It is August 2007, and I am 10 years old. We did my story when I was two, and it seems like a long time ago. A lot of things have happened and changed since then! At that time I was an only child and I thought that was all right, but Dad and Mom thought differently. Now there are three of us kids. And, of course, for me there have been school and plays and ball playing. When we wrote the story I had a great-great-great-grandma, who was 97, and she has gone now. She died when I was about four; but I still have Grandma Brigitte and Grandpa Ron Drury in Waterloo and Grandma Linda at Cherokee. They have always come when there is something special in my life like plays and stuff. They like me a lot.
Some things are the same as when I was two: My dad is still working at Miller Products and my mom at Clarke County Dental Health Center. I still have my good friends, Byron and K England, who have lived next door to us all this time. Their story is in this book. My dad and I still go fishing in our same boat, although we have only one dog to go with us now. That is Cocoa. Mandy isn't living with us any more but she's still alive. I'll tell you about my life:
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First, when Iwrote before, I said I was soon going to have a little brother or sister. This turned out to be Sierra. She was born in Des Moines, and I went up to see her. She sure was tiny. I thought she'd be nice but it turns out, she is annoying. She likes to tease me, like when I have friends coming over, she'll say, "Ha-ha, I get to go swimming." She screams around the house and fights with me, I suppose it is because I'm the big brother. I guess little sisters are like that. |
Sierra is seven years old now and she sure is a girl! She likes dresses, and make-up, and purses. She wants her hair combed just right - none of the things I ever thought about. And she doesn't do any of the things I like to do. Instead of playing ball she takes dance lessons - tap dancing and tumbling. But I guess she's okay. I have gotten used to her. Savanna is three. She had some problems when she was little and had to be in the hospital several times. She's okay now. I don't know if they want me to say this but mom is 33 and dad is 41.
We swim in the pool in Osceola but I haven't taken lessons. I just go play in the water. Savannah goes, too, but she stays in the little baby part or sometimes she runs along the side. Some weeks we go often but in others it is just Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
There will lots of changes pretty soon bcause we are moving to our farm. It is near Murray, Iowa, a mile south of the water tower. It has 200 acres, and Dad has built us a new house. Dad worked really hard and built it all by himself except the family kind of helped. I helped with sheet rock and pouring concrete in the walls and the floor downstairs. Mom painted and did the wood floors. It is almost finished. We have to put up the railing, and the trim, and put in sidewalks. The garage isn't done. We have to put on the siding and sheet rock, and do Mom's scrapbook. She is still doing those and takes lots of pictures. Sierra helps by keeping Savannah occupied. We are almost ready to move out there. Now we stay there on weekends. We all like it except Grandma Linda who has come to see it. She is kind of mad at our dog Cocoa and the chickens. I believe she thinks it smells out there.
We have two ponds with fish in them. One that runs down by our house is big enough we can put our boat on it. In the pond there are blue gills, perch, hybrid bass, and hybrid crappies.
Sometimes we catch them and eat them. If they are too little, we throw them back. We also have baby wild ducks on the pond, and we have a pet duck, Jeffrey, that we got at Farm and Home.
You will see in a minute why we called him Jeffrey. When it was tiny, it was furry but now we have probably had it six months and it has feathers. We had two ducks but one got snapped by a snapping turtle. We also have three chickens - actually we have two chickens and one rooster. One of the chickens laid its first egg last Monday. We put it in the incubator so it will hatch.
So we have our dog Cocoa, a duck and three chickens besides some animals that aren't ours. We are renting pasture land for a neighbor's cows and two horses. We ride the pony but the other horse isn't broke well enough to ride. The horse's name is Babe, and the pony's name is Pepsi, but I don't know why. We didn't name him. We also have a bunny named Oreo.
This summer I played baseball - not in Little League but the Minors. It was hard ball, not softball. Some of the kids pitched kind of wild and we'd get hit once in awhile. But nobody ever got hurt real bad. My team won second place in the league and second place in the tournament. There were me and two sets of twins who were the best ones on our team because we knew
everything to do. The other teams got up and just barely hit. Last year we had the best team. We got first place in the league and second place in the tournament. This summer, we had a ton of practices but it rained a lot. We had to skip two games, and then we had to make up the games we missed. Finally we just played and sometimes it was really muddy, sometimes we had to play in water standing on the field. We played in water all the way up to here (his sock tops).
I was in a bunch of plays directed by Kathy Kooiker. They were in the high school auditorium and lots of people came to see us. One of them we did in the daytime for the kids in elementary. I think that was "Snow White." I was also in "Charlotte's Web," and in that one I was Jeffrey, a duck. (See why we named our duck Jeffrey?) In "Cinderella" I was a mouse. In "Snow White," I was a dwarf. In "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" I can't remember what I was. I should because we did it twice and that was only two years ago! Oh, yes, I was Ollie Herdman, one of the bad kids - just in the play. I wasn't really a bad kid. But in the play the bad kids didn't go to church. They finally went to Bible School and liked it. They sort of kept going and they weren't bad kids anymore. In "Wizard of Oz" I was a munchkin. But then I just quit. There were lots of practices and I had other stuff going on.
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A couple pretty exciting things have happened to me. I got my first shotgun two months
ago. I was able to pay for it myself because I'd saved three gift cards from Scheel's Sporting Goods Store. I was short just $3.90. I go hunting with Dad but I usually just walk with the fellows and carry the animals. We hunt for wild turkeys, ducks and deer. Dad also hunts deer with a bow and arrow but he hasn't gotten a decent buck yet. When he shoots a deer, we eat the meat. If it is big, we take it to the taxidermist and they mount it. We have a deer head at the farm and we had deer antlers above the fish aquarium in our house in town. We had to take the antlers down and kept the aquarium, but gave the fish away to my friend, Devin Wills. Other good friends are Damon Helgevold, Bowen Ellis, the Hatfield boys and the Rockhold boys, Jacob Redman and Reed Kale.
The other exciting thing - we haven't said anything about me was my catching a big bass when I was four or five years old. It weighed four or five pounds and I caught it on a camouflage popper. I reeled it in by myself. We'll be doing a lot of fishing on our farm, and in a couple years we're going to raise pheasants.
Pretty soon school will start and there will be more changes. We will be going to Murray Community School. That was another reason Dad was glad we were moving because Murray has a smaller school. I will be in fifth grade, Sierra in second, and Savannah will have one more year before she can go to pre-school. We have Misty McCoy as our sitter now. When we move to Murray we will have Berney Potter.
Right now I just do my chores and help Mom and Dad. Mom woks all but one day a week and on Tuesdays we go to help her clean the office. When we go out to eat my favorite thing to order is a cheeseburger. I don't know if I have a favorite place to go. but MoDonalds is okay. If we write my story again in 10 more years, I will be 20, and wonder what will have changed by then! I'd kind of like to be a computer guy like Dad. Computers will probably do lots more things by then.
Return to main page for Recipes for Living 2007 by Fern Underwood
Last Revised November 6, 2013
