Preschool (Charlotte)

• Playing in the sprinklers was a really big deal, but they would never let us swim in the big pool. We only got to use the small flower sprinkler.
• I used to grab objects and sing into them as if they were microphones (sticks,dolls, blocks) all the time as if I were giving private concerts. One day Laura's boyfriend Jeffrey stole my stick as I was singing into it and threw it over the railing. I never liked him after that.
• Laura's boyfriend Jeffrey used to call himself Captain Hook and he would stumble over introducing himself when he would proclaim his name to others. I think he used to wear some sort of hat when he would say this but I could be making that up.
• Drawing all over the wall of the apartment with lipstick with Laura's help. There are pictures of us sitting with Mama and smiling with the destruction in the background visible behind the couch but Mama hadn't seen what we had done yet.
• Technically, this one is from my grandmother's but we hadn't moved to Columbia yet. When Laura and I turned 3, we had a Pooh themed party and we both were carrying around our Pooh bears all day. At this time a woman would always make us theme cakes at our birthday so we had a Pooh cake. When one of my parents cut into the cake, they were cutting off Pooh's head and I was horrified that they were killing him through this beheading. I screamed and started crying, but wouldn't tell anyone why I was upset. I was crying for like half an hour in the bathroom, while still clutching my bear. When I calmed down enough to tell my parents why I was crying they had hidden the cake away so I didn't have to see the beheaded bear and they gave me a piece with no part of the picture on it and all was well.

Preschool (Columbia: Adlerian Child Care/Bright Horizons)

• Daddy used to let me punch the code into the security box when we would try to get in every morning, but people got mad about that because he would say it to me and I would press the buttons really slowly.
• Miss Lisa was my favorite teacher, and Laura named her stuffed rabbit after her. She was only around for a year. She used to read us a book about these monkeys that ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and jumped on the bed. I remember it being a good book, but I remember nothing else about it.
• Laura's boyfriend Richie, who was a year older than us, used to have to say his vowels during naptime, and since I never slept, I learned them too from listening to him talk in the dark.
• Laura and I used to watch Darkwing Duck and Stuntdogs every morning, and Daddy was in law school at this point so he wasn't going to work early. I always remembered feeling like I was late because we would get to preschool at like 9:30 and all the rest of the children would be there an hour before us.
• Richie brought a book of ghost stories that stopped me from "hiding well" when playing hide and seek for about 5 years. In the story a woman was playing hide and seek on her wedding day and she hid in a trunk and somehow got locked in it. No one found her until a maid was cleaning a few weeks later and found the dead bride in her wedding gown in this trunk. I don't know who let anyone read this to a group of 3-5 year olds.
• My boyfriend Jeff licking a table that had been sprayed with Windex, and me deciding that he had issues.
• Laura ate some chapstick and I thought it was a horrible thing to do and kept it a secret for like a month until I decided to tell my grandmother. I thought it was toxic I think.
• We went on Joe Pinner, an ex-weatherman's, show called Mr. Knows-It, with our class. My friend Jeremy said he wanted to grow up to be a baked potato, and Laura and I discussed that he would look funny wrapped in tin foil sitting inside an oven. At this time in my life I was obsessed with this book that talked about occupations and I liked the picture of the bride, so I announced I wanted to be a bride and a mommy on this show. He misunderstood me and thought I said writer and the teacher had to correct him.
• I learned from this teacher with long red hair that we called Rapunzel that glue was made from horseshoes.
• I had issues with this girl named Sarah Kelsey Falls who thought she was better than me because she had some sort of Little Mermaid shirt. She also had one of those books that you pressed the buttons to make sounds while reading the story aloud dealing with The Little Mermaid and I was jealous of this. She was mean, but I don't really remember anything specific she did.
• I remember Laura breaking her wrist when she fell off the swings while trying to jump out of it the week before we went to the beach. She walked around with a pink blanket over her arm even when she was being x-rayed the next day since Mama didn't think she was hurt that badly and didn't take her to the doctor.
• Laura and I went over to Richie's house a lot, and I would play with his sister Casey's dolls which fascinated me because I could take their temperature and I was obsessed with sickness at this time. I also wrote Richie loves Laura with a permanent marker on her dry erase board, and Richie was mad.
• Richie had cool Jurassic Park dinosaurs that had parts that you could take off to make them look like they'd been fighting each other. These were the only toys of Richie's that I liked. I did enjoy the game where Laura, Richie, and I would pretend to be the X-Men. I was always Rogue, and Laura and Richie were Jean and Cyclops since they were a "couple."
• Laura and I used to stay up late to watch Scarecrow and Mrs. King on the Family channel. I comprehended nothing dealing with the Cold War, but I definitely understood the romance between Lee and Amanda. We also used to shout out "Mrs. King car" every time we saw a station wagon that was brown and white because Amanda drove one.
• We used to hang out with Daddy's law school friends and John Gettys would do a Scooby Doo voice impersonation so we called him "Scooby Doo John" (very creative). For this reason he was my favorite of Daddy's friends. He still hangs out with all of them, but John moved to Rock Hill so I haven't seen him in like 8 years.
• My friend Mary was very shy and when I called her on the phone she would never talk. Her mother would then take the phone from her and explain to me that she hadn't figured out that people couldn't hear her nodding.
• Laura and I had a friend named Meredith Cook who had red poofy hair that was kind of like a volumized bowl cut. Her mom would pick us up from preschool a lot and we seemed to go to the library a lot which I loved because it had trees growing out of it (It still does). The only thing I remember about her house is watching the Fairy Tale Theatre version of Rumpelstilskin while sitting on her brown couch.
• There was a tree right outside our apartment at Quail Run that I would always climb even when I was wearing dresses. I used to climb up the slides on the playground on the top of them since they were enclosed like a sort of tube. The only other things I remember about Quail Run when we lived there are that we went to the pool a lot, caught some tadpoles with some girl named Stephanie that lived in the building, and tried to feed the ducks with bread around the little lake.I have more memories of Quail Run when Sarah Gates lived there and we went over there all the time in 3rd-4th grade.
• After finding this picture, I have remembered the significance of my pacifier which I called "my bobby" (apparently this was my first word too, and at the time my parents though I was referring to a boy). I had the multicolored pacifier to distinguish it from Laura's. Additionally, I had another pacifier that I didn't put in my mouth, but I did rub the top of my nose with it. I would often lose it and would have to tell my parents to find my nose bobby. When Laura and I turned 4 we had to get rid of our pacifiers since the preschool teachers thought it was weird we had them still and kept complaining to our parents. My parents made up some lie that we were sending the used pacifiers to our baby cousin and we have pictures of us putting them in the mail. That night I forgot we had gotten rid of them and asked for my bobby. I tried to pretend that it was the name of my new teddy bear that I had gotten for my birthday, and so from then on my bear was named Bobby Blue Santa Claus Duncan (this name was based on all my favorite things at the time). I have no idea what happened to this bear though because I haven't seen it since we moved to our house the summer after kindergarten.