kayla aimee: only slightly neurotic

A bouquet of newly sharpened pencils

via

Every time I go to the grocery store I pass a display of brand new school supplies, which makes me all nostalgic about Back To School season. It also makes me think of the above quote from You've Got Mail. I actually can't stand the movie You've Got Mail but my best friend played it multiple times a week in our college dorm room and thus, it is burned into my memory. I can't hold a grudge because we only owned one movie each and my pick was The Princess Diaries. This is probably why we didn't get a lot of dates in college. And by we, I totally mean only me. 

My obsession with school supplies began in elementary school. Once the calendar pages flipped to July, I set about my mission to annoy my mother into taking me shopping for back to school supplies. Typically she made me hold out until August, back when summer break actually lasted an entire summer and students didn't file through the classroom doors until right around Labor day. After picking out the perfect Trapper Keeper, I'd spend hours of my (summer, no school) day meticulously organizing my Lisa Frank pencil box. I'm pretty sure I've always been slightly neurotic.

And still, I kinda wish I had a reason to buy school supplies right now.

Nostalgia: Stuff I learned in books

When I was younger I was obsessed with a book called Invisible Lissa. In it, the main character kept a sucker in her dresser that she had been eating when she had strep throat and then saved in case she ever needed to get strep throat again in order to be able to stay home sick from school.

I thought that was an excellent plan. Clearly I'd yet to have strep throat. Or any misadventures with Chloraseptic spray. 

The problem with my plan was, I had not been sick and thus could not stash an emergency sickness sucker in my drawer. So I waited until my little sister got sick and then I offered her a lollipop and took it away when she was halfway through with it. That is both cruel and disgusting.

I then proceeded to wrap said lollipop in plastic and stashed it in my sock drawer. I know.

Then came junior high and the first day I ever wanted to stay home because up until that point I was all BOOKS! LEARNING! YAY FOR SCHOOL! I LOVE SCHOOL! SCHOOL IS MY BFF!

Except in junior high, I worried that eighth grader on the bus really WAS going to stuff me in my locker and so I whipped out my trusty germ sucker.

I figured I'd come down with something horrible that would keep me out of school for at least a week or so, giving me plenty of time to a) convince my parents to drive me to school every day and b) come up with an intricate route to my classes that avoided any place I might run into said eighth grader.

I woke up the next morning fully expecting a fever and possibly some sort of lesions, maybe a rash or some hives. And nothing. The flippin' thing didn't work.

So I did something else that I'd read in a book. I faked sick and when my mother left the room I stuck the thermometer to the lightbulb until it read 101 degrees. I feel for today's teenagers who are stuck with those newfangled non-mercury thermometers.

I'm sure I learned a lot of important stuff in books too. I mean, I read a lot of Amish Fiction, y'all. But mostly I remember getting into trouble for trying out stuff I read in a book.

Like when I read a survival guide and thought it would be a good idea to get lost in the woods and try to find my way home with nothing but a bottle of water and a swiss army knife. I was seven. Or that time I read Harriet The Spy and thought it would be a great idea to build a dumbwaiter from my closet to the basement. Newsflash: not such a great idea after all.

I reminisced fondly about my childhood shenanigans until Scarlette came along. Now I'm like NOTHING IS SAFE! NOT EVEN READING!

Five For Friday | Childhood Nostalgia

My favorite childhood toy was my Teddy Ruxpin Bear. I also had Grubby. Holla! I actually still have my Teddy Ruxpin. I kept it thinking one day I would pass it and it's obsolete cassette tapes on to my child. Except that at some point in the 25 years that I've owned him, he lost an eyeball.

And a talking teddy bear with a hollowed out eye socket is probably one of the creepiest things you could give a kid. So I'm just going to give her my baby doll that has anatomically correct boy parts instead. Win, win.

My favorite song from when I was little was Katie and Tommy She's In Love With The Boy by Trisha Yearwood. Except I thought the lyrics were: "Later on outside the tasty feast" and "You yourself was just a hay seeding plow boy who didn't have a row to hoe."And I always wondered "how was he a hay seeding plowboy if he had no rows to hoe? That crazy Trisha Yearwood and her lyrics that don't make any sense."

My favorite childhood memory is hands down the time my cousins and I spent an entire summer reenacting Cool Runnings in my grandparent's apple tree. Right.

My childhood crush was three words. Jonathan. Taylor. Thomas. You could not see my walls for all of the Teen Bop posters covering it. And bless your soul if you tried to touch the remote control while Home Improvement was on. I will cut you, 4 year old little sister.

The thing I was most afraid of as a kid was people poisoning my Halloween candy. Do people still tell kids this story?

I remember our teachers telling us that bad people used needles to shoot drugs into tootsie rolls and other such treats. And McGruff The Crime Dog coming to our school and telling us to JUST SAY NO and also to let our parents inspect our candy for things before we ate it. And my parents dutifully spreading out all of the candy that we'd collected in our safe, suburbanite neighborhood and throwing out anything that looked like maybe someone tampered with it.

I lived in fear that I was going to eat a snickers and inadvertently become addicted to heroin. So my childhood was totally normal, right?

* I decided to add the link-up to this post because I wanted to see what everyone else had to say. If you do this post on your blog, link it up below so that we can all read/comment on each others!

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Dusting off the old journals

While I was going through my old journals in order to accurately tell our story, I discovered many interesting things about myself as follows:

In junior high I was afraid that someone would find my journal and distribute it throughout the school. So I used code names for everyone. Very logical of me. No one reading my journal would have ever guessed that I hated Amanda Lee for saying I looked like an inmate in my new striped GAP sweater because I used a code name for her. Unless that is, the person reading my journal flipped to the back, where I kept a list of everyone and their code names.

In sixth grade I discovered that girls were mean and boys were cruel and started praying for God to change my face into a pretty one at night while I slept. Apparently, I had God confused with Dr. 90210.

I also found the fake journal that I kept in ninth grade, the year I discovered that my mother snooped around my room. In the fake journal, I was a really good kid who's only worry was her schoolwork and the occasional rambling about boys to keep it realistic. In the real journal, I worried endlessly about when I was going to be able to fill out my bra. Actually, that journal is pretty similar to the one I keep now...

In fourth grade I thought that if I had a little girl I'd name her Ashleigha. In fifth grade I thought I'd name her Jaiyzah. In sixth grade I decided I'd have twin girls and name them Lark and Dove. Obviously, sixth grade was a bad year for me. In tenth grade I settled on Lainie (which I still love, but Jeff shot  down.) Now there is a new name in my journal and the problem with infertility is, probably one of our friends or family will use that name before we ever even get pregnant. Lucky for them, I'm very generous. I'd totally give up Jaiyzah. You're welcome.

I also learned that I am very inquisitive. Like, for example one time Jeff brought me a present from Disney World and I used exactly 9 pages to decipher what it meant. Nine pages. Front and back. 

And I used to not only date the pages in my journal, but wrote down the time as well. The nine pages about my Disney World gift? I wrote that 1:14am. I have no idea where my car keys are but if you need to know how I was feeling at 7:28pm on the day I tripped in front of the cutest boy in school during gym class? Oh, I can tell you.

Wait, does that baby doll have a ...

When I was five years old, my parents had a baby. To prepare me for this baby, some of our neighbors thoughtfully bought me a baby doll. It was supposed to be a realistic baby doll, I suppose to help me with the transition. Except that my parents had a little girl and the baby doll? It was a boy.

Now I know it LOOKS like a girl, what with all that pink lipstick and the fact that I used to dress it in my infant sister's clothing. But it was most definitely a boy, a fact that a quick peek under that fluffy pink dress would verify.

Because that baby doll had a little plastic doodle.

It did! And this was in 1988, before the days that baby dolls talked or tinkled or breastfed (the latter of which, apparently, you can score for only $112 on ebay. Merry Christmas to me!) were the norm.

I took that doll with me everywhere and people were fascinated with it. Mostly because my grandmother showed all of them it's teeny little man parts. And when I say "all of them" I mean every single person we ever  encountered. The lady taking our order at Taco Bell. A person we happened to walk past in the shoe department at Macys. Her pastor. Everyone.

She'd take the baby doll from me and say in a hushed voice "Look at this little doll! Just look at this! It has a little wenis*! A real little wenis!" And whomever she was accosting with the doll would exclaim over it and call over all of their co-workers and they'd all stand around and say things like "Have you ever seen anything like it in all your days?"

21 years later I still have that doll. I've never met anyone else that had one. All of my friends think it is creepy. My husband likes to pretend that it doesn't exist, which is why I like to randomly leave it on his pillow.

I'm really hoping that someone else on the internet has encountered one of these baby dolls. I'm also hoping it wasn't because my grandmother introduced you to it while you were grocery shopping.

(* I know it isn't called a wenis, I just really like that word and I don't want my blog to come up in adult searches. I'm very delicate. Also, we're getting so close to the top 20! Thank you greatly for your votes. I wish I could bestow you all with your own little boy parts baby doll!)