Some of you may have seen this sexy shot on facebook… for those of you who have not, you’re welcome.

There are SO many things to discuss here… from pre-braced chompers to the fact that at this point in my life I still slightly believed that my dolls came alive at night. This was a time in my life when the term beauty regimen was synonymous with low pony tail, and style was the same thing as anything that even slightly resembled a Lisa Frank sticker in all of its glory. Let’s just say, this was a time when I actually owned multiple sticker books.

…Which reminds me… I remember having an 3+ hour melt down after realizing I stuck like, ALL of my furry and oily stickers on pages that were the permanent sticker pages…. not the ones that allowed you to reuse your stickers.. Meanwhile, like, where was I going to reuse my stickers? Let’s be real, little Maddie.. You were just upset because you had extremely buck teeth. I actually loved the idea of getting braces and never actually knew I had buck teeth. Or little to no neck. OMG p.s., what kind of cruel adult comes up with the idea to make sticker books with permanent pages? Really?!

This picture was taken on my birthday. My parents got me lots of the American Doll stuff for Kirsten, but drew the line at the Kirsten trunk, which my Dad build, painted, and decal-ed for me. Yes, totally “aw cute”, but I have a stronger than slight feeling that my appreciation was not directly correlated with the amount of time my sweet father spent on this totally thoughtful project.

Other things that were happening in my life…
I specifically remember my Mom to reminding me not to be bossy when my friends came over… which is when I should have realized I was destined to be an entrepreneur, I would get into physical altercations with my brother… once resulting in him locking me out of the house and slinging a dime, via slingshot, at me from his window… to ACROSS THE YARD (where I was)…  (and, let’s be real, the kid had no aiming skills), YET, it hit me between the eyes and left a dime mark!… I had massive eyebrows (which I wish I never massacred [that’s another story for another time]), and a massive troll collection that came with me everywhere.. Like, literally, even to my uncle Joe’s graduation from Dental school.. There I was, at the inappropriately not young enough age of like, 11, setting up what I called my “TROLL WEDDING”.. maybe that has something to do with my marriage complex. One by one, adults came over to say, “Ohhh how cute!”… OR… “That’s so neat, Maddie!”.. really, what they were thinking was probably more along the lines of, “Holy shit- didn’t know there existed a human that carried 80+ trolls around in shoe boxes to set up destination troll weddings.”.. What I was thinking?…”They think I am SO beautiful and SO cool. They wish they had a troll collection like this”.

Yes Maddie.. Keep telling yourself that they were envious of your troll collection.

yes, of course, I totally still have the trolls.