Picture from Pixabay. Answers to this week’s The Friday Five questions.

1. Growing up, what sayings/phrases do you remember your mother using? Your father?

Nothing particular comes to mind except for the typical “How was your day/how was school?”. We’d talk about how each of our day went during dinner.

2. What book/song/other did your parents use to put you to sleep?

I don’t remember. What I remember being a habit since I was kindergarden age is Mom or Dad reading to me in the evenings before I learned to read myself, but I never fell asleep during that – I loved stories too much too to fall asleep! Around the time I started school (so 6 years of age) My Mom and Dad started to teach me to read before school did because what I really wanted was to be read to like for hours each and every evening and obviously they didn’t have time to read to me for four hours on workday evenings. Particularly I remember The Famous Five book by Enid Blyton being read to me (they were my faves!), but also Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators books. Learning to read is one of my earliest clear memories.

3. What did you fight with your siblings over?

I’m only child in my (adopted) family. Technically I have biological brothers and sisters somewhere, but I’ve never met them.

4. Do you and your siblings still fight?

See above reply.

5. What was the worst fight you had with any family member?

The only fight I remember was the one about being forced to go to a hobby gym class once a week. Since I was a baby Mom had been taking me with her to “Mom and baby” exercise classes and when I got older she went back to her own exercise class and signed me up for one of my own toddler/little kid class.

Once school started to I started to resent it. I’d have much rather spent the time reading or with my friends and thought school had enough of it already (two hours a week usually) and we as a family did enough of exercising on the weekends by biking/skiing/walking and things. And we always walked and biked to places such as the library or small shopping trip or my Grandma’s anyway so the extra hobby exercise was on top of all that. I usually got some form of exercise most days even without the extra hobby class. It wasn’t fun to me, just a way to get from point A to point B, or to please other people.

None of my friends had extra hobby gym or hobby sports so I thought it was unfair I had to and a complete waste of time when we already did outdoorsy things (biking etc.) more in our everyday life than any of my friends families did, but my Mom and Dad were very into extra hobby exercise because they thought it was fun(!) (it was always all for fun, not competing in our family) and didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them I didn’t enjoy it and wanted to stop. We fought about it regularly for a couple of years until when I was around 11 or 12 and I simply stopped going – I didn’t go the extra hobby gym but lied to Mom and Dad I did and got away with it for like five months. Then when they found out, they finally got it that I really didn’t want to go and agreed that I didn’t have to. They grounded me for two weeks and took away my weekly allowance for two months as a punishment for lying but I was so happy I didn’t care at all!

I thought (and still do) that because they didn’t listen to what I wanted, what I ended up doing was the logical conclusion because it was just simply useless to talking to them about it – I had tried it many times, over many ears and it got me nowhere. That was the only time I actually lied to my parents, and it was the last resort kind of thing.