25 Fascinating Facts about My Childhood

1.) As a wee baby Kendra, I loved talking to the babies on the cover of Parents Magazine.

2.) I sucked my right pointer finger until I was in the 6th grade. I only stopped because I had a very painful oral surgery on the roof of my mouth due to the fact that a tooth (!) was starting to break through the roof of my mouth. Dentist friends now tell me that said tooth was probably re-routed to the roof of my mouth because of all of those years of finger-sucking. The irony!

3.) I have a baby blanket which my Auntie Doris crocheted for me which still lives with me. It is known as Blankie. The only time I was without Blankie was in college because I was worried wild fratboys would soak it with beer.

4.) My Catholic confirmation name was Elizabeth because I thought Elizabeth Ann Seton was the most feminist saint.

5.) My middle name used to be Colleen (I changed it post-marriage) which means “girl” in Gaelic.

6.) My family has a whole archive of home videos. Roughly 80% of them feature a heinously bossy version of myself.

7.) I used to watch PGA golfing with my father for hours. After my parents split, I would stay up at night eating Pop Tarts and watching the Golf Channel.

8.) I broke my leg in the 9th grade when I was swinging from a ceiling overhang and fell and landed on a set of stars. I heard a crack. It was disgusting.

9.) I faithfully kept a diary during 3rd and 4th grade. I wrote extensively about a real-life character “T.D.”

10.) I taught my brother how to say his bedtime prayers. My parents never knew until one night my mother tucked him in and he began listing all of the relatives for whom we had been praying.

11.) “Annie” was my favorite movie growing up and I especially liked the character Punjab. Presently, my bosses are Sikhs and they wear Punjab-esque turbins and know how to speak Punjabi.

12.) It typically took me at least an hour to fall asleep when I was in grade school. To pass the wiles of insomnia, I would often play beauty parlor, McDonald’s Drive Thru, and/or pretend that my classmates were hiding in the drawers of my dresser.

13.) My sister TP and I were masochists when it came to watching “Unsolved Mysteries.” We were fascinated by this program, but at the same time knew that we would never fall asleep after watching an episode about hitchhiker abductions.

14.) My first home had a real dark room in the basement. Sometimes I would go in there and wait to see if two red eyes would appear out of the big empty darkness.

15.) One of my favorite snow days during grade school was spent with my sister as tagalongs to my father who left us to chill in a courtroom whilst he talked shop with a judge in his quarters. Sometimes, when I think back to that day, and how my father had not wanted us to be left alone in a snow enbanked suburban home with all of the home videos of my heinous self to watch, and how he instead brought us to a building where the criminal/convict per capita was probably 1:1 so that we could sit unattended in a courtroom whilst he sat in protected quarters with a judge, whereby if we should scream, no one would have heard us as we were scuttled into an elevator shaft and made into prisonfeed at the hands of a crooked probation officer.

16.) I used to love making my mother crack-up uncontrollably. She was mostly a serious mother who dealt with us using much sarcasm – but I knew she had a freak flag to fly! She used to bust up when I rendered my best impression of Jimmy Stewart doing the Campbell’s soup commercial. She would laugh through her nose so hard! Now I make her laugh on the phone all the time, usually at my own expense, but it is totally worth it.

17.) I was deeply afraid of cauliflower. I do not believe that I tried it well on into my late ‘teens.

18.) I had dozens of baby-sitters, many of whom I absolutely despised. One of the kind ones was Mrs. Butts – oh yes, Mrs. Butts. She had many cats and would apply perfume to my wrists before I went to kindergarten so that I would not smell like a feeewine.

19.) I had a very smitten admirer in the 4th grade. His name was Hunter Weatherly-Lydon. He stuffed a bouquet of flowers in my Alf back-pack on the last day of school. I reacted terribly and ended up giving them to the principal because I was too embarrassed to take them home for fear of the mockery of my father; he extrapolated that Hunter and I would sail away on our yacht one day and watch our cares settle on the waves.

20.) The best part of kindergarten was when one of the classroom gerbils escaped. We had to walk across the very expansive kindergarten room on top of chairs.

21.) There isn’t a website big enough to list all of my childhood misconceptions, but one of them involved my neighbors whom I was convinced were brother and sister, yet, they were indeed married.

22.) Both of my siblings and I were mad for corned beef hash as children. You cannot tell me that we were not in touch with our Irish heritage.

23.) Somehow, when teachers made new seating charts, they always placed me next to a boy who a.) ate glue b.) was slow to learn or c.) both.

24.) In order to make me physically eligible to ride the Magnum rollercoaster at Cedar Point, my father stuffed my tennis shoes with newspaper. It worked.

25.) It took me a very long time to learn to read, but once I caught on, I jumped a whole reading group upwards and it took me three more years to jump to the highest level. Some people might resent this kind of caste system, but I say, it taught me to fight with words. Ha Ha. Hahaha. Ha?