Choices, choices, choices

I am back for a second round of Mommy's Piggy Tales - Recording My Youth. I think recording your memories for your children is one of the most important things you can do for them. That's one reason I decided to join Jana for a second round.

While I blogged in detail about why my parents chose my name and the details I know about my birth story, I did leave out a few things out so I'll share those things today.

As I mentioned previously, my parents had moved to Maine far from everything they knew and far from their family. Both had grown up near each other and met while in high school after my mother's family moved. She was a junior in high school at the time and moved from a very small town to a large city. There were 300+ kids in my parents graduating class. There had been that many just in my mom's previous high school. To say the least, she was not very happy about the move at all. Obviously though, she would never had met my Dad so it all worked out in the end.

All of their family lived at least a six hour drive south in Massachusetts then. After all, there really was no direct route. While I-95 now exists and cuts that drive to about four hours, in the early 1970s it was not the nicely paved route it is now.

What amazes me is this...my mom's parents (the only set of grandparents I had while growing up) came to Maine when I was born...in December and again when my younger sister was born about two years later...in January. In good weather I'm sure the drive wasn't all that bad, but who knows what it would have been like in Maine in those months. It changes rather quickly!

I was also very ill as an infant and young child. In fact, my mother has shared a story from when I was an infant and very ill with some sort of infection. In fact, so ill they were afraid I would die. None of the antibiotics at the time were helping. However, there was a new one on the market and they felt it would work and was their last chance. It was tetracycline. The doctors used it and it did work. The only problem...it's not designed for children under the age of 12 - something they did not know (or didn't really care about) at that time.

So what happened? I'll share that next week.