When NOT to play horse-y with a baby. (And other adventures from 1973)

Yep.  I’m still stuck in the 70’s, people.  So, all aboard the time machine!  Today, we’re voyaging back to 1973….


(For a refresher of my 1972 discoveries, click HERE.) 


I was about five months old when 1973 began.  According to my baby book, that’s when I started talking.  My first word was “hi”.  I was about fifteen pounds and I had no teeth and virtually no hair.  Oh!  And I lived in a house with hip bright red shag carpet and a faux midget polar bear skin rug on the living room floor.  You know you’re jealous.





My mom was still in her ridiculous wig phase.  Clearly.  *snicker*





Despite my mom’s frightening wigs, I was kind of a happy little thing.





Okay, fine.  Make that VERY happy….





….unless I was having my passport picture taken.  Then I was just freaking confused.  Apparently.





(Funny, I still make that exact same face when I realize we’re out of ice cream!)


That passport picture wasn’t just for craps and giggles either.  When I was about ten months old, my parents took me on a trip to to England to meet all my relatives there.  The flight from Seattle to London was over nine hours long.  Let’s pause and let that sink in for a moment….


A nine hour flight? 


With a baby?!?!  


I don’t know if that makes Mom and Dad really brave or just really stupid. 


But anyway….


During our three week vacation in England, I was Christened.  Here’s a shot of me outside the church with my parents.  (Yes, I’m grinning up a storm.  Again.)





And here’s one of me at the church with my Dad’s parents, my aunt, my uncle, and my newborn cousin.  (Uh-huh.  Still smiling.)





Here I am with my mom’s parents in their home.  They had a huge chocolate Easter egg for me, which I just couldn’t wait to get my little hands on.  (On a related note, I just ate half of Wednesday’s Easter M&M’s this morning while she was in school, so at least I’m consistent.) 





But our England trip wasn’t all church and chocolate.  No, no, no.  I also got to sit on my grandpa’s motorcycle!





I noticed Grandpa is wearing his helmet and riding jacket in that picture up there.  Umm…. yeeeaaaahhhhhh.  That makes me somewhat suspicious that this might not have been just a posed picture on that motorbike, that maybe he might have actually given me a quick little ride down the driveway on it.  Grandpa was a troublemaker and it seems like the sort of thing he and my dad would have cooked up.  (Hey, it was the 70’s after all!)  But if they did, I know it was totally behind my mom’s back.  Grandpa lost an eye in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier and was sporting a spiffy glass eye in that shot up there, so if—IF—he gave me a ride on it, it would have been while Mom was in the shower or something so she’d be oblivious and couldn’t have relieved him of his other eye.  Because she absolutely would have!!!!  I’m soooooo going to ask my dad about it the next time I call him.


Speaking of Grandpa’s troublemaking, there’s also this picture.





That’s me on his shoulders in his backyard.  It looks innocent enough, doesn’t it?  But, no.  No, it’s not.  You see, I had just had breakfast five minutes before Grandpa flung me up onto his shoulders and started galloping around the yard like a horse.  Both my mom and grandma told him that was a bad idea and pleaded with him not to do it, but he did it anyway….  only to end up wearing my upchucked breakfast all down his face about two seconds after this picture was taken.


Yes.  Yes, I threw up on my grandpa’s head.  And Grandpa learned a valuable lesson on when not to play horse-y with a baby.  Just trying to do my part.


In later years, Grandpa was without a doubt my favorite grandparent.  He nicknamed me “Carrots” because of my red hair, and even though those sorts of nicknames offended me when anyone else used them, for some reason when Grandpa did it, it felt like a badge of honor.  And, yes, he forgave me for vomiting on his head.  That takes a lot of love, you guys. 


A.  Lot.  Of.  Love.





Well, anyway, when we got back to Seattle, Summer was in full swing.  As you can tell by the previous picture, I had four teeth now.  And still no hair.  I also had a friend (let’s call him Jesse) whose sandbox I got to play in.  Jesse poured sand on my shoulder, so I retaliated by stealing his cookie. 





Seems fair. 





I liked cookies.  A lot.  I’m told that my favorite kind of cookie at the time was Arrowroot by Nabisco.  Here’s a picture I borrowed from Google that shows what the Arrowroot box looked like in the 70’s. 





I remember five or six years later, I would drool like Pavlov’s dogs every time my mom pulled that box out of the cupboard to give a cookie to my baby brother.  I would beg her for one—just one!—because they were sooooooooooo delicious.  Mom would always roll her eyes and tell me it was baby food and I wasn’t a baby anymore, but deep down inside she knew I was right that those suckers were pure heaven and she’d give me one anyway. 


Sometimes two.  :-)


In July 1973, my first birthday rolled around.  According to my baby book, my parents had a party planned for me, but then my sandbox friend, Jesse, came down with measles, so at the last minute the party was cancelled in case I was coming down with it too (since I stole and ate Jesse’s cookie and all).  No-one wanted to risk any other babies catching measles, so everyone was told to stay away. 


(Seriously?  What the hell?  What kind of 70’s attitude was THAT?!?!)


So, I spent my first birthday with my parents.  My mom was rockin’ her beehive wig for the occasion, and I just wanted to get a taste of the cake.





Which I did.  And I liked it!





After cake (and maybe a bath!), I opened one of my presents.  It was a Dorable Daksy dog.  Dorable Daksy’s tail would wag when his leash was pulled, and he barked and sniffed as well. 





Daksy was so well-loved that he, sadly, didn’t survive my childhood.  I remember being about five years old and Daksy’s fur had fallen half off his plastic and metal body, and was just hanging on by a mere thread or two.  Mom always wanted to throw Daksy away, but I would never go for it.  But I guess Mom won that battle at some point while I wasn’t paying attention because I have no idea what happened to him.


*sniffle*


Daksy dogs are really, REALLY hard to find these days, but they do pop up on eBay every now and then.  I once replaced my long gone Daksy on eBay for about $10, but, sadly, my replacement Daksy doesn’t work—no barking, no uber-cute tail-wagging—however, he’s still freaking adorable.  And he has all his fur!  See?





Anyhow….


The now measles-free Jesse and my other baby friends came over for my rescheduled birthday party about a month later.  (And, no, I never came down with measles too.  Whew!)  Jesse, it appears, was still sore from the whole cookie-swiping incident and attempted to murder me with the elastic on my party hat, but—whatever—I was WAY too enthralled with my new toys to even bother to notice.





Mom and Dad, for some reason, waited until some point several days after my late-birthday party to let me open the gifts sent from my relatives in England.  Mom was in a black bouffant wig and fake eyelashes that day and was looking a bit like Amy Winehouse.





One of my favorite new toys I got that day was a Fisher Price Chatter Telephone.  Here’s a picture of one that I borrowed from Google.





I, obviously, had lots of important calls to make, so I got right down to business.





These days, 1970’s FP Chatter Telephones sell on eBay anywhere from $1 to $40.  And FP Chatter Telephone Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments (jeez, that’s a mouth full) are hocked on eBay anywhere from $55 to $149. 


(Yes, really.)


Around my first birthday, I really started getting into music.  I loved listening to the radio.  I even had a favorite song that would make me drop whatever I was doing, hold onto the coffee table, and sing, dance, and totally rock out to it every time I heard it.  Here’s shot of me doing just that.





So, what kind of song would make a one year old drop all her toys and get her groove on that fiercely? 


This one.





Yeah.  “You Make Me Feel Brand New” by The Stylistics.  Oh, I knew how to party, people.  Definitely.  I loved that song so much that my parents bought me the record album. 





Eight or nine years later, I would still play that record whenever any of my Barbies were dating or getting married.  (In fact, I’m pretty sure my Starr and Shaun dolls conceived a baby to that song once in 1982.  But that’s a story for another time.  Moving on….)


In addition to dancing my ass off, I also liked going on walks to the park with my mom.  Although, why Mom wore a half-shirt, mini skirt, and stilettos to the park, I’m not quite sure.  (????)





(Wow.)


When Fall rolled in, Mom and Dad took me to a reunion with their Lamaze and Baby Care class buddies now that all the babies were one year olds.  For some reason, there was a newspaper photographer at the reunion and, maybe because I was the only girl and all the other babies born to the class were boys, but the photographer was quite smitten with me.  Some pictures of me at the reunion ended up being published in the newspaper and in a Red Cross newsletter.  Here are a couple of them.











When Halloween hit, my mom made me a pumpkin costume and I went to a party with Jesse and my other friends.  Always the jokester, Jesse tried to poke my eye out….





….so, I ate a cookie and watched a poodle’s tail wagging (which probably reminded me of Daksy’s).





As 1973 came to a close, my parents took me to a Christmas party at my dad’s coworker’s house. 





My earliest memory is of that party.  I was only one and a half, but I definitely remember those other kids in the picture up there and that I knew they all thought I was little and cute, and they kept trying to tickle my neck.  I remember looking at their huge, glittering Christmas tree and knowing I shouldn’t touch it and then, when their mother told them to, the other kids took a present out from under their tree and gave it to me.  I remember how surprised I was that there was something for me under their tree!  Kind of sweet for a first memory, huh?  :-)


What I don’t remember is that I somehow made a horrendous mess in their house with a box of packing peanuts, but there’s photographic proof that I did.  Whoopsie!





(Oh, looky.  An eBay Seller in the making!)


For Christmas that year, one of my favorite gifts was my new Fisher Price Music Box TV.





The FP TV played two songs, London Bridge and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, while the pictures on the screen moved and changed according to the songs.  My TV is long gone.  I have no idea what happened to it, but here are some pictures of one just like it that I borrowed from Etsy.








These days Fisher Price Television Sets like my old one sell on eBay anywhere from about $10 to $30. 


And as 1973 ended and 1974 began, I saw my first ever dusting of snow.  And I mean dusting.  (Hey, sometimes Seattle goes a whole year or two without any snow.)  It’s kind of hard to see it in the picture, but it’s there.





In the next post, I’ll be telling you what I’ve discovered about 1974—the year I became a big sister, got into Kraftwerk, and watched my scary little cousin eat a whole stick of butter and then climb on top of my fridge.




©  Coracabana

And that’s one more reason I shouldn’t have eaten those beans! (And other adventures from 1972)

Last summer, I spent five long, lonnnnnnnnngggggggg weeks loitering like a bum on my mom’s couch, 2000 miles away from home.  Sounds like fun?  Yeah, not so much.  It wasn’t my idea to be there.  At all.  I just got all tangled up in the spider webby, complicated, court-ordered crap involving Wednesday and my ex-in-laws—(or are they called out-laws now?  I dunno….)—because I’m Wednesday’s mama and I was ordered to be her rescuer-in-waiting, should things turn sour.   Which they did.  Duh.


(Yeah, it’s complicated, but don’t worry, I’m not going to delve any further into it.)


(You’re welcome.)


While I was stuck out there in Seattle, living out of a suitcase, with nothing to do for over a month but wait for Wednesday to need me, I decided to tackle a hefty task I’ve been meaning to do for roughly twenty years.  Remember how I was telling you about my parents’ pitiful photo-organizing skills which resulted in everyone in my entire family (but me!) completely forgetting about a trip we took to California in 1986?  (Need a refresher?  Click HERE.)  Well, I decided enough was enough.  Before any more memories could go *POOF!* and disappear like M&M’s near a chocoholic, I decided I would round up all the old family photos I could find, scan them all into my laptop, put them all in chronological order, and piece my childhood back together, picture by picture. 


People, this was not easy!  And, at times, it was most frightening!  Ever stumbled upon a full-on crotch shot of your mom giving birth to your little brother?  No?  Well, I have!  And, frankly, I have never been the same since!


(NEVER.)


(*vomit*)


(*twice*)


Most of the pictures (including the horrific beaver shot) (*shudder*) were found randomly crammed into cardboard boxes.  They weren’t labeled, dated, or in any sort of order whatsoever, just a messy hodgepodge of images spanning the 60’s through the 90’s.  Totally overwhelming.  And the pictures that did make it into the family photo albums were often even worse!  I don’t know what Mom was sniffing while she put the albums together, but absolutely nothing made sense.  I found pages mislabeled “Christmas” which featured an obvious Halloween party; and barren pages with no pictures at all; and entire albums that skipped back and forth here and there throughout the years, like Bill and Ted on a time-travelling acid trip.


Oy.


When I came back to Chicago, I brought the scanned clutter of my past with me on my computer with the intention of putting it all in a nice, pretty, labeled, sense-making order so I could preserve all the memories, say “HA!” to my slacker parents, and so Wednesday could laugh at my 80’s hairstyles and my 70’s pants.  *le sigh*  But….  It’s been seven months and I’m still trying to sort it all out!  It’s been taking some effing serious CSI work, my God.  I’ve been scrutinizing haircuts, coats, and shoes; counting candles on birthday cakes; matching up missing teeth in children’s smiles; looking for subtle changes in house décor; and Googling information on toys and books littered in the backgrounds of old photos, all to try to figure out when these hundreds of pictures were taken.  It’s been one massive, aggravating, puppy-kicking, pain in the ass—*snarl*—but, of course, I have loved every minute of it.


I guess I underestimated what a gigantic journey it was going to be.  When I started, I truly had no clue that I would learn so flipping much about my history and that I would spend so much time twirling around in dizzy circles inside old memories that I haven’t stopped to visit in a long, long time.  It sounds like a dumb cheesy cliché (and you know that clichés are the only time that I am NOT pro-cheese), but maybe you need to face where you’ve been to understand where you are going.  (I know.  Deep, huh?)  That’s part of the reason I haven’t been blogging or skipping through Facebook as much lately.  I’ve been busy in my past.  And I’d like to share some of it with you over the next several posts. 


We’ll be lingering in the 70’s around here for a little bit, talking about toys, TV, clothes, books, music, wigs  (yes, wigs) and just pretty much what life was like back then, sifting through scattered pictures and misty water-colored mem-ries of the way we were. 


Can you dig it?  Far out.


My parents grew up, met, and married in London.  In the late 1960’s, they moved to the US (first Atlanta, then Seattle) because my dad got a job with Boeing.  I was their first baby (and the first person in my family born in America).  I popped out into the world in the Summer of 1972.  Here’s a picture I found of my mom while she was pregnant with me.




Yeah, you read that right:  WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT.  Mom looked fabulous, no?   I don’t know how she pulled that off, frankly.  I know I never managed to squeeze out even a mere millisecond of fabulousness while I was pregnant.  Instead, I just galumphed around in over-sized t-shirts, while oozing blubbery, nauseous, crankiness, and looking like Louie Anderson in drag the whole nine months.  How most unfair.


Being fabulous when you’re pregnant has a price though, I suppose.  After Mom sloshed down drinks at a party five weeks before my due date, I, clearly, took offense at her marinating me in alcohol and I kicked so hard that her water broke.  She went into early labor and then magically found herself the surprised mother of a five pound itty bitty preemie who failed the Apgar Test and had to be whisked away to an incubator immediately.  Oops. 


This was me the day I was born, looking exceptionally pissed off and already plotting my revenge. 




It’s a good thing they put me in mittens, so you can’t see the middle finger I’m brandishing there.  But anyway….


These days, everyone gasps in horror, of course, when they hear about Mom knocking ‘em back while she was pregnant, but she assures me that it was no big deal at the time because, hey, it was a party and that was the norm in 1972 and it’s what everybody did.  I guess life was like that bar scene in Hairspray back then.  (“Wow!  They’re so glamorous.”)  But I’m not complaining; I survived. 


Unlike these days when the hospital kicks you out the door 24 hours after giving birth, back then moms and babies got to live it up in the hospital for four whole days before going home.  (Again, so unfair.)  Once they got me home, Mom and Dad were eager to fatten me up, it seems, because here they are, shoveling baby food in my face while I was trying to sleep. 




I seem really perplexed by the whole thing—and rightfully so, I think, because, obviously, I was waaaayyyyyyyy too young to be eating solid food.  (Hell, I was a preemie, and I shouldn’t even have been born yet!)  But, again, it was the 70’s and there were no rules on… well… anything.  After eating?  Yep, they gave me a bath.  And I was most displeased.




This is me, after being force-fed and dunked in water, further planning out my forthcoming revenge.




(”Well, that settles it.  Now I am SO going to be a shit when I’m a teenager.  You have no-one to blame but yourselves.”)


But I guess I eventually got the hang of the whole eating thing, because I was as round as a beach ball just a couple of months later.




Mom thinks I’m laughing jovially with her in that shot up there.  But I’m pretty sure I’m really laughing at her sagging beehive wig.  My mom had a whole collection of bizarre wigs back then.  She even had a gray one!  (Seriously?  Who voluntarily gives themselves gray hair?!?!)  She seemed to have a different hair color and hairstyle each and every day of the week.  I wonder if I knew it was all the same woman or if I thought I had a whole battalion of mothers coming and going?….


Hmm….


Well, anyway….


There aren’t really any decent pictures of what my nursery looked like back then, but I know from the bits and pieces in the backgrounds of various pictures that there was a lot of yellow in it and that I had a cute hand-painted wooden Irmi Mother Goose mobile hanging over my crib.




I have vague memories of that mobile.  I Googled the heck out of it and found out that Irmi mobiles, lamps, and light switch covers were everywhere in the 70’s.  My one played Rock-a-Bye Baby and had cute wooden nursery rhyme characters hanging from it.  These days they sell on eBay for about $10 each.  Here are some close-up shots of the old, long-gone mobile that I borrowed from eBay and Etsy.










Ahh, the glorious 1970’s!  When people put wooden objects the size of grapes in their babies' beds and the term ‘choking hazard’ hadn’t been invented yet.  Fifty bucks says that was lead paint too.


I was about five months old when Christmas rolled around.  Here I am with my dad (who looked like a young Alan Alda) who gave me a teddy bear.




I still have that bear.  He’s a threadbare old man now.  Like, literally.  These days, he’s dressed like Dumbledore and sitting in my den.  See?




Here I am with my bear and the rest of my Christmas presents back in 1972.  Mom opted for a black wig that day, but I’m pretty sure that’s the same purple dress as before!




See the little pink doll just beneath the bear?  That was my Baby Beans Doll.  Baby Beans was made by Mattel in the early 70’s.  She had a vinyl face and hands with a floppy, soft body that was stuffed with orange plastic “beans”. 


According to family legend, Baby Beans wasn’t with us for long because, one tragic morning, my mom found me sitting in my crib, eating the plastic “beans” that had poured out when I had ripped open Baby Beans’ seams.  Whoopsie!  Even forty years later, Dad still loves to tell the harrowing tale of the Battle of the Baby Beans.  (Apparently, the next several diaper changes were quite beany…. and orange…. and interesting to say the least.  Ugh!)  Here’s a better picture of Baby Beans that I borrowed from eBay.




These days Baby Beans goes anywhere from $5 to $50 on eBay.  $50!  Can you believe that?  And that’s ONE MORE reason I shouldn’t have eaten those beans!



In the next post, I’ll be telling you what I’ve discovered about 1973—that magical year when I rocked out to the Stylistics, rode a motorcycle, discovered the joy of birthday cake, and taught my grandpa a valuable lesson on when NOT to play horse-y with a baby.





© Coracabana