Why Can't I Remember Anything About Leander?

Hello, y'all!

Starting a new life in a new home. Now, we're in the city of Leander. At this time, the city is still growing but still very new. Back in the day, we called it the country. It was a city basically in the middle of nowhere. I remember fields upon fields and some dirt roads. When we moved they had an HEB with a new strip next to it or something. Near our neighborhood, we had a CVS and gas station on the corner, it was so cool! Anyways...more on that later. In this house, it was...me, my mom, Chip, Levi, Pudge, and Johnny, who then got replaced by my grandma (I think). We lived in the suburbs, which sounded so fancy and cool. Our house was one story, 4 bedroom, with a red front door, which I thought was the coolest. 

Moving to here from Round Rock, was quite the adjustment...I had no friends or neighbors here. I'm pretty sure we only lived here for 1 year. It was quiet around there, I feel like we barely did anything, haha. So, the layout of the house...you walk in, to the left were 2 bedrooms. Chip, Levi, and Pudge's room, and then across was Johnny's room. Then to the right of the door was the bathroom and another room. It was supposed to be mine, but I was too scared to sleep alone. Yes, I know at my grown age of 11, I think. From the front door again, straight ahead through the hallway. At the end was the living room to the left with a fireplace (woah). To the right was the kitchen with a corner pantry (omg) and the dining room (it was carpeted, huh?...new concept to me). The dining room had a sliding door to the backyard. I loved that backyard so much, soooo much room, it was huge! Next to that room was my mom's room and next to that was the laundry room that led to the garage.

I can't seem to remember too many things from here, I wonder why? 

I remember getting my first couple of phones here. I can't remember the first phone I had and the specific name, but it was pretty great. It was a think rectangle, touch screen type of phone. I couldn't do much on it because I didn't know what to do with it, haha. But, I probably had games or something. I was pretty late to the phone game, everyone in my grade had one or at least an iPod touch. Apparently, my dad offered to get me a phone in Kindergarten but I declined, lol. My 2nd phone was my mom's old phone, an HTC Thunderbolt. Literally so cool! On there I had a few apps. I eventually got Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat later on. Man, I remember when my phone updated and got the function of screenshotting, I felt so cool because now I could do that! This was also the first phone that got me into my first group chat. I remember getting bombarded with a bunch of texts in the middle of the night. it was my classmate's from school...talking about someone liking whoever. I was so annoyed and wanted to shut my phone off, haha. Ooo, I was also sent my first chain text, saying if I didn't send it to 10 people some girl was gonna haunt me in my sleep or whatever. I was so scared, but the fact I didn't send it to anyone, because I was SO scared something was gonna happen to me, I just deleted the message, haha.

As I mentioned I loved the backyard here. It was empty for a bit, but we eventually put something back there...a trampoline! We were basically rich now, in my eyes. We got it installed/put together one day and the rest was history. We would spend so much time jumping on it. Some days, I remember just laying on it and looking up to the sky...thinking. I can't remember what I thought about, hm. I used to jump so high on it! It was pretty cool, I could see over the fences and see over the surrounding neighbor's fences. We would even put water on it because it would get so hot during the summer...which was quite dangerous because we could've broken something, but we didn't...thankfully!

Like I mentioned a couple of posts ago, my mom was a professional baker...that was her career, she had her own business and such. She had clients and family members who ordered from her. She had her times/moments in the year when she was in high demand, like Valentine's. She would make dozens upon dozens of chocolate-dipped strawberries. She would have those brown cases stacked almost as tall as me, with about 12 or more cartons of strawberries in each. A memorable moment was she had to make a late-night HEB(grocery store chain), in the middle of the night because she ran out of chocolate and strawberries. She took me along with her since it wasn't that far. This was back when stores were open 24 hours. We went at like 2 something in the morning, I was asleep in the car and she ran into the store real quick and grabbed the goods. Then back home we went! That was so fun because I was "up all late" and "out doing things".

Since it was just my mom and I, a lot of the time, one thing we did was watch music videos on YouTube. At this time we had no cable, for a while...so, YouTube was our thing and movies. One time we always talked about was this one night. We had attached the computer to the TV through the HDMI cord. We were watching the usual 80s music videos but one thing that kept happening was the same ad kept playing over and over and over, before each video. It was funny the first couple of times, but after the next 12 times or so, we were annoyed. It was a new up-and-coming (?) artist, named, Cosmo Jarvis. His new(?) song, Love This, played for a few seconds before the Skip Ad button popped up. So we would hear, "You don't know how much I love this.." repeatedly. After the whatever time, we were like...you know what, it's kind of catchy, haha. Then we ended up playing the whole ad, which was him just talking about his new song. Then we decided to look up the music video, which was pretty interesting, he was dressed up as a devil walking down the street with angels next to him. Either way, we fell in love with him and his content and music. We then subscribed to his channel and yeah!

This is such an only/poor/embarrassing child moment, right here. Okay, so during this time I was in middle school, 6th grade, to be exact. One thing that was in was braces. I had always wanted them (funny, my mom did too when she was younger, but she had perfect teeth), but we were too poor for them, so I never/still haven't gotten them. They seemed so cool, to have different color bands and the cool glittery container to hold your wax in. Obviously, I know the downsides of having them, the pain, the expander, not being able to eat certain foods and just wearing them, in general. Anyways, I used to make fake braces. This was so much fun! I wanna do it every so often but...(edit, I just did it right now, and omg I miss this!). So, I would make them with a bobby pin and earring backs (I had a ton of new earrings from Claires, lol). I would pretend to be a YouTuber and make video tutorials (with no camera, all in my head) on how to make fake braces. I would also pretend to be a nerd and be lonely (idek). This was so much fun...all by myself!

I won't go too much into this because I'm still very sensitive to this subject, but I plan on making a separate post about this. So in my other posts, I vaguely mentioned my dad and his dialysis journey. He along with my mom, both had their own health issues. My dad had end-stage renal disease and he ended up getting a transplant after a 10+ year wait (next house/post). My mom had thyroid disease. I'm not sure which one or the specifics, but she had her first treatment while we were in Stillwood, I didn't mention it. Along with that she had narcolepsy, which she later developed, along with some other things, idk. She and my dad ended up in the hospital about 4 times each. Each time, traumatized each time. I still can't get those moments out of my head. Especially whenever my mom was away from me, we did everything together. So, I was a wreck whenever something happened to her. Anyways, while here in Leander an incident happened where we weren’t there and my dad was just there helpless. I still hurt to this day that I wasn’t there for him. But, like I said I’ll go into more details on these incidents in another post.

Some small memories I remember are: leaving my purple Croc Mary Janes outside because they were drying off after we had a mud/water day. I forgot about them and they shrunk like a few sizes…and didn’t find them till months later. I remember having to almost evacuate our home because of a nearby fire that broke out. I was so worried that our house was gonna burn down and that I’d lose everything. This was me just panicking, it never reached us. But, I remember seeing the smoke filled sky while jumping on the trampoline. 

One semi big memory I had was us moving out. I’m not sure why it happened like this. I was oblivious to certain things at this time. Moving was always a process for us. We had a lot of stuff from throughout the years, we’ve accumulated. Well, it was our last day we had to move but the new family was already there. They had spent the night and we were there in the morning still moving and gathering our stuff. I tend to get embarrassed easily over everything I do. I can remember being vaguely embarrassed because they were just there watching us as we were moving out of their house now. But…that’s just a distant memory I try to forget, haha.

That concludes it for this house! Lots yet little memories were made here. I’ll always remember this place. Onto the next house, though. A lovely home in the city of Manor!

Until next time,

Zelly :)