Nostalgia Meme

Here's the question which I picked up from Katherine:

What were you doing 10, 20, 30 years ago?

Finding photos for this project was hard! Even as a teen, I was the only one in our family who bothered to take photos, and all my pictures were taken with my little Vivitar 110 camera. Let's just say that they're nowhere near professional quality and leave it at that. When John and I began our family, the first thing I asked for was a "real" camera, but I'm still the primary photographer, which means there are relatively very few photos of me. But, from the bottom of the family albums (which are at the end of a long line of scrapbooking projects) here's a blast from the past:

Ten Years Ago:

1997: John and I celebrated 6 years of marriage. I was still into high-maintenance hair. John Mark was 4, Becca was 2, and Philip was born in February. In January of 1998, we would discover that we were expecting Baby #4! I was a Creative Memories Consultant, and it was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time. As one of the first consultants in our little town and since there were no local craft stores at that time, my business took off in a big way. 1997 was an exciting but very stressful year. I'm not a consultant any longer, but it was a great experience for me and I developed some skills in running a business that have served me well in many other ways over the past several years.

Twenty Years Ago:

1987: I graduated from high school in the spring of '87 and began college at LSU that fall. I have to show this picture because these are the only academic awards I've won in my entire life: 5th Place in the state in the Virginia Junior Classical League competition, and Magna Cum Laude on the National Latin Exam. In high school, I was a mediocre student at best- I was all about music. But I had a fabulous Latin teacher named Maureen O'Donnell. Mrs. O'Donnell had a way of squeezing knowledge into even the most reluctant of her students, and these awards prove it. We were all her "Soo-pah Scho-lahs," as she called us in her thick Boston accent.

This is another photo from 1987: me and my BFF Christy. I met Christy on the marching band field when we moved to Fairfax at the beginning of my Junior year. We were kindred spirits and inseparable. When my family moved back to Alabama midway through my Senior year, her family took me in for 6 months. In this photo, we are probably laughing at her older brother Steven, who was a college student at George Mason and a computer whiz. He lived in the basement and was constantly teasing us. Christy's family adopted me as one of their own, and I adored them all.

Thirty Years Ago:

You thought I was kidding when I talked about our Halloween costume reincarnations and told you that my little brother had to be a pink clown too! Here's the proof:

In 1977, I was 8 and my little brother Matt was 3. My youngest brother, Will, was still a baby. See those awful Buster Brown shoes I'm wearing? Along with huge plastic-framed glasses, Garanimal outfits, a penchant for reading, and those hated shoes, my parents could have hung a huge sign on me that said "DORK" and I couldn't have received any more teasing than what I already got at school. Kids can be so mean. My parents would divorce in the spring of 1978 and it was the beginning of some very difficult years. Although I was a star student in Mrs. Lau's Language Arts class, 3rd grade quickly became a misery for me in Mrs. Ehl's math class as we got into topics like multiplication. My parents had their own problems and when I did receive help- usually long after it was needed- my assignments were accompanied by dread and tears. My multiplication turtle was bare long after almost everyone else's was completed. It was a tough year. But you'll be happy to know that I can say my multiplication tables with the best of them now, and I have ample evidence of God's faithfulness to me during some very tough times.

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I'd love to hear your stories too- please play along!