Preschool to 5th grade.

Me in my favorite Pocahontas costume terrorizing my cat Annabelle.

The only thing I remember about kindergarten was the time we had a substitute teacher and the fire alarm went off. She panicked and froze up so I started directing the class into a single file line until she regained her composure.

At home I ran wild along the canal and greenbelt near my house with my neighbor Patrick. We adventured on secret trails and built forts tucked away on the banks of the canal. One time we snuck into a barn and found hundreds of typewriters. There was basically nothing but typewriters in the barn. We stole a few for our fort.

I liked to dress myself and wore weird stuff. I went through a serious Pocahontas phase and wanted to be an Indian more than anything. I wore a Pocahontas costume constantly and wore it while running around a nearby pond, playing a wooden flute that tasted like smoke.

My parents started sending me to "Pony Day Camp" where I learned how to horseback ride. My favorite horse was Daisy. I always had trouble learning how to post while trotting. It made me angry that they wouldn't let me canter or gallup without first learning to post while trotting properly. I just wanted to go fast. I loved exploring the land on the ranch, which was nestled in the foothills, as much as I enjoyed horseback riding. One time a cow got loose and they had us go find her by sticking our fingers in cow pies and tracking the warm ones.

I read at a higher level than any of the kids in my grade. They had to seperate me and another boy from the rest of the class when it was time for reading practice. I was proud but also embarrassed.

My gym teacher was an asshole. He ridiculed me in front of all of the other students on a regular basis for my ineptitude. I think he may have been part of the reason I started hating sports.

I was unpopular because I was a weird ugly little tomboy that wore glasses. They also started pulling me out of regular class for "gifted and talented" classes, which I thought were fun. We played a lot of games.

One day, I think I was about 7-8 years old, my dad barbecued some hamburgers on the grill for my mom and I. Her and I were sitting on the bed on the second floor of our house as my dad finished up some grilling, when all of a sudden there was an explosive noise and through the windows the entire world outside appeared to be on fire. We screamed and ran down the stairs... I'll never forget seeing my dad, shirtless, screaming in pain, covered in burns, and dousing himself with the garden hose. All of the neighbors came running because they thought a car had exploded and were shocked to discover it was just the propane tank of the grill that had. This was how I was first introduced to firefighters and paramedics. He spent some time in the burn unit, his face, chest, arms and abdomen covered in second and third degree burns. It was at this time that I realized I enjoyed being in a hospital. He made an amazing recovery and now it's nearly impossible to tell that he had such horrific injuries.

For some strange reason I was obsessed with the idea of becoming a lawyer in elementary school. I even had these thick legal books for the home that I carried around. I knew a completely unhealthy amount of information about law for a child. I got tired of it by 4th grade.

My parents argued all of the time for as long as I had remembered. My dad's business started going down the tubes and things fell apart from there. They started getting divorced when I was in 2nd grade. It wouldn't be finalized until I was entering 6th grade. It was a brutal, nasty split.

My grandma had a stroke soon after my dad's burn fiasco. She was staying with us at the time, and I remember coming inside to see her sitting in a chair, and she was crying but her face looked funny. I asked her what was wrong but when she tried to speak it came out like gibberish. I told my dad that something was wrong with grandma and the paramedics came again. It turned out that she couldn't speak but she could write perfectly. I stayed with her for hours in the ER, and then in the ICU. She made a great recovery because she had been treated very early. A few days later she was almost 100%. The doctor in the ICU blew up a glove-balloon and my grandma, the doctor, a nurse, my dad and I played glove volleyball. I decided I wanted to go into the medical field.

I was the only girl in the math gifted and talented class. We played this fantasy stock market game and I won, mainly because the boys invested heavily in the company with the ticker symbol "NHL" because it was hockey playoff season, but I looked up what the ticker actually stood for (not the hockey league) and knew better. It really pissed them off. I was never particularly good at math after that year.

In 5th grade I got a really bad cold. Which slowly developed into a cold that gave me severe difficulty breathing. I ended up in the ER and was hospitalized for a week because I had bad pneumonia and bronchitis. I liked the hospital. They rolled this cart with video games into my room all the time. I was really, really, really good at the jet ski game by the end of the week.