Flashback Friday: Real Live Doll

The fun thing about being the youngest of six kids is that you have built-in playmates ready and waiting for you. I was born and instantly became their real live doll... apparently I talked and walked earlier than my other siblings, but mother says it's because I had five little kids constantly trying to teach me new tricks.

Maybe they should be trying to train Riley for me.

This is a picture of my sister Janette and me when I was little. She had changed my clothes so we were wearing matching checked outfits and doo-rags... and it looks like I wasn't complaining a bit about the attention. Janette's been a fun and loving sister in so many ways ... but she also thoroughly enjoyed being the older one who could get me to do just about anything.

She would be in the bathroom upstairs doing her hair and would yell for me... I'd go running up the stairs to see what she needed and she'd casually ask me to get her hairbrush from the next room. And like an idiot, I'd do it. And it took nothing more than a "Hey, I'll time you..." to get me to fetch anything that came to her mind.

She also liked spinning tall tales to prove that she could pull anything over on her little sister.

Like the time Dad had been welding and wasn't wearing that protective mask, so he hurt his eyes in the process. She woke me up that morning and very gravely told me that dad had an accident and burned his eyeballs out of his head. I didn't believe her and went running into his bedroom where he was laying in bed with a cold washrag over his (what I was assuming to be hallow empty sockets instead of) eyes and I FREAKED OUT.

Or another time when she pulled me into the laundry room so she could talk to me about the fact that she was really my mother. She told me she was too young to have a child - that it would have been scandalous - and so mom and dad had to step in and raise me as their own. Of course, if I had known about the birds and the bees I would have been able to calculate that the five year age difference didn't really make that feasible, but at the time I believed her and I FREAKED OUT.

Of course, she'd also help me make covers for my school books every year and taught me how to make the cool rainbow design around my name on the front. She'd hide with me at the top of the stairs and help me scare our brothers after an episode of The Incredible Hulk, and she was always up for goofing around the house, playing Barbies and just plain being silly.

But I still totally blame my being gullible on her and all of her tall tales... which is why I've completely given up answering the phone on April Fools Day.

So here's your Question for the Day: Which one are you... the gullible one or the one who spins the crazy stories to see what you can get people to believe?

[Amy, if you're reading this: We've already covered which category you fall under in last week's flashback!]