Because adolescence wasn’t awkward enough…

I’m giving you all a glimpse into mine as I clean out my childhood bedroom.

The kids and I are in Georgia for the week visiting my parents while the husband is on an elk hunt in Eastern Oregon. When we come out here, we stay with my folks. Now, my parents take care of my nephews some of the time so their house has been actively hosting children for the past 22 years…. that is, most of their house has been actively hosting children. While my sisters' old rooms have been maintained as bedrooms for my nephews (and now my kids when we visit), my old bedroom has turned into general dump storage.

Old cuckoo clock for our first trip to Germany? Put it in Robbin’s room. The old family cradle? Robbin’s room. Huge paintings and furniture that our neighbors didn’t want when they moved 10 years ago? Definitely needs to go upstairs to the middle child's room. That, combined with the fact the my sisters took advantage of my being the first to move out of the house and subsequently used my room as a second closet…well, the result is something straight out of a hoarder’s paradise.

So, this trip, I finally decided to bite the bullet and clean up my room. Below, please find a long but by no means comprehensive list of some of the treasures I rummaged through this afternoon.

I’ve included photographic evidence for your viewing pleasure.

We’ll start with the Barbies. I collected Barbies for roughly 20 years, and my Granny would still buy me the annual holiday Barbie every Christmas up until she died, in 2017. This is conservatively 1/10 of my entire Barbie collection.

When I wasn’t gazing longingly at my boxes and boxes of unopened Barbies, I was honing my skill as a wordsmith, as is evidenced by this journal from 1993. Clearly I have always had a knack for the written word,  which is apparent in this enthralling piece I wrote on my little sister’s “varre strag chaup” habits. Investigative journalism at it’s finest.

 Not only was I a dedicated journaler, I was a stickler for calendaring my many, many social appointments. 

                                                                        #JTTforLife

In addition to my artistic calendars, I had a wide array of tastefully appointed pieces on my walls (like a framed print of the Leonardo DiVinci painting used in the Drew Barrymore classic, Ever After  and a Thomas Kinkade print in a bronze frame) and tucked into the edges of the mirror over my ornate (read: gaudy) dresser. I still had this gem tucked into the corner of that mirror, along with one of my 4th grade best friend in her coordinating Pooh shirt, circa 1996. I also had one of my mom at Christmas in the depths of her blue eye-shadow phase, and a baby picture of one of my friends from high school that for some unknown reason was given to me by his mother. It was a hard pick but finally I settled on showing you the pic of the best lookin’ kid in the bunch, so feast your eyes:

 I know what you're thinking, but you don’t get that rockin’ bod by just reading smut novels that are incredibly inappropriate for your age and damaging to your mental development, you’ve also got to work on it with hours and hours of bench riding. Which brings me to my next item. TBH, I almost sold this because of the mint condition; "like new with tags" except for the scuffing on the custom paint job caused by 20 years of junk being carelessly tossed on top it in the dark recesses of my closet. 

*Wobbin was my "nickname", since yours truly would naturally have a speech impediment with the letter"R" up until high school. I choose to believe my mother meant well.

All that bench riding does an imagination good though, and in 2000 I returned to my first love of writing. I won’t intimidate you with my genius by letting you actually read anything that 14 year old Robbin wrote, but suffice it to say there was an entire page dedicated to how I liked the color gray…deep stuff. Also, more than one page was spent detailing why both my middle/high school crush and Prince William were actually my soulmates; and, there may or may not be a disturbingly specific plan to open a Western-themed amusement park in Montana.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed from the contents of my journals, and my natural good looks, my social life was POPPIN’, which is why yours truly had not only a pager, but also this indestructible bad boy, which I am willing to bet $100 would still turn on if they made chargers to fit it anymore.

 If the Nokia would charge you’d see the only 3 numbers programmed into the phone were my parents house, my grandparent’s house, and my best friend’s house. And with so many friends I was talking to, it's a good thing I had all of these key-chains...so I could find the only key on the ring, which went to my parents' house...since I couldn't drive until almost my senior year of high school.

My one friend lived in a nearby swim/tennis community and I guess I could have worn these joggers to huff it over to her house since I couldn't drive, but my swarthy build did not lend itself to movement beyond the fridge. Thankfully, these have been held onto for the last two decades and I am now able to invite you to feast your eyes on this sexy ensemble. Not gonna lie, bringing these swishy joggers and fanny pack back with me to Oregon; thinking I could sew a couple of swatches of this material into the kids' clothes so I would know where they are at at all times. 

I'm thinking the pants and fanny pack will pair nicely with these knock off Doc Martin’s.

Now only if I had a shredded, decades old American Eagle visor to top is all off…

And don’t tell me I don’t have a sense of fashion—I mean, look at how I decorated my bedroom! Are you really gonna sit there and try to tell me that a 4-poster bed, gilded comforter and dark, olive green paint *isn’t* the interior design aesthetic of all 13 year old girls everywhere?!

 If you insist on saying that I had no taste, well, my excuse is that I was practically blind for the first 20 years of my life. I actually got Lasik when I was 19 or 20 years old because my mother told me that WHEN I GET KIDNAPPED they will take advantage of [me] when they realize [I’m] blind! Before that I wore coke bottle glasses and contacts. This wasn’t even my last prescription so I’m guessing this bad boy is….18 years old?

Also, I know it’s a little late but I’d like to cordially invite you and 75 of your closest friends to my high school graduation, because that’s at least how many invitations and thank you notes I found in the gigantic stationary box buried beneath my sister’s old volleyball bag.

No worries, if you’re afraid you might run late to the ceremony, I’ll lend you my Senate watch. Remember how EVERYONE was wearing these?!Y’all still have yours laying around, right? RIGHT?!

Speaking of time, pretty sure it stood still when this happened:

I say I’m pretty sure because I honestly have no recollection of this ever happening. Where was I? When was this? WHO WAS I WITH?! Someone had to take the picture….I will give you this entire bag of old newspapers if you tell me who was with me. 

And y'all, that barely grazes the surface. Like I said, there is an incredible amount of stuff I have to wade through up there. I am making slow but sure progress--I filled five heavy duty contractor bags in the span of two hours yesterday. 

Oh, well. If I have to spend my time in GA reliving my youth, at least I can rest easy in the knowledge that I have always been really, really cool. And now the internet has the pictures to prove it.