Thursday, November 07, 2019

The reason I'm not a fashionista?

Since my return from Pennsylvania, I've been going through photos from my childhood, a project I started some time ago but haven't finished...or barely touched the surface. I have slides and pictures that I've scanned into my computer. My plan is to label them by year.

My dad was very big on labeling pictures with the date and the people's names. He wasn't always right on either. Sometimes the year is on the back of the slides or on the photos. Most of the time, it isn't. Which leaves me to guess.

I emailed the digital copies Lois had on her computer and took photos of the pictures in her photo albums. I've been using the length of our hair to guess the date. Seriously. I made a chart of our hair, and then I wrote out the years of each school year. It took forever.

Lois had a photo of the first day of school with a date of 1971 scrawled on it. I, too, had some pictures from the first day of school and so I went to put this picture with mine. I realized I had labeled it 1969, and so I had to do some math. I started school before I turned five, which meant Kindergarten began in September 1969, and first grade would've started in 1970. Hmm...

I wrote out each year of school like this:

Kindergarten 1969-1970
1st Grade - 1970-1971
Etc.

But the pictures I had on the first day of school were strange. In some, I had a lunch box that I distinctively remember carrying my first-grade year, and in other photos, I did not. In some pictures, it was raining, and in others, it was not. It took a good two days of studying the images before I struck gold.

I WORE THE SAME DRESS BOTH YEARS!

Obviously, my mother considered this my first day of school dress!

I figured it out by looking at Kim's outfit and the notes pinned to our clothes. Oh, and my shoes were different. And I looked older. But...same dress. Tee Hee.



1969 - Kindergarten First Day



1970 - First Grade First Day

2 comments:

Jay Brewer said...

Deep post. I would love to look back at my younger self and see what's up with styles and intent. Younger jay was an ongoing fashion disaster and it wasn't really until the past 5 years that I feel that I ever got into clothes in any meaningful way. Awesome post.

Stephanie Shaw said...

But it was such a cute dress!