I have lived my entire life in the Provo/Orem area. Although it wasn't my first home, the earliest one I remember was an apartment complex in Orem. It was the last apartment we lived in before my parents bought a house. It was a nice place. I had lots of friends there. It's where I met my best friend Lindsey, who I wrote about a few weeks ago.
The apartments faced each other and there was a big grassy area in between that all of the kids played in. There was a garden area that the tenets could share, no one else was interested in gardening, so my mom used the whole thing! She of course shared the food with our neighbors. There was a swimming pool that was open during the summer. My dad was hired by the landlord as the pool manager in exchange for free rent during the summer months.
We lived in that apartment when my brother was born. That is my earliest memory; my paternal grandma watching me while my parents were in the hospital. I also attended kindergarten while living there. My parents taught me how to read and basic addition and subtraction before I entered kindergarten. (With my dad being a math teacher, education was important.)
That summer we built a house in Provo, where my parents still live. My brother and I each got our own rooms, and we got to pick which room we got! My mom dug a garden, and my dad built a tree house in the backyard. Because of my dad being a school teacher, we wanted my school schedule to match his. So I went to a different school from the rest of the kids in my neighborhood because that school was a year round school, and I went to a traditional August-May school. But that was only for first grade because then they built a new school that my neighborhood fell into the new boundaries. Going to that school helped me meet all of the other kids in my neighborhood that weren't in my ward.
My parents, brother, and I were really close. We had family home evening on Mondays (some years it was Sunday), we read scriptures every night. We had three different sets of scriptures to go with my and Michael's reading level. We started with what I call the "comic book" scriptures. then we read an other simplified version but with less pictures and more paragraphs. Then we moved on to the actual scriptures. By the time I was a teenager we became really inconsistent with both FHE and scripture reading. Michael and I became involved in extra curricular activities and got jobs, which was part of it. I'm hoping to learn from that and hopefully not fall into the same rut when my kids are teenagers.
Our house very frequently played host to family parties and friend parties. Most of the family parties on my dad's side of the family were at our house growing up. Now, they are usually at my Uncle Doug's house because his new house is the biggest house in the family. My Junior and Senior year in high school I hosted a lot of homework parties and weekend get-togethers with my friends and dance teammates.
I really enjoyed my childhood home. It was the atmosphere - not the actual house - that made it great. I still love visiting and my kids love going over to grandma and papa's house. I hope that I have created a similar atmosphere for my kids.
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