Baby arrived today
The oldest record of me there is: the baby book my mom kept. Born March 30, 1988, plus chicken pox, a lost tooth, and how many pounds I was at fifteen months. The very beginning of the whole timeline.
This is the very beginning. Everything else on this site eventually traces back to this one page, the first entry in the baby book my mom kept for me. If the timeline has a starting line, it is here.
Baby arrived today
According to the book, I arrived on March 30, 1988, at 1:00 in the afternoon, at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Todd Brandon Hertzelle. Seven pounds, twelve ounces, twenty inches long, blue eyes, brown hair. The attending physician was a Dr. John Ansty. My mom, Cheryl, and my dad, Marlin, are both signed at the bottom, and so, in his own hand, is my older brother.
My favorite part is the note scrawled at the very bottom. After listing which relatives the family thought I resembled, my mom added the line that I choose to believe set the tone for everything after: “has good disposition.” I will take it.
A few things that happened next
The book has a page called “Every Day” where my mom jotted down the small stuff, and two entries in particular made me laugh.
The first: “Todd had chicken pox on 3-25-94. Had to cancel 6th birthday party. Bad case, too many to count.” So five days before I turned six, I came down with a case of chicken pox bad enough to cancel the party and apparently bad enough that my mom gave up trying to count the spots. The second: “Todd lost 1st tooth (right bottom front) on 12-26-94.” The day after Christmas, 1994. Right on the calendar, forever.
The growing page
There is also a “Growing” page tracking the early measurements, and reading it now is a strange little thrill, like looking at telemetry from a version of yourself you have no memory of being.
At fifteen and a half months I was 26¾ pounds and 30¾ inches, eightieth percentile for weight and seventieth for height, and there is a sticker noting that I had figured out how to climb down stairs. By nineteen and a half months I was still 26¾ pounds and a bit taller at 31½ inches, in good health, with my oral polio and H.I.B. shots logged right there. My mom was keeping records before I could even talk. I come by all of this honestly.
That is where I begin. A good disposition, a bad case of chicken pox, and a mom who wrote it all down so that, almost forty years later, I could put it here.
The same mom who, a year or two later, was still right there, reading to me.
