Every family has stories about one particular family member’s exploits. Usually these exploits center on that person’s teenage / young adulthood. In my family, I am that person, but the stories are all about me before I even turned five. Every new family member is held up to my history to determine where he/she falls on the behavior scale. It all began when I was only six months old. I began to do the Houdini escape from my crib at this time. Every morning, upon waking, my mom would bet my dad on my whereabouts. See, I refused to sleep in my crib so they would find me under it, in one of my chest drawers that I had emptied out or in the closet. So they figured they would buy me a fancy canopy bed. “Surely she’ll sleep in such a lovely bed,” was my mother’s reasoning to my father when she told him of her plan. The next morning they found me sound asleep – on top of the canopy! I was seven months old and had just learned to walk and my climbing skills were growing daily. The next new place for me to sleep was on the top shelf of my closet. A couple of mornings after they first found asleep on the canopy they came in the bedroom to wake me up. What they found instead was smoke beginning to fill the room because I had climbed to the top of the closet and brought down my dad’s work spotlight, plugged it in, turned it on upside down, and promptly climbed back to my perch on the closet shelf where I fell back to sleep. After that they had to make sure that there were no long clothes hanging in the closet or chairs in the room that I could move to the closet where I would then climb to the top shelf. They also had to move everything out of the closet other than clothing. My aunt loves to tell about the last time that she agreed to baby-sit me. I was only 14-months-old and she had put me down for a nap with my 16-month-old cousin. That was her first mistake. Her second mistake was going downstairs to clean while we napped. She came upstairs to check on us about an hour later and found us in her bathroom. Her bathroom that she had just spent a good hour cleaning from top to bottom was now covered, in every spot that I could reach, with Vaseline and baby powder. I had climbed onto the sink, gotten the stuff out of the medicine cabinet and started as high as I could reach and worked my way down. More to come...these are just a few things I wrote during a two-day Life Stories workshop about my childhood.