Julie-old house

I remember very little about the old house. It was a time of discovery for me. When Shannon and I were first adopted and brought to that house, I remember sitting in my bed not knowing what to do with so many kids running around, I remember feeling so overwhelmed. After a little while, I wandered outside to learn how to play. I  remember Grandmas trailer, I remember big pink bubble gum being brought to us after Grandpa had walked down to the gas station. I remember the animals. I loved watching the turkeys and chickens peck at the ground. They were so fascinating! I remember that trampoline where Daniel bit me for the last time.I bit him back so hard one day that he bled. It took me forever to figure it out; figure out that when I could bite him back he would quit biting me. So when I did... I let him have it! I remember the go carts, we had so much fun watching Joel and Meg go crazy on it, we were supposed to throw sticks at them when they drove by us. I remember them wrecking it into a tree too. The day Meg fell out of the gumball tree I was not sure that she would live. I remember thinking, I will never climb a tree as long as I live because of that. The memories I do have are very short, but I loved that old house, and I loved getting to know my new family.

laurie-Old House

For some reason I always considered our "Old House" a farm. I don't remember many animals besides some chickens, but I do remember some lovely ponds filled with tadpoles. That made it farm enough for me. I use to grab my mothers jars and go "fishing" in those pools and bring home some freshly caught fish. I remember being horribly upset when my mother made me go and throw those fish back out in the pond.
Other parts of that "Farm" that stand out to me was a big Burr tree in our front yard. It was a tree I ALWAYS wanted to climb, but never seemed to get an opportunity. It seemed everytime I tried I would get burrs tossed down on me and I would have to go run for cover in the long grass next to our house. I called it the sticky grass because it was sharp. It would cut you up pretty bad so running into that grass meant that the burr wars were pretty deadly. I was only three or four so I didn't have a lot of common sense because I kept coming back for more, and just like clockwork my older brother and sister would pelt me with those burrs until I would again turn tail screaming into the sharp grass. Yet as always I would try again. You would think that that would make trusting them that much harder, but growing up I was always a little naive. If they spent time with me I wanted to please them, and so they got away with murder.
When I was four we moved. One afternoon mom and dad left Joel and Meg in charge and a dog across the street had scattered our trash all over the yard. Because our family was so large, you could usually count on some dirty diapers being spread around, and so everyone would try to clean up everything else as quickly as they could, but leave one unlucky person the nasty diapers to clean up. Well one day my older Brother and Sister decided it was Davids turn to clean up the poop. David being a little quicker then I was adamantly refused to do so. They kept pressuring him (Because I imagine they didn't want to pick up the poop either) until they came up with this idea :Lets have everyone else touch the poop to show David it's not that big a deal. Well like idiots we did. We all stuck our fingers in the dirty diaper and slowly cleaned up the mess to prove we were not babies about cleaning up the poop, All the while not realizing that Joel and Meg never touched anything. But they did cheer us on from the sidelines. I don't know if David was ever convinced, but the mess did get cleaned up.

Mom 2

Joel was about 31/2 years old when this happened.

Monday, October 10, 1983
 
          “. . . Joel got upset with me today and told me he was going to run away.  I assured him that that was okay but that I wanted him to wait till after his nap and stay in the fence.  He agreed to all those conditions so at the appointed time I made him a peanut butter sandwich, put it in a neckerchief tied to the end of a stick, kissed him good-by and he was gone  (but not far!)”

Mom

At one time when we were living at the old house in south Vidor, we experimented with raising rabbits, a "gift" from our home teacher, Brother Bob Moulton, who is Aunt Linda Hilton's dad. We had several different cages of rabbits, some suspended from the beams of the shed, some as wire boxes standing about a foot off the floor. We begin to have trouble with packs of dogs. One night they came, unaware to us, and somehow managed to pull many rabbits and baby rabbits through the wire holes in the cage. They had quite a good time, I suspect. In the morning the barn and field around the barn was littered with remains of their overnight rampage, i.e. a scene of carnage, mangled, bleeding, dead, or half-dead rabbits all around the barn. It was grisly and disturbing.

The next evening dad explained to Heavenly Father that he (dad) was the only thing that was standing between the helpless rabbits and the dogs. He promised Heavenly Father that if He would just let him know when the dogs were there, that he (Dad) would do his best to go out and protect and defend the helpless caged rabbits.

At the time we had a small set of wind chimes that hung from the ceiling fan in our bedroom. I think they had been there for months, innocuous and soft, but this particular night they behaved a little differently because in the middle of the night they started jangling so loudly that they woke me up from a sound sleep. The following is part of a journal entry about that night:

"Tuesday, October 19, 1982

 
          Last Thursday night (Friday morning) about 2:30 a.m. I woke up and became aware of the chimes (hung from a fan above our bed).  They were really clanging a lot it seemed.  Pretty soon I became aware that Johnny was awake beside me.  He quietly got up, got dressed and went out to the barn where he found all 3 of those dogs trying to get our rabbits.  He closed himself in there with them and commenced swinging with a stick. He got the big one a good blow or two before he got away.  One of the little ones escaped through the give at the bottom of the door.  The other little one he managed to corner and subdue.  He put him in a cage and the pound picked him up the next morning.
 
          When he came back in I asked how he knew to go out to the barn because I hadn’t heard anything from the bed.  He told me that the chimes were ringing so loud they woke him up and he decided the Lord must be trying to tell him something was wrong.  So he went and listened at the kitchen door and heard the dogs from there and knew to go out to the barn."

Note: One correction. It was pretty dark in our part of the neighborhood. When Johnny realized the dogs were in the barn, I don't think he actually took time to dress. He was playing the part of an avenging angel that night, and, if I remember correctly, in the almost total darkness, I suspect he looked the part.

Dishes

This story is just an example. I got it off the old family blog.

It was the night of a Church dance. While I was getting ready my dad told me to make sure I washed the huge pile of dishes waiting in the sink before I left.  Well I had a lot of things on my mind that night-the biggest was how to figure out how to get a friend of mine (who was a boy) to the church dance without my dad finding out about it. I was only 15 and to my dad that would have constituted a date. Not being allowed to date until I was 16 I knew I had to be as discrete about this boy as possible. With all these things on my mind I naturally forgot all about the dishes.

I went to the dance and that boy was there. I was miserable. I felt so guilty and I am pretty sure this boy didn't have any fun. I felt so awkward with him being there that I could barely stand to be around him. After the dance I rode home with some of my brothers friends who were going to give the boy I invited a ride home. My brothers friends decided to drop me off first and when we got to my house I got out of the car and I hugged this guy in plain site of the house.

When I walked in the door and into the living room where I knew my dad would be waiting I could see right away that he was furious about something. I didn't know it was at me until the remote control Dad had been holding came flying at me missing me by about a foot (On purpose I found out later)

I got an earful. First I was told that I was never allowed to see that boy or even talk to him ever again. I was told too end it the next day or he would (That was dads reaction to every boy that I had interest in all through High school though-He even threatened to flunk one guy out of school if he so much as saw him talking to me) and then after my dad felt I had gotten the message about this boy he moved on to the subject of the kitchen. He griped at me for probably 30 minutes before it dawned on me that the reason he was so furious was because I forgot to do the dishes.

"This is about DISHES?" I asked during a break in the conversation
"YES IT IS ABOUT THE DISHES!!!!"
"Well I can do the dishes!" I said which I promptly did
Never again did I have that kind of run in with my dad because I always did my chores first.