It's a New Year...

I really like to take pictures of things. I also really enjoy writing, so here is another blog. I'd like to  make a photo journal, because little things fascinate me. I think that's why I take so many pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words.

I was lucky. I grew up with a great family. Over the last few years, I've starting looking at photos from my childhood. It's really neat to see where you've come from, and how things have progressed over the years.

This is a picture of me when I was probably about a year. My mom tells me my Uncle Bob took this picture while we were at the beach. I was sooo cute. 

Then, at the age of 2, I learned to sorta drive a car. That's my Pap-Pap I'm sitting on, in Johnstown, PA. My parents were born, raised, and married in Johnstown. Even though we don't go up there very often anymore, I have wonderful memories of taking the 4 hours trip and staying with my grandparents. My dad's side included Grammy and Pap-Pap, and my mom's side was Grandma Burkett. My mom's dad died long before I was born. It's always upsetting that I never knew him.

My sister, Kristina, was born when I was two. Our birthday are actually two years and two days apart. I'm June 12th, and she's June 10th. It always made our birthdays very interesting. She'd always get her gifts two days before me, so that generally created a very jealous and anxious Amanda. When you're a kid, two days is forever.

Seriously. Kids are weird. If you don't remember being weird, then you obviously didn't have a fun childhood filled with daydreaming and living somewhere completely outside of reality. We took several family vacations to the beach. Here you can see Kristina sporting sunglasses far ahead of her time. Who woulda thought that these would be fashionable today?

 Halloween was awesome. My mom always made us fun costumes. I remember the year Kristina wanted to be a red crayon. I wanted to be a "mean witch." Yea. There was actually questions about the purity of my soul MUCH earlier. I really enjoyed painting with the color black when I was young. The Great Valley and rainbows were always black in my paintings.

Sarah was born when I was six. We always joked that she looked like a cute little asian baby, and she must have been switched at birth. We created several amusing stories for how we got Sarah, but her favorite was that we bought her pretty face at Walmart. In pre-school, she would insist that her parents got her at Walmart.

We kept growing up. We still went to the beach for family vacations. Sarah was very clingy around this age...she must have been four-ish. Maybe older. I have a hard time judging Sarah's age in pictures. She's still a tiny kid in my mind. (She recently turned 20. Ugh.)

We grow. We learn. We hurt and we heal. When you're a teenager,  every setback is a life and death situation. I've had my share of life and death setbacks as a teenager. I'm sure you have, too. Hell, I'm 26 and I still have to remind myself that life is a constant journey of lessons we learn. It's not about what happens to you and how much it hurts. It's how you move on that matters.