You make me feel so young

With all the Christmas funtivities and snow falling, it got me thinking about being a kid. I was a really cool kid I think. I was a bad kid, but that kind of made me cool. While going through the cabinets, Dad found a thermos from my old lunch box that has a skeleton on it and says "Boo Dude!" It was a Goosebumps lunch box and it was friggin awesome! I owned every Goosebumps book ever printed, I was a big reader back in that day. I read the Boxcar Children, Babysitters Club, Curious George, Nancy Drew, Animorphs. One time I stole money from Dad so I could buy a book at the bookfair (see, reading doesn't necessarily make you smart). When I wasn't reading a scary book, I was writing them. I had notebooks FULL of scary stories and I wish I still had them because I know my writing skills back then would make for a mortifying laugh. Apart from my journalism skills, hobbies included getting in fights at school over who took my swing, collecting baseball cards and monkey stuffed animals, and trying to be better than my brother at everything (I never got there). My fave birthday party was Curious George themed and I didn't leave the house without my Atlanta Braves hat on my head. I played baseball, soccer, and I clogged all at the same time and I'd like to think that's why I couldn't make anything higher than a C in school. Really I was just a slacker and didn't care. I spent my entire 5th grade year grounded because I couldn't pull those D's up. So that Master's Degree might feel really good in my hand soon. It's funny how you mature in some ways but on Christmas eve I woke up every hour through the night and my family would agree that I still hold the record for fastest paper unwrapping. I think the cool thing about beleiving in Santa is knowing that all these presents were about to show up no matter how good or bad you were that year. It's almost like you knew you didn't deserve all that great stuff but you could count on it being there. That was still my feeling on Christmas morning #24 and that's pretty cool.