{"id":709,"date":"2025-09-25T21:13:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T02:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/?p=709"},"modified":"2025-09-25T21:13:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T02:13:17","slug":"early-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/25\/early-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I barely remember being in daycare, which of course was before kindergarten. I want to say it was a two-story white building. The main lady there was named Mrs. Steele. I remember feeling awkward on water fun day when they had all the boys in one line and all the girls in the line beside us changing our clothes. I couldn\u2019t have been more than three or four and was very self-aware at that time that this is weird. That would\u2019ve been around 1982 or 1983.<\/p>\n<p>I attended elementary school at Black Rock Elementary in Black Rock Arkansas. At the time I started kindergarten in 1983 the elementary school was a set of three buildings with stone fronts and a sidewalk connecting them all on the right hand side. The left-hand side was the main road. The playground for K through three was at the top of the hill behind the third building. There was a red fire hydrant in the far corner of the playground. I used to pretend that it was the Tardis console.<\/p>\n<p>For kindergarten, my teacher was named Ann Phillips. I only have very faint memories of kindergarten, but I do remember my mom brought my K9 from Doctor Who that dad built me for show and tell one day. I remember one day laying on a kinder mat on the floor and just looking up staring at this wooden shoe that was used to help us learn to tie shoes. I struggled with tying shoes for a very long time and more Velcro shoes as a result. <\/p>\n<p>I really don\u2019t remember much of first grade. That would\u2019ve been the 1984 &#8211; 1985 school year. My teacher was Mrs. Mary House. We had a teaching assistant named Mrs. Lynne Beary. I want to say that the class got split in two and each teacher took half of us to each end of the room. I want to say that there was a large curved table in the back corner of the classroom. We had reading textbooks that they were very thin paperbacks, I want to say, had red on the cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I barely remember being in daycare, which of course was before kindergarten. I want to say it was a two-story white building. The main lady there was named Mrs. Steele. I remember feeling awkward on water fun day when they had all the boys in one line and all the girls in the line beside &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/25\/early-memories\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Early Memories&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions\/711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omarvance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}