Week Number 2!

I'm doing it! Consistent for two weeks! I can do this.

Here's week number 2's question:

When and where were you born? Describe your home, your neighborhood, and the town you grew up in.

I was born on June 23rd, 1995 at 1:05 PM in the American Fork Hospital. We lived in Utah until I was 4 1/2, moved to Texas where I went to Kindergarten at Parker Elementary School, moved back to Utah for a few months and then to Kennewick, Washington, where we lived from when I was 6 until I left to go to college.

When we first moved to Kennewick, we lived in a little red rental home on Willamette Ave. I remember thinking it was so cool that we could see the river from our front porch! There were technically 2 bedrooms in that house, my parents in one and Cameron and Andrew in the other, and I got the fancy sewing room converted into my bedroom. It had a big window on one side looking out onto the front lawn, under which was my bed. The wall opposite that was covered in drawers! I thought it was the most awesome room ever! I had a door on one side leading into the hallway and french doors on the other side that led into the living room. I remember most of the house was wooden floors,  except for I think Mom and Dad's bedroom and the TV room down the hall (which I'm fairly certain used to be a garage.) We had two giant trees in our backyard, and a swing on one of them that Cameron and I would take turns spinning each other in. I remember that house and those years fondly.

The summer I turned 8, just a few weeks before my baptism in fact, we moved from the house on Willamette to the house my parents bought on Quinault Ave in Kennewick Park. Luckily it was in the same ward, but a different school. I started out in the bedroom upstairs in the left corner, then downstairs by the TV room, and eventually downstairs in what used to be referred to as "Grandma's room". It was in this house that I went from little girl to awkward preteen to awkward teenager to somewhat confident high schooler and then off to college and beyond. It was in this house I learned to play piano, started taking an interest in boys, learned how to roller blade, made some of my best friends. It was also where I learned that not everyone is nice, boys can break hearts, and that life is harder than fairy tales once you become an adult. When I think about my parents leaving the house it makes me so sad. I grew more physically perhaps the other places we lived, but that house on the corner of Quinault and Quebec is where I became who I am.

The neighborhood we lived in was a quiet one, a few kids our age around the block, and the chapel just down the street. Since we lived on a corner/cul-de-sac, our street was usually pretty quiet and we played a lot of kickball and soccer in the streets. I remember too climbing trees all the time, reading up there and trying to get high enough to see past the rooftops and electrical wires. We also rode bikes all the time; Cameron and I used to go to the church parking lot with our friends and pretend we were police guys on our bikes chasing the bad guys down.

When people ask what the Tri Cities is like, I often call it "mini Utah". It's not a lot of the same landscape, but our school was about 15% LDS. We had enough members in Kamiakin to have release time seminary every hour of the day! It wasn't a very "exciting" town, but there are a lot of great parks, the river, a good public library where I spent a lot of time, and the weather is usually pretty mild.