Well my 5th birthday started out with a bang. We were still living at “The Walsh’s” and all my friends came over for my party. And I threw up. At my own birthday party.

Shortly after my 5th birthday, we moved to Danbury, CT, where my dad had gotten a position as pastor at the Danbury Advent Christian Church. My brother’s name is Dan Berry and so there was concern that we were moving to Danbury, but people always ended up thinking it was humorous rather than teasing him about it.

Fall when I was 5 I started kindergarten. I remember going in for my kindergarten
interview and having so much fun. Then at kindergarten orientation, I met Courtney who became my best friend. I still remember my first day of school because Martha walked me to my classroom and then just as my mom had told me to do, I walked up to Mrs. Seabury, shook her hand and informed her of who I was. Before I started school I had been very shy not liking being away from my mom too long, but I LOVED kindergarten. I remember my friend Kent crying outside in the hallway with his mom one day because he didn’t want to come in and I kept
poking my head out the door watching in bafflement that he would not want to be having fun with us in class and yelling to him reminding him of all the fun things we were going to do that day. My closest friends were Courtney, Kent, and Todd.

The summer when I was 5 we added a few locations to our summer family vacations. We started
camping at Baxtor State Park in Maine with Skip & Elaine and their son Aaron took us canoeing and taught me how to blow bubbles with bubble gum that year. We also went and watched bears
from afar and I was too scared to go swimming because of the leeches. Mom took about 1000 pictures of the loons on the lake.

I was not allowed to go to sleepovers when I was this young, but for some reason my mom let me go to Courtney’s sleepover birthday where we also went to the Danbury Fair Mall, rode the carousel, and I saw my first movie in a theatre “The Fox and the Hound.”