Who Are You? A Topic for Each Week of the Year {Week 1: My Birth}

This is a cool challenge that I stole from my friend Megan. It's a way to record your own history regarding specific subjects. I'm a great journal writer, but I feel like answering targeted questions like these will bring some more specific information that I don't get around to writing about in my journal, which is where I generally write about day-to-day things and whine when I need to vent.

1. Where were you born and what were the circumstances of your birth? Were there other children already in the family? How did your parents choose your name?

Left to Right: Chelly, me, Dad (Dave), Mom (Jeanine), Matt, Ben

I was born in Murray, UT on July 18. I was the only one of my siblings to be induced. It was before cell phones, and my dad was attending school at BYU, so to make sure that I didn't come while my dad was in Provo, the doctor thought it was best to have a planned day for me to be born so my dad wouldn't miss it. I was born at around noon on a Saturday, but my mom didn't get to hold me until about 5:00 pm. She kept bugging the nursery because she wanted to hold her baby, and when they finally brought me in, they let my mom know that for some reason, my body temperature wouldn't come up, so they had to leave me in the incubator. My mom was quite angry that they hadn't told her that earlier, especially after she had asked to see me so many times.

I am the youngest of five children. Bobby isn't in the picture above because he died before I was born, so I never met him. I've always wondered what our family life would have been like had Bobby lived. I wonder what the dynamics between me and my siblings would have been like. I'd like to think that things wouldn't have been so different, especially at this point in our adult lives. We're all pretty good friends now, regardless of how much some of us used to fight when we were younger.

As for my name, my dad worked with a lady whose name was Andralynn and who went by Lindy. My mom and dad really liked the sound of both names. My mom also had a thing for nicknames. Her name is Jeanine, which isn't very nicknamable, so she wanted her kids to have nicknamable names. So we have Benjamin (Ben), Robert (Bobby), RoChelle (Chelly), Matthew (Matt), and Andralynn (Lindy). The boys got the common names. The girls did not. This has been a constant source of confusion in my life. I also don't have a middle name, which has at times made me feel left out. My sister's middle name is Joy, which is also our dad's mom's middle name, and she passed the name on to her youngest girl. My sister-in-law also passed her middle name on to her daughter. I thought that was the coolest things, and I felt like I got the shaft because I didn't have a middle name I could pass on to my daughters. But at the same time, my mom doesn't have a middle name and neither does her mom, so I could pass that tradition on if I want to.