Kiddo Kim Story? Splendid!

I've always been a bit... um... precocious.  There are some delightful stories in my family of my antics as a child.  Some of these stories are relayed to me from my parents and other family members, while other stories are actually memories I have.  For example, I remember getting in trouble on two particular occasions for name calling.  Once I quoted Back to the Future to my brother, asking him "What are you looking at, butthead?"  I was also reprimanded whilst watching the Today Show with my parents once for calling Bryant Gumbel a "pompous windbag," a phrase I picked up watching Disney's Cinderella.

I couldn't have been more than 5 here. Look at that sass.

The desk I used as a child (well, really, until last month) was the desk my mom grew up using.  Sharing a room with my younger brother throughout our early years meant that we shared a lot of things, but we didn't really share that desk.  That desk was my little corner of that room.  I loved reading, writing, and coloring as a kid, so I spent quite a bit of time at that desk.  Long before I was writing essays in school, I remember wanting to write "S.A."s (I was sounding it out) at home.  Because that's what big kids did.  And I desperately wanted to be a big kid - a 16 year old to be specific.  For some reason I thought that when I was 16, my life would be awesome, and I would magically be treated as an adult.  I blame Disney's The Little Mermaid for this one.  I practiced writing all kinds of words... even the bad ones.

This little project was discovered years later.  Don't ask me why my parents were looking underneath my desk drawers, but they were.  And under the center drawer, they found my dirty little secrets scrawled in brown crayon.  They also found a note on the inside of the drawer that said "This was Kim Lareau desk." I couldn't fit the apostrophe and S on my name, because I was trying to write this in the upper right corner of the desk.  This particular note was written in a nice teal color.  This little tag was done because I had it in my head that someone would discover that note decades later, and it would make a great story for them.  Seriously, that's what was going through my head more than 20 years ago.  I'm sure I was reprimanded and flogged accordingly for defacing the family heirloom.

If there's any moral to this anecdote, I'm certain I don't know what it is.  It probably has something to do with explaining to your kids that if they want to be remembered, the best way is probably not through obscene words scrawled in a desk with a crayon - even if it is impressive that a 3 year old is dropping F-bombs in writing and mastering that tricky "tch" spelling.

"Hell" looks like hell, but the others look pretty good.