Don't you remember the days of the old school yard?

I’ve been tagged by the Blakkat to post about my earliest memory. My earliest memory is pretty fragmented, it’s sitting in a rocking chair rocking very hard with the sun streaming through the window. Ever-so-angelic, perhaps, but not particularly riveting.

My most memorable moment at kinder, however, is another story.

When I was four, I went to a small-town kinder. There were two groups at the kinder, “town group” and “country group”. I, being from outside the town, was in the country group, along with a boy who cracked his head open not once but twice on the slide, a boy I would go on to have a major crush on in Year Seven (but who appears in the kinder photo looking, shall we say, a little stunned), and a girl I ran into recently who has barely changed since then (although she IS taller, married and expecting her first baby).

I loved kinder. You can tell how much I loved it by looking at my kinder photo, where I was so enamoured of one of the dress ups that I wore it in every shot*. Not that I'm posting that here.

But when I wasn’t dressing up, I was out on the playground equipment. One particular day, I was climbing around the edge of the monkey bars when I had the bright idea to turn my body around so that I was facing out. I turned slowly, hooked my hands into the bars above my shoulders and….found I was stuck. Facing outwards with my heels just holding me onto the rung below me, I had stretched my hands far enough behind my back that I couldn’t confidently let go with one to allow me to spin around. Fortunately, a small boy named Brett** noticed my plight, and ran to tell the kindergarten teacher. Here is what he said:

“Mrs Taylor! Mrs Taylor! Come quick – Gigglewick tried to do a dangerous stunt, and now she’s stuck!!!!”

Moments later, the charming Mrs Taylor*** appeared and released me – but I have never forgotten the sheer terror of that moment, nor how relieved I was when she arrived.

Of course, not more than a year later I fell out of a tree while brushing my hair and hit my head on a concrete block causing an exorcist-like bout of concussion, so it’s fair to say I probably didn’t learn anything from the experience.



So I guess I’d best get into the business of tagging people – how about the We Do Talk About Our Kids crew (Miz, Actonb, INCraig, Meva and Melbournegirl) surely you were all as delightful in your young days as your own children are now?



* in my defence, it was a shiny, hot-pink cocktail dress with purple spots, and if that isn’t the most glamorous thing I had ever seen I don’t know what was****

** Brett later went out with one of my sisters friends for quite a while. He didn’t remember the kinder incident when I asked him. Probably unsurprising, given that his life wasn’t IN MORTAL DANGER.

*** Mrs Taylor, I am amazed to report, is still teaching at the kinder I went to. I was exclaiming that she must be ancient by now, but my mother helpfully pointed out that in fact Mrs Taylor is at least five years younger than my mum (who is now 55) which would have made her around 25 when she was my kinder teacher.

**** Also, my sister and I had a dress up box that included my mother’s strappy black high-heeled sandals and closed toe, black leather high-heels (I now have a pair remarkably similar). We used to call the closed toe heels “shopping shoes”. Now I am a mother, I can confidently say that anyone who wore those particular shoes shopping would have found out sharpish that they were making a huge mistake.