Monday, December 17, 2018

Eleven Years of Daughter Number Three

Darn, I missed the 11th birthday of my blog yesterday. Back on December 16, 2007, I started this enterprise, if you can call it that.

When I was 11, I looked like this on a bad day. As you can see, I had gotten glasses since the previous year and was in the midst of growing my hair out to achieve that perfect early-1970s straight-hair look. That never worked out for me, but I didn't know it yet.

Sixth grade was the first year we were put into a middle school format, with a homeroom and different teachers for each subject. My English teacher was an evangelical Christian who ranted against racial equality and hippies. My mother opined that he sounded like a member of the John Birch Society, so that was educational for me. He left teaching soon after to become a minister.

This was the year I threw myself into making paper people. I memorized all the bones in the body for science class. We made a chariot race with Barbie and Ken dolls in the social studies unit about the Roman Empire. I had a crush on a boy in my class named Kevin Granger. And after the girls-only sex ed class one of the women teachers gave us, I was afraid I could start bleeding any second while sitting at my desk. I think I read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that year.

My penmanship continued to stink (and my report card has the lowest average marks for that subject to prove it). I got overall pluses in every subject—meaning I was making progress up to my ability—for the first time in my school career, I think, and pluses for the entire list of Habits and Attitudes, too. That means I Accepted Guidance from Those in Authority, Had Self Control, Respected School Regulations, and so on.

I missed 11 days of school that year, almost all in winter, and was never tardy, thanks to our hard-working bus driver.

Eleven years is a while. I'm glad to still be here writing this every day, and thanks to you for reading.

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My past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

2 comments:

Bill Lindeke said...

congrats!

Michael Leddy said...

Congratulations, Pat. Eleven blog years is a lot of years. Long may you wave.