It's my birthday!

 I was cute once!  This is me at about a year and a half...

( Too bad it didn't last.)  I have no great claim to gorgeous looks, but I sure was cute.  Back then.









I was the first child, and there would eventually be six of us.  I was born two days after my Grandmother Bennett's birthday.  Her name was Frances Marion, and my parents changed the spelling from 'on' to 'an' to make it clearly and solely a girl's name. (Though you probably don't know any guys named Marion, there used to be such.)









This is the school picture of me at six or seven, that if you took a picture of my brother Morgan at the same age, covered up my braids, and placed them side by side, you could almost think we were twins.  (The next year, I had glasses.)

Pippi Longstocking?  Nope, just me

 The only picture of me as a teenager that I liked okay was this one, in 10th grade.  No, make that 11th grade, I think I missed pictures as a sophomore when I was out for several weeks with mono.  I missed the senior pictures too, so this is the only representation of my lovely self in any Winston Churchill yearbook.

junior year of high school

The last birthday I celebrated at home, though I didn't know it then, was my 16th.  The next year I was playing hooky from school for the month of September and traveling to Europe with my father.  It was a business trip for him, and amazing for me. We were in Paris for a week, then driving through Switzerland on our way to Venice, Italy, then back to Paris, then a last week in London.  We flew in and out of Brussels, so I got a museum there the day before we flew home.  (Dad says always get to your departure city the day before, so you have a cushion if anything happens--smart man.)  I spent my 17th birthday getting to go up the Eiffel tower--can't get much cooler than that--and having dinner at a place (in English, The Golden Door) where you could make dinner out of the huge appetizer menu--like tappas is today, as a concept.

My 18th birthday was celebrated in Salt Lake City, waiting for school to start and getting a cake from my Aunt Bonnie.  I had no idea I was about three weeks away from meeting the man I would marry.  And we would eventually have six kids of our own, with seven grandchildren and counting.

everyday us, after lots of years

I think next year, when that decade number changes, it will be a bit of a lurch.  For now, I suppose another year is okay.  Life is a good gift.