I Love You Twelve

1. My Family

My sister and I were crazy growing up. Not in a bad way, it was more along the lines of we had insane imagination. We spent every single minute together on top of that. My dad was a truck driver so he wasn’t home all that much. Most of the time it was my mom, my sister, and myself.

Sometimes I wonder how my mom did it. She had me. My head was always in the clouds. I was particular about how I spent my time and what I was playing and who I was playing with. I cried if we missed lunch. I was bullied a lot at church and at school, so there were many days she had to figure out how to get me to stop crying. I loved Disney and that was all I talked about. Ever. I went through 293048924239482304 pages of paper just writing down story character names. I always begged her to put pigtails in my hair. I also pitched a fit every time my dad had to leave for work up until I was about ten years old.

And then she had my sister. She was a little ball of energy who was difficult to keep up with. She was also a bit of a daredevil (still kind of is). She was hilarious. She accidentally learned bad words and no one ever knew how or where. She loved getting dressed up. She put up with me accidentally knocking out two or three of her teeth. She instigated a lot. She had a little blue piggy she carried around everywhere she went and refused to eat ham or any type of meat made from pig meat. (Last year I accidentally told her that sausage was made from pigs…I thought she knew! I swear!) She loved horses and always asked for one.

My sister and I are quite a pair. We argued a lot, but it was never something that would ever take away how close we were. My parents used to get so irritated because we would be laughing hysterically one moment, and then the next we would be smacking each other around screaming, and then the next we were best buds again. It’s still that way. I don’t know why that is, but it is.

Our favorite movie was The Lion King. (I’m trying to think of stories I haven’t shared yet. I don’t think I have told this one?). When it came out on VHS, my sister actually got to see it before me. Because I had a speech meet.

Yes, I, Samantha J. Clark, had a speech meet. In which, I believe, I got a first place ribbon. Thank you, thank you. -curtsies-

Anyways, I was so upset that she got to see it before me. She didn’t get to watch the entire thing, so I suppose that kind of made up for the fact that she got to hear Simba and Nala talk before I did. But it never made up for the fact that she got to hear “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” before me. Haha.

We used to rewind that part over and over and over again. To the point where my mom took our VHS and stuck it in a cabinet way up in Heaven for a few weeks.

We still sang the song repeatedly though. Sorry, Mom.

And then there was a lion cub at Burger King.

Nicole and Samantha freak out.

No one ever believes me. But alas, it happened.

To this day, I find it humorous that there was a lion at Burger King…in the middle-of-no-where-of-Ohio.

Yeah. His name was Simba and all.

Our parents bought us both Simba and Nala stuffed animals– followed by Bambi and Falene stuffed animals. We pretty much thought that was the best thing ever. Of course, the lions and the deer were BFF’s. We had an entire storyline of how they met and why the deer weren’t in the forest anymore.

Pretty sure our parents thought we lost our minds. But they encouraged playing with stuffed animals and using our imagination. Our dad is the one who taught us that stuffed animals could talk, you know.

I’m thankful for my family and silly memories like these. Because when things are hard, those are the memories I go back to before anything else.