EPTThe first thing I remember is looking up and seeing stars painted on the ceiling. My mom later told me that she and my dad made those stars an exact replica of the solar system. I have dim memories of a rocking chair that I loved and my mom showed me a dirty brown blanket later that I was attached at the hip to from the moment I was born. It was small and silky, and I would always rub it against my arm and smile up at my mom.
The second and last early memory that I have is of my sister being born when I was a bit over 3 years old. I remember a small room and a bathtub, and a dream that I had the night before of a song that my preschool teacher taught us to sing when babies were born to wish them a good life. I couldn't remember any of the song when Emma was born, so I made something up on the spot and just yelled her name in a vague semblance of melody. My parents thought it was hilarious and I wanted to hold her right off the bat. I don't have any memories of holding her, but I do remember being obsessed with umbelical cords and wanting to cut hers off. My parents wouldn't let me, which is probably a good thing- I was as clumsy then as I am now.
I spent those first few months cuddling with my sister and reading her books. I remember lying in bed and hearing my sister crying one day and telling her to stop, and then cuddling with her until she did.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping as a little kid. I never felt tired when my parents were trying to tuck me into bed, and so I would always devise clever strategies of getting out of my room and sneaking around during the night feeling like a ninja. I snuck out of my crib one night and into my parent's room, and when my mom asked me why I was there I told her I couldn't sleep. I thought she would make me go back to my room, but she let me sleep in my parent's bed and I felt very warm and secure being with them. From that point on, I always wanted to be cuddled to sleep by one or the other of my parents- I couldn't sleep without it. Up until I was about 8 years old, either my mom, my dad, or both of them would lie with me and cuddle with me until I fell asleep, then quietly get up and leave. My mom would sometimes sing lullabies to me and my dad would always read me books.
When I was 5 years old, my parents started trying to teach me to read from a horrible big textbook made for little kids. They made me practice for an hour a day and every single day I would spend that hour arguing that I didn't ever need to learn how to read and that plenty of people went through their lives without reading. Eventually, through my parent's exasperated persistence, I understood the basics and suddenly I couldn't stop reading. The first nonpicture book that I remember reading was a mini book that came with a doll that my sister got for her birthday. I was about 5 years old and she didn't read, so I grabbed it and brought it to my room with a flashlight and stayed up under the covers with the flashlight on the book reading late into the night.
At one point when I was a small kid we moved to Boston for a year because my dad had something that he needed to do for his work there. I have almost no memories from that time except for there being a lot of snow and seeing a light switch in our small apartment house. I thought it was seriously awesome that I could press a switch and then something interesting would happen after, so I flipped every switch that I could find in every room. One of the switches turned on the fan and you could make the fan go faster the farther up you pressed the switch, and I would always laugh when the fan started to turn quickly. I don't have any memories of this, but on the plane ride back from Boston I apparently spent the entire time playing with the light and the air conditioner switch above the seats and asking my dad what all the buttons did.
I also remember learning to play my first video game around this time. I don't know if this was in Boston or not, but for my birthday or Christmas or something my parents got me a game console that plugged into the TV and only played one or two games. I played an educational game and I don't remember anything about it besides that I was obsessed with it and that I had tons of fun playing it.
When I was very small my dad was sort of a distant figure and I never wanted to be separated from my mom. I thought my dad was sort of interesting, but I never wanted to be apart from my mom. As I grew more and started becoming more curious about everything, my dad was always there to tell me any answers I had. He told me what molecules and atoms were when I was 4, and I remember asking if there was anything smaller than an atom. He told me that there were neutrons, protons, and electrons. I asked if there was anything smaller than that and he said that he had no idea, and that's the first time I remember my dad not knowing something that I asked him.
When I was about 5, my dad started trying to teach me how to ride a bike. He rode his bike to work every morning and he thought it was something that I should learn. He had a bike with two seats on it, and I sat in the back and pretended to be the one who was pedaling the wheels. I got a tricycle for my birthday one year- I don't remember what year it was- and I spent about a week literally doing nothing but going up and down the hill outside my house on my tricycle. I hit a bump in the road one day and fell face forward, and I got a huge scratch on my face and I ran inside crying to my parents that I never wanted to ride a bike again. They hugged me and my dad gave me a band-aid, and they both made me feel better. A week later I timidly ventured back outside with my tricycle and started practicing again.
I still remember the first time that I learned how to ride my bike without any training wheels on it. My dad and I had been going down to Gasworks Park every day to practice it, and he would push me forward and hold my bike up by the back seat. I couldn't look back and I was determined to learn how to do it myself but I was scared to try to move forward without my dad's help, and suddenly I heard his voice behind him and he was nowhere near me and I was going by myself. I felt terrified but victorious. My dad and I started riding our bikes to school together after I got confident enough to ride along by myself every I got on.
Every fourth of july and new years when we were kids, my sister and I would bake cookies and lemonade to sell to the countless people walking to Gasworks Park to see the fireworks. We sat there behind a mock store counter that we made out of wood yelling that we were selling cookies. If anybody wasn't interested in our cookies, we would make them interested. I would run up to people and stand in front of them and ask if they wanted a cookie, and say that they could have one bite free of charge. I secretly only gave people bites free of charge so that I had an excuse to eat the cookie if they still said that they didn't want to buy them after they tried them out, so every year my sister and I would be filled up by the end with half-eaten chocolate chip cookies. I remember counting the money at the end and discovering that my sister and I had made over 100 dollars, and I felt like the richest man on the planet. The most money that I had ever had at that point was a 20 dollar bill, so 100 dollars was a ridiculously awesome amount of cash.
When I was about 6, I started having anger problems. I would mostly get angry at my mom when she wouldn't let me do stuff. I got into serious tantrums over tiny things. My mom wouldn't let my sister and I go to Seattle Center one Saturday when we wanted to go on the ferris wheel, and I went into a screaming rage and started throwing things around. My parents both held me down and my sister was off to the side pulling her hair because she was so stressed out from it, she said she thought mom and dad were hurting me. When my tantrums kept happening at the same level of severity, my parents brought me to a bunch of child psychologists that I don't remember and they had me run through a bunch of tests that I don't remember doing and eventually said that I had one of the most severe cases of ADHD they had ever seen. I had no idea what ADHD was and I didn't really care, but my mom really took it to heart and started to read a bunch of books about ADHD and what to do with kids who had it. I started going on meds and I didn't really feel very much of a difference, and I'm still not sure whether or not they made a difference at all.
When I was in kindergarden, I had a friend a grade above me who had a big ponytail that he had been growing since he was born. I thought he was a cool kid and I looked up to him, so I wanted a ponytail too and I started growing one. I had it until I was 12, and it sort of defined me for awhile.
My parents had me live a very active life. I always went to soccer camp during the summer and I was the star soccer player of my elementary school. I could juggle the ball with my feet really well and it was an excuse to run around, so I was pretty into it. My dad and I also always played catch as a kid, and one day we went to a park when I was 7 or 8 to play catch and he accidentally hit my nose with the ball. I started crying and said I didn't want to play catch anymore, and I became scared of baseballs for a year or two until I finally mustered up the courage to ask him to play catch again. I remember playing laser tag on my birthday, and I was running around smoky corners and my dad had a laser gun around my eye level and the gun smashed into my nose. It made a perfect half-circle on my nose and I had a scar there for a few years.
In Kindergarden, I went to a small religious school called the Waldorf school. We spent our day making arts and crafts and napping and playing outside, and I went to Kindergarden twice there. The second year I met my friend Skyler there, and I'm not sure where or how I met him. We were the two most hyper and loud kids in the school, and we would always run around together and we would always tackle each other and get into wrestling matches in the middle of the school. I remember one day everybody in my class all went out back to take a hike in the nature, and I wanted to feel like I was the leader of the class so I cut the whole line in order to be right behind the teacher. I felt big and proud up front, and then walked off the beaten path a little bit and I accidentally stepped on a beehive that was on the ground. All the bees started swarming out angrily at my and stinging my hand and my neck, and I started crying and running away. I sat there crying and my teacher called my parents to tell them what happened, and I had 4 or 5 stings on my hand and my teacher had more. They came to get me and I didn't ever want to go back into the forest, and I felt silly for wanting to be in the front of the line so badly.
In the same school in Kindergarden, I started getting curious about what girls look like without any clothes on. There was a girl that I was friends with in my class, so I grabbed her and we went underneath a tent and did an I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours thing, and one of our classmates figured out that we were doing it and ran to tell the teacher. She grabbed us and put me and my friend in time-outs and made me stand at the corner without moving. I cried because it was the first time that I had really ever felt embarrassed about anything. My parents came to pick me up early, and I remember watching my teacher having a long talk with them and when I got home my mom showed me a video about babies and how pregnancy works.
When I was 8, I walked across the street to my neighbor Casey's house and walked in to see what he was doing. He was quite a bit older than I was and I always thought that he was cool, and he was sitting there playing a game on his computer called Starcraft. I was mesmerized because it looked so awesome, and I asked him if I could borrow it. I brought it back home and installed it on my computer, and started playing it nonstop. I never gave it back to him and I felt bad about it, but if I gave it back I wouldn't be able to keep playing- I started playing for an hour a day, two hours, three hours, until my parents told me that it was time to stop. I still had anger problems so I would go into tantrums whenever they told me to stop playing, and so they would turn off my computer and tell me to go to my room and I would sit there and read, and my anger would go away immediately.
We went to my grandmas's house one day to visit her and my cousins, and my cousin Ryan, who was another role-model of mine. He was on his computer the whole time playing a 3-D fighting game, and I asked him to play and he let me, and I thought he was awesome. We bonded over that and every time I came over after that Ryan and I played the game together.
It was my 7th birthday and I wanted a dog more than anything, because my dad would always let me read the comics and there was one about a boy and his dog, and I wanted to have a furry friend like he did, plus I was really into Clifford the Big Red Dog and I just thought dogs were awesome in general. My family and I went to a puppy mill and I laughed and tried to cuddle with every puppy that I could, and they kept crawling all over me and licking my face. One of them was particularly excited and he jumped on me and started snuggling on my lap, and all of the dogs were differentiated by their tail color and his was salmon-colored, but I couldn't remember the name for salmon so I told my parents that I wanted the tuna-fish doggy.
We went back a few times because the puppies were so little and it was bad to separate them from their parents when they were that young, and when the tuna-fish dog was ready on my birthday we drove down and picked him up, and I felt bad for him because he was in a cage on the car ride back and I was scared that he wouldn't like it in his cage. We had some family debate about what to name him, and my mom and sister wanted to name him Finnigan, which I thought was a dumb name because it sounded like an old wrinkly school teacher. I had a friend named Spiral at school who had a cool older brother named Phoenix, and I thought Phoenix was a totally awesome name, so I told my mom and sister that and eventually we agreed that the dog's name would be Phoenix Finnigan Loftus. We got back home and set up a section of the kitchen made specifically for him, with a cage around so that he couldn't get out and newspaper set up on the ground to stop him from peeing all over the place. The first night we had him he started howling and crying in the night, and I felt bad for him so I walked downstairs with my blanket and cuddled with him the whole night because cuddling always made me feel better about things.
I eventually started doing everything with Phoenix, and he became the main man in my life. I brought him to school with me and played Tetherball with him, because I was really into Tetherball. He got really excited by the ball going around the metal pole, so he jumped up and kept trying to hit it with his nose and I thought that was hilarious. We also did a seriously awesome job potty-training him, and we fed him peanut butter to get him to come when we called his name.
