually ridden a bus until my freshman year of high school. And that year there was a boys home on the route and I can vividly remember the bus being so crowded there was standing room only. I also remember the bus driver not being able to control the kids or even see to the back of the bus - at one point the kids were lighting paper wads on fire and throwing them around the bus.

Yes, they stopped busing those kids. And they switched the route so the bus wasn't so crowded. Our street and the ones on either side were stuck at the end of another route so I ended up riding the bus right past my street (they wouldn't drop us where we had to cross a busy street to get to our street), then around other neighborhoods for 40 minutes before being dropped at the corner to walk the half-mile home. Not my idea of fun! And the reason why I really, really wanted my own car.

Sorry, got off topic there for a minute.

So, my first car. My Ford Escort. It was tan with a black interior. And a radio.

Having a radio was incredible - my mom didn't have one in her car because she'd gotten tired of us kids fighting over it.

My Escort also happened to be the 'sporty' model with cruise control, and a sunroof. The sunroof leaked, but I wasn't complaining!

Oh yes, and I had fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. Someone gave them to me and I thought they were 'cool'. Boy was I a geek...

I owned this car for only a couple of years - I'd driven it out to Minnesota when I lived there the summer after my first year of college with my half-brother and his family. I was packed and all set to drive home after 5 months when the car... died. A head gasket or something like that which would've cost a fortune - and that wasn't worth it when I was about to drive the car through four states to get home.

So I sold my first car to a junkyard for $60 and took the train home.

This was the best photo I could find online of what my Escort looked like - it was even this color. I'll have to dig a picture up at home later on and scan it so I can add it to this post too.

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My 1st pregnancy

I try to not think of this too often anymore, but it comes to mind from time to time, usually around March or October. There are a lot of reasons to remember finding out you are pregnant for the first time. Sometimes it's expected. Sometimes not. Sometimes you feel joy. Sometimes you don't. Everyone has a story and this is mine.

Ron and I were engaged right before Christmas of 1998. You can read about his unusual proposal here if you're interested. We planned our wedding for May of 2000. On the way home from visiting my family the Christmas before our wedding, we started talking about kids. Well, we'd talked about kids before and were planning on starting a family soon after getting married. We were somewhat on the older side - Ron was 30 and I was 29 and we didn't want to wait long. During that conversation in the car on the 2-hour drive, one of us (I can't remember which) suggested that there really wasn't any reason to wait - we were about to be married in a matter of months anyway and besides, I was on the pill and you know they always say it can take months to get pregnant after you go off of the pill. So why wait? Maybe we'd get pregnant right around the wedding.

Or not. Our first month off the pill - we weren't even exactly even 'trying' yet - but I noticed that I was a day or two late. I was pretty regular, but then again I'd been on the pill for years. I had no idea what this first cycle off of it would be like. So a couple of days went by, and then a couple more. Before I went on the pill to the regulated 28-day cycle, I always had a shorter one, around 24 days or so. So by 32 days, I was either slightly late or very late!

I had suspicions so I stopped and bought a test on my way to work. Probably at Walgreens, but I don't really remember for sure, or what else I would've bought at the time. I do remember that I took the test in the bathroom at work at lunchtime. And I saw two lines for the very first time. And I have never been the same since - something changed in the first moment that I saw that second line.

Almost everyone in my office was at lunch, except for my boss - well she wasn't my boss yet, but she was also a friend and was to be a bridesmaid in our wedding. I went to her and told her that I was pregnant. And even though she has never had or wanted kids, she was happy for me because she knew I did. Funny thing is though I don't remember actually telling Ron. That's weird, isn't it. I remember telling him every other time, except for this one. I do remember that he was ecstatic and called everyone he knew immediately to tell them. He was thrilled. We both were.

Not to go into too much detail, but that first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage by the beginning of March. I don't know if it was from having gotten pregnant right off the pill - my doctor said that shouldn't have made a difference, but I will always wonder. I was devastated - to feel such joy and then - just emptiness.

When I got pregnant with Abby, two months after our wedding, I was so afraid to believe it at first. In fact, my doctor told me that I most likely wasn't pregnant because the test I took there was negative, even though I'd taken several at home that showed a (very, very faint) second line. I waited over probably one of the longest weekends of my life and then (after several more positive home tests) went back in and got the official +. I had done an ovulation prediction kit that month and had never gotten a positive result, but apparently I must've ovulated anyway, because Abby came along 9 months later. Big, beautiful and healthy. And I know that things must happen for a reason, because I can't imagine my life without her.

Abby was born 6 months after my original due date with the miscarried pregnancy. Six months - to the day. October 3rd to April 3rd.

Here's our first family photo - taken right around our first wedding anniversary. Abby was 7 weeks old:

This post was written as part of Memory Lane Monday over at MomsBlogging.com. Thanks for the great idea, ladies!