I'll try to do this as organized as possible. I'll go with years for the first few but then I'm going to transition into grades because I think that's easier to remember for whatever reason.
The first few memories I have (or at least i've been told I have) are from when I lived back in Springfield from when I was around 3-5. I remember running around our old house, and we had some odd window between our kitchen and living room, and I used to climb through it all the time and my mom would get mad because it was rather close to the stove on the kitchen side. We had a hill behind our house where my dad used to take me in the winter and I would go sledding down it, and my dad would stop me when I went down to the bottom. Other than that I don't have many interesting details from my childhood in Springfield other than that we had a ridiculously hot pink bathroom. That is a very vivid memory.
When we moved into my current house I was around 5, and I made friends with a kid named Dave who was my next-door neighbour. I was also friends with two brothers across the street from me. We used to play a lot of street hockey and basketball over the years because we were kids and we all liked to play outside. I remember my dad and I would go outside and play catch in the yard then in the street as the years went on. My parents had me playing all types of sports when I was a kid, and I played soccer, basketball, baseball, and did swimming a bit. I think I started playing soccer before anything else, maybe in around second or third grade I wanna say? And basketball and baseball followed. The reason for the swimming was because every summer up until last year my parents and I would go to the Cape for a week for vacation, and naturally I needed to know how to swim if I wanted to enjoy myself. We stayed in South Yarmouth and I had a great group of friends there that happened to be vacationing the same week that I was, and I looked forward to seeing them every year we went. But that's off on a different tangent. Back to when I first moved. I went to preschool in my current town, and my only defining memory of that was accidentally pulling the fire alarm and having the firetruck come to the school at the end of the day, and then to add insult to injury, my mom locked her keys in the car and we had to wait for what seemed like forever for AAA to come to unlock it for us.
From Kindergarten until second grade I went to Medowbrook School, and I have a few memories from that. I had a witch of a first grade teacher who I really didn't like, Mrs. Hasbrook, and apparently she singled me out for no reason and would always pick on me. I'm not sure what happened to her but i'm pretty sure she got what was coming to her. In second grade I remember playing a LOT of soccer outside at recess because I actually played it and knew what I was doing, so I wasn't that bad. Also during that time I remember going through a slight klepto phase where I would steal random things from my school like legos or building blocks and nobody really ever caught me. My most prominent memory was on a hot day late in the school year, when we were sent outside for a fire drill that I found out later in life was actually because of a bomb threat. We were out there for the majority of the school day and then a long while after that because the buses had to run late for whatever reason to get all of the kids home. It turns out, one of my good friends nowadays just deposited a box that was "quite securely" duct taped closed, and it was a donation of bathroom items to the homeless fund-raiser-thingy we had going on at the time. Talk about a false alarm.
In from third-fifth grade I was at Mapleshade School, and those were some interesting years. I remember that's when a lot of fads were going through the school. Things like Beyblades (spinning battle tops), Yugioh and Pokeman trading cards, and a bunch of other things aimed at that age group. In third grade my troubles with math started to blossom and I had to get extensive extra help with that from an excellent math teacher (Mrs. Jagedowski I believe). But somehow at the same time I was in the "gifted and talented" program taught by a Mrs. Barry that met in some room that was a little bigger than a closet where we got out of class to discuss random things and actually do some fun stuff. Also in third grade I remember having a very strict English teacher, Mrs. Toller, and in that class I feel like I actually learned a lot, but I had to struggle through learning how to write in cursive. Fourth grade was an odd year for me. It was very difficult but I also started Tae Kwon Do that year and I progressed relatively far in a short amount of time with that, but i'll go back to that later. I had a genuinely awful math teacher that year, Mr. Bosquet, and he decided he would only teach students whom he liked, and for whatever reason he didn't like me, so I fell very far behind because he wouldn't take the time to help catch students like me who were behind back up with the group. During that time I struggled a ton in math, and I was essentially screwed for the next year, and luckily (for some odd reason) my English teacher Mrs. Grimes saw that, and she kind of took control and put me in her class for the next level next year, and put me in the class of an excellent math teacher, Mr. Sears. In fifth grade I was doing a lot. I was still playing all of my sports in their respective seasons and I was doing Tae Kwon Do at the same time, and I progressed to one belt away from getting my Black belt. I had to stop because it turns out that the academy I was going to was ripping us off and was charging us way too much, so I stopped that. With more time to concentrate on school, my math teacher that year helped me get back up to the level that I should've been on, and he is the only teacher I remember ever calling my house, and with good news too. He called to say that I made a drastic improvement and that I was actually well on my way to being on the level that I should. Unfortunately that's all the good I can say that came out of that year. I took a trip to Boston with my parents and from what I believe to be a very unfortunate turn of events, I got a perforation in my eardrum. I had to go back and taken to the hospital where they basically said I just have to sit there in excruciating pain while it heals. So during that time period, I developed problems paying attention in school because the pain would spike every time I turned my head and there was nothing I could do. So I fell behind again and had to be removed from the gifted and talented program to be put in a class that would help me get caught up. Thankfully though, towards the end of that summer before sixth grade started, the fluid that somehow managed to block up my ear in the first place drained out through the perforation and the pain finally went away.
Now sixth grade was supposed to be more of a fresh start. I started playing football so I had a made some new friends from that along with my small group of friends, and I started playing trumpet in fifth grade so I had a couple friends from band too. I had one of my favorite teachers so far in sixth grade, Mrs. Croci, and that was possibly the best science class I've ever had. I remember we did that fun experiment with mentos and coke before it was a viral video on youtube. I also was elected student of the month for my grade once, and that was a pretty big honor for me. I had a witch of an English teacher, Ms. Karas, who made everyone completely hate her class because she was the most strict teacher I can ever remember having. If we misbehaved at all in class, she would make us write vocabulary sentences for the whole class and then do 25 more for homework. Not fun. In seventh grade nothing really significant happened except the fact that apparently my body wasn't growing fast enough, so I started gaining quite a lot of weight. Made me a better linemen for football though. That led to me having relatively low self-esteem though, so my eighth grade year was rather tough. After a pretty bad low that year, I got myself together and got ready to make the transition into high school.
I made two major changes in the beginning of my freshmen year. The first was I started playing the best sport known to man, Rugby. I also started a workout routine over the summer and that not only helped me get in shape for freshmen football but it also helped get me acquainted with the school itself. The best part, I never realized I would lose all the weight because my body actually caught up with me and combined with the fact I was working out, I gained a ton of muscle and got relatively in shape. Freshmen football was a blast for me, I started offensive tackle and played the entire season. I learned a lot and feel like I really improved, and I was actually looking forward to playing JV next season. I also had the opportunity to go to D.C. for a week for a National Youth Leadership Conference where I was one of only a couple freshmen when the rest of the conference consisted of upperclassmen. That was a ton of fun, because I got to spend a week away from everyone for the first time in my life, and I got to see all of D.C. and all the famous monuments. Unfortunately again however, after my football season ended, I met my first girlfriend, and that set the next events in motion that would be some of the most difficult of my life so far. The relationship was good in the beginning, but it got really messed up because of her parents, and clearly love is blind (pfft, dumb) so I didn't care about any of that and I did all I could to "help" her, even if it meant putting her needs over my parent's worries. I'm not going to get into details, but it took until well into sophomore year for me to realize the stress I put my family and friends through, and all the wrongs that girl had led me to. To add injury to insult, I was hurt during the football season of sophomore year and I couldn't play for most of the season. I had a knee injury and was on crutches for a very long time, but my coaches thought I was faking my injury for whatever insane reason, so the next season (my junior year) I barely got to play at all.
After the disappointment of my junior year football season, I decided I didn't want to deal with the coaching staff anymore so I quit my senior year to focus on rugby. During my junior season of rugby, I was elected an acting captain when our current captain was hurt, and I held that position for the next two seasons. That year was great for my team, we had a lot of great players and we won a major tournament up in New Hampshire that we go to every year but have yet to have any sort of recognition in. Other than that, nothing all that major went on during my junior year. In senior year though, that's when everything changed. I had a pretty large group of friends because the girl I was dating at the time was in the grade below me. I ended up breaking up with her because she basically turned into an awful person in about a week, and to this day I have no idea why. But that led me, among other things, to my current girlfriend. When she and I started dating, it was relatively soon after we had just ended our previous relationships, both ending with a large amount of annoying high school drama. Her ex-boyfriend and I were very good friends, but after they broke up, something I said at some point made him turn on me and he completely hated me. Because of that and my love of not causing annoying drama, I separated myself from my main group of friends and kept close with a small, tight-knit group of people who i'm still in touch with today. My girlfriend really kept me grounded during that time and I have her to thank for helping me get through some very difficult times.
My senior summer was spent working and trying to enjoy the free time I had as much as possible before I left. Went to the beach a couple times, took a couple road trips, but I was really excited to finally get up to UMass. Orientation went horribly because I was ridiculously sick the whole time, but that didn't ruin my hopes at all. I finally got here, and i've made some awesome friends that i'm gonna hope to keep for a long time. But for now, eyes on to the future to see what it brings.
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