The Beginning

Welcome to my blog and my first entry!  The main purpose of this blog is to tell my children and grandchildren about my life before they were in it.  I also want to tell about my life as it is now and my hopes for the future.

So I’ll begin at the beginning.  During World War II, a man and a woman met and fell in love.  They married and settled down in Kimble County, Texas.  (Life ended up taking them to many other places, but they started their life together in Texas.)  They soon found out that they were to be a family of four.  They were going to have twins!  Because the woman was expecting twins, the doctor thought she should go a hospital when it was time for her to give birth.  The closest hospital was 50 miles away in Kerrville, which was quite a trip in 1946.  So a week before the babies were due, they went to Kerrville and rented a motel room.

After a long labor, three little girls were born!  It was a bittersweet occasion because the first baby was stillborn.  The cord had wrapped around her neck.  You can imagine all of the different kinds of feelings everyone had during this time because of the joy of two healthy babies and the sorrow from death of the third.  I was the youngest of those three babies.  Of course, I don’t remember anything even though I was there!  My mother and my aunt O have told me about my birth.  When my mother talked to me about it, she cried even though it had happened long ago.  She felt that there were not enough nurses working.  The nurse assigned to her was in training.

My mother said that my sister and I were dark like we had been out in the sun.  We weren’t red like a lot of babies.  Our skin was wrinkled all over.  Someone said we looked like old women.  When one of my uncles saw us in the nursery, he said we were the prettiest babies he had ever seen.  My aunt O wrote in her diary that we were “sure cute and so little.”  (I was the smallest at 4 pounds 6 ounces.)

The first thing my father said when he found out that we were girls was, “Two stinkin’ girls!”  (When my younger sister was born several years later, he said, “Another stinkin’ girl!”)  Later people said it didn't matter that we were two stinkin’ girls because my father was proudly strutting around.  Someone asked my mother if she had to sew the buttons back on my father’s shirt since he was pushing out his chest so much. 

So I entered the world with joy and sadness.  And someone to play with!

 Click on photo to see a bigger photo of me and my sister.