Day 3: Time to meet Justin
A Little About Myself
Wwll it is Day 3 of the 31 days series. Well it is my turn to be in the spot light. Yello! I am Justin, nice to virtually meet you.
I guess that I will share a little bit about myself, and the big family that I loved growing up in, so you can get to know me a little better.
I am 6’ tall with blue eyes and blond hair. I just turned 35 last month. Most of the years I can’t even remember how old I really am. Does that happen to you too? I don’t feel like I am that old. I still feel like a kid around 18. It’s fun to feel young.
Here is a picture of me with my JC pajamas that my grandma made for me. My parents named me Justin Carl so they could give me a nick name of JC. That name stuck with me all through my childhood. My parents and family still call me that today. These where my favorite pajamas because they had my name on them.
This was one of my favorite toys. The Big Wheel! This little ride was sweet! I always loved to be on the go. I would ride this thing all over the neighborhood and never want to get off. The best was riding down our steep driveway and turning on to the sidewalk full speed ahead.. I remember turning the corner one day when one of the back wheels just fell right off. I guess you can say that I rode it into the ground.
Meet The Family
I grew up in the awesome state of Utah, with the Wasatch mountain range close to home. It’s a great place to live if you like the four seasons. It gets hot and it gets cold, but in the fall and spring the weather is great.
(I’m the littlest guy in the picture)
I am the 3rd child of 6 in the family food chain. I share the middle with my little sister. I have an older brother, an older sister, me, another sister, a younger brother, and finally my baby sister. We were always proud that mom and dad were able to pull of the boy, girl, boy, girl, boy girl, family line up. We loved the Brady Bunch growing up and kind of felt like them. We each had a brother or sister to either play with, or pick on.
They always called me and my sister that share the middle, the peacemakers of the family. It seemed like we were always trying to keep things calm and happy in our big family. We were always the ones to break up the family feuds.
Let me introduce my parents a little bit. My dad is 6’-6” and my little mommy is 5’-6”. They are quite different in height and demeanor. They are the best parents ever (I hope they read this… brownie points and all). They have always been there for me throughout my life and I love them dearly. They have done a great job raising all of us kids.
Here is a picture of their wedding day with their parents, in February 1972.
One thing that I remember about my dad growing up, was his big mustache. He had that mustache all of my childhood for as long as I can remember. One day when I was in high school he shaved it of. It was the weirdest thing that I had ever seen. I didn’t know that my dad had an upper lip. It was kind of like seeing the eyes of Flint Lockwood’s dad, when he asks flint to look in his eyes, in the movie, “Cloudy with the Chance of Meet Balls”.
For most of my childhood my dad worked as a manager at a big and tall clothing store. Very appropriate for his big – tallness. He loved working there because he is such a people person and loves to be around and helping people.
My mom is very soft spoken and very sweet. My dad was my moms first date, first boyfriend and first kiss. They have been married for over 40 years now and with (hopefully) many more to come. I think that is pretty awesome. They are a great example to me in so many ways.
My dad and mom loved to travel and explore the states around us all the national parks that were about a days drive from where we lived. I remember all of us kids packed in the station wagon and heading off to see the world. I remember riding in the very back or our station wagon (the kind with the backward facing row), next to my sisters, eating a really good ice cream cone driving up the streets in San Francisco and feeling like I was about to fall out the back window, because the roads where so steep.
If it is a good memory it usually involves food, ya know the saying “the way to a man’s heart”, well it is true for me. There was always a reference to food linked into every single memory. For instance, I remember our backyard growing up was always full of food. My mom was gardener and loved to plant vegetables and grow fruit trees. I remember sitting up in the cherry tree for hours just picking, then eating and enjoying every minute of it. My favorite thing about my late summer birthday were the steamed vegetables from my grandparents garden (strange for a kid, I know)
Funny childhood memories
I had a great childhood. I lived in the coolest neighborhood ever there were tons of kids around, a forest and river right behind my friend’s house, where we would find ourselves about every day having lots of fun, hopefully staying out of trouble.
My friends and I would build huts in the forest and start clubs in our new huts. For some reason they always nominated me as the president. Probably because I was always the one that said we would should start a club. We never did anything with our club, but hang out inside our huts.
When I was about 12 we build a two story hut in my fiends new back yard, with building scraps. It was the coolest hut ever. We would work on it all day long, throughout the summer months. It had a large room on the main level that we built over a drainage ditch, with a ladder that went up the the upper level. The upper level had two rooms and an upper balcony with railing that hung over the garage that parked my friends Honda 3-wheeler. It took all summer to build it, but we had a blast building doing it.
After it was mostly finished we wanted to have a sleep over in it with all the guys that built it. There were about 7 of us crammed in our little hut. In the middle of the night one of my friends decided he needed to pee. Instead of going in to the forest a little further, or going inside, he decided to pee on the corner of the hut thinking he wasn’t getting it on any one inside. Well that wasn’t the case. So we all got up and decided to sleep inside the house, I guess that is boys for ya.
So I guess it is time for the next post! Stay tuned for tomorrow. Check out the 31 Days tag for all the rest of the posts!
I am the husband of the amazing Cassity of Remodelaholic. I love to problem solve and to design and build things inside and outside the house to make life better. I am a professional Landscape Architect by trade and love the outdoors.
