Birthdays and Memories

It's Friday once again - although I spent all day yesterday thinking it was Friday and being repeatedly disappointed to realize that it was only Thursday, so today I'm really confused.

June 1st
Eleven years ago June 1st also fell on a Friday and it happened to be my last official day of work before going on maternity leave. I'd been managing an outpatient physical therapy center for over a year and couldn't wait to be rid of the long hours, the stress, the obligation to see x-number of patients a day to meet some type of quota set by the corporate office. I imagined a week of pre-birth bliss: sleeping in, lounging at home in my pjs, organizing the baby's room and getting some much needed rest before the imminent arrival of our first-born. After all, my due date was still a week away so I had all the time in the world.

Wrong. The next night John and I went out and gorged ourselves on crabs to celebrate the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. I ended up ordering an extra tray of crabs and eating the entire thing myself. I remember our waiter saying "You'd better watch out or that baby's going to come tonight!" We all had a good laugh.

I wasn't laughing at 1 a.m. when my water broke. Jack decided that I wasn't going to have that nice relaxing week to myself after all and was born a week early. That was eleven years ago. It's hard to believe.

This weekend we'll be celebrating eleven years of Jack. I never dreamed how much I'd enjoy this thing called parenthood. There are no words to describe it. We have an Anne Geddes print hanging in the kids' bathroom with the following quote. I think it speaks for itself.

"The decision to have a child is to accept that your heart will forever walk about outside your body." Author: Katherine Hadley

I do sometimes feel like pieces of my heart are walking around inside my kids. It's a good feeling but a slightly scary one too. I try to focus on the good part.

Memory Lane - Burgertime

Last week I was lamenting the fact that I hadn't spoken more to my dad about memories from his childhood. In light of that I've decided to start a new blog feature entitled "Memory Lane" in which I'll write about my own memories from my younger days. I'd love for my kids to read this blog when they get older and have my memories written down for them to enjoy. I'm very excited about it, so I'm going to start right now.

When I was a kid video games had just started coming out - 1980 was a big year for me personally since that's when PacMan first came out as a video game in places like malls, skating rinks, arcades AND Intellivision was created as a competitor to Atari as a home video system. Most of my friends who had video game systems had Atari. We happened to visit our family in Chicago during Thanksgiving around that time and my cousin Tauras had an Intellivision system. I thought my cousin Tauras was so cool since he was a teenager while I was a mere ten year old. After playing Intellivison with Tauras all weekend long, we came home and my parents immediately went out and bought one for us.

We had some fun games on Intellivison, but our family favorite was Burgertime. According to Wikipedia, Burgertime was created in 1982 so I was twelve years old when my family became obsessed with this particular game. Check out the graphics . . .

The little guy in the middle in the chef's hat was Peter Pepper and the object of the game was to "build" burgers by having Peter Pepper walk across the various ingredients to make them fall down to the next level. At the same time he's being pursued by a hot dog, a pickle and a fried egg. He can kill them by dropping a bun, burger etc. onto them or stun them by "peppering" them. You can see at the top right hand corner it tells you how many peppers you have left. Once all your peppers are gone, you're pretty much toast unless you can outrun those evil monsters. I remember our strategy was to lure them onto a patty or bun and then to drop them to their deaths.

There were six levels - once you got past the sixth level, you started back at level 1, but now the enemies chasing you picked up speed and were harder to escape. It took a long time to make it to that level and once you were dead, that was it. You had to start from scratch.

The game was so addicting that my parents would stay up at night, playing til the wee hours of the morning, growing more and more competitive as the night wore on. My sister and I would lie in bed listening to them play, the "beep-beep" sounds occasionally interrupted by shrieks of "Nooooo!" or "Aaaaaargh!" or something to that effect. My dad even kept track of their high scores on a sheet of paper and every night they would try to outdo each other while attempting to beat their own high scores.

One time my mom was playing Burgertime by herself in the middle of the day, no doubt trying to hone her skills to beat my dad that night, when the unthinkable happened. She was feverishly tapping away at the circular control panel, while excitedly reporting that she'd just gotten her highest score ever and she still had Peter Peppers left to spare. Just then my sister and our dog Spencer ran through the room, dashed between my mom and the TV and (GASP!) tripped over the cord that connected the Intellivision to the TV. The cord ripped out of the socket and the screen went blank. I think my mother's shriek could be heard at the end of the street.

I wish we could still play Burgertime. Such a simple game, such a ridiculous concept (it's a wonder we didn't have nightmares of being chased by pickles and hot dogs) and SO MUCH FUN.