Blog Me MAYbe: MAY I tell you something about my (child) self?

Happy May Day, everyone!  Today is the first day of the Blog Me MAYbe Blogfest, hosted by Sara, Katy, Cambria, Jessica, Tracey, Alexandra, Lola, and Alison.

The theme for Tuesdays is MAY I tell you something about myself?  


I'm going to try to focus on a different part of my life each Tuesday, so as not to bore you!

Thanks, Facebook, for getting my whole extended family to post baby pictures of me on the internet!

When I was younger, my grandfather used to call me Shirley Temple.  This picture, I think, is from that phase. 

Some facts about me when I was this age:

• I loved whales.  A friend of the family did an "adopt a whale" thing for me; my whale's name was Patches.  We looked for him when we went to Cape Cod the summer I was four, and went whale watching, but no luck.  This was the phase of my life when I decided that I wanted to be a marine biologist (which startles people coming from a four-year-old.) 
  
• I (shocker) loved to read and be read to.  I was reading some chapter books (mostly Carolyn Haywood and Beverly Cleary) before I started school.  My favorite books that my parents read me were Kay Chorao's Oink and Pearl books and The Josefina Story Quilt.
  
• I was an only child for the first five years of my life, and I didn't go to preschool.  As a result, I had more than the usual number of imaginary friends. (I made my dad write out a list once.  It fills the length of a sheet of paper--in three columns.  That's in the archives, somewhere.)  Most of them were characters from TV shows--which, I realized later, means that I basically spent my toddler years making up fanfiction as I acted out stories with them.