Cochran Family History and News – BlogCochran.com

I’m sure there was some kind of gum rule, but I can’t remember it.  The one rule I remember very clearly is that we were not allowed under any circumstances to buy or eat any kind of candy cigarettes.  My Dad lost his father to lung cancer when he was just 7 years old and he spoke very passionately about this prohibition.  I also remember that there was a candy store in the mall called “Candy Time” that sold gum in the shape of a cigarette rolled in white paper that you could buy for five cents a stick and that if you blew on the end of the stick a puff of white flour would come out the other side.  I remember being very tempted to buy that gum as it was the least expensive thing in the entire candy store (the store only consisted of a long wrap around counter with a cash register in the middle).  Unfortunately, I am also pretty confident that at one time I did buy that candy and in my mind’s eye I see a picture of my Dad, more sad than angry and very disappointed. 

Now that I think about it as an adult, the idea of candy cigarettes is quite appalling—how did candy makers get away with it?!

This is my name-sake Kathleen O’Bryant with my grandmother.  My grandmother loved roses.Kathleen was not quite two years old when she died.  The oldest child of my maternal grandparents.  I can’t even imagine how my grandmother must have felt after she drowned.  I know she sobbed and sobbed and pulled handfuls of her hair out. My uncle Toby (her second child) was born just before Kathleen’s death.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Repp. She was an older lady. The only thing I remember about her is that if she caught a bottom in the air she’d smack it. Usually this happened when someone was leaning across a desk to reach someone else’s desk. I think I even remember one day a fellow classmate giving her a swat for having a bottom in the air when she bent down to get something from a cupboard. The whole class was shocked and she was very mad.

I remember that the desks were arranged in groups of 4 or 5.  They weren’t really lined up, they were pushed together with no space in the middle so it was almost as if we had one big desk instead of a series of small ones.

My mother tells me that Mrs. Repp started writing really negative/mean things on my papers and that they became concerned. I know that in first grade I was diagnosed with dyslexia and my parents and others determined that I should repeat the first grade. They told me that I was taking first grade again because my hands weren’t as big as Mellissa’s. I can remember noticing that I was smaller than her one day as we got on the bus to go home. I know I had trouble with the orientation of letters and I had a letter and number line across my desk. I can remember struggling with knowing the orientation of 5 and S and I could never remember which side was my left and which was my right. At sometime during elementary school I figured out that if I tried to snap, my right hand was always the hand that would snap. I used this as my guide and whenever I had to determine left or right I’d think about snapping. Maybe this is weird, but I still use a similar strategy to tell left from right—it’s like my brain just can’t automatically remember which is side is left and which is right, I assume that’s the dyslexia.

Repeating first grade meant I new set of classmates and Angie and Melissa moved on without me. It was probably at that point that I became very lonely. I can remember walking around the playground by myself thinking how I wished my friend Erin from church went to school with me because then I would have a friend to play with on the playground.

The first car that I spent some time driving was my parents 1991 red Dodge Spirit.  It lived through most of my siblings despite being crashed a few times, never by me.  I think the picture I have provided was it’s final crash which happened during the time that Zach and I lived in Ohio.

I got to drive it to school mostly because my parents were too tired to get up to drive me to early morning seminary.  I would wake one of them up to drive me and they’d say “you can just take the car.”  After awhile I used to hope that they’d be too tired because it meant I got to drive home from school instead of spending an hour riding home on the school bus.  My senior year of High school I got a job at Heidelberg College Cafeteria and I remember singing along to the radio as I drove to and from work in the Spirit.  I never fixed it or named it. 

Here is a picture of someone else’s red Dodge Spirit:

After graduating from high school, I moved out to Utah with no car.  I walked everywhere I went.  When Barbara left on her mission, she left her black Nissan Sentra at our apartment, but she didn’t leave it for me to drive.  It was a stick shift which no one had ever taught me to drive and she let the registration and insurance lapse on it.  A boy in my ward took me to the BYU stadium parking lot and gave me a few lessons on how to drive stick in that car and I was terrible at it.  I may have learned enough to drive it over to my next apartment when I moved, but I never drove it around to the store or anywhere, so for all intensive purposes, I had no car.

The next car I got to drive was Zach’s brown station wagon (Belle) which he started leaving at my apartment after we were engaged.  I felt a new sense of freedom to be able to get places that were farther than my feet could walk.  I will let Zach write about all the cars we had together, since he will be much more detailed than I would be.

I think if I had to pick a car that was the most “me,” at this point it would be a van.  I’m just in the van stage of my life I guess.  I spend my days hauling around my own little hoard of adorable children all day.

I love Independence day.  It’s one of those days that I reflect on how thankful and blessed I am to live in  a free country.  I have never lived anywhere else, yet I’m convinced that the USA is the the best country in the world.  I often cry during patriot songs (which I know isn’t saying much because I cry all the time).  One that has elicited tears from me in Elementary school and still makes me cry regularly is Lee Greenwood’s I’m proud to be an American. 

These days it seems like we spend more time fretting about how our freedoms and our country are being/or might be destroyed.  I admit that I am afraid sometimes when I see crazy, insane things happen politically.  I just hope our freedom is preserved for my children and grandchildren and I wish more people recognized how great it is to be an American.

I also wish I had gotten a better picture of the kids in their matching patriotic shirts.

For most things I have much more price loyalty.  The following list are the only things for which I will not buy an alternate brand:

Underwear.   For the last ten years and for the rest of my life, I will wear only one brand.

Lego.  Sorry Mega Blocks, no thank you.

I love my Henckels knives.  I haven’t bought any other brand.

I can’t remember anything about kindergarten.  I know I went to Clinton Elementary School for kindergarten and that I did not have Mrs. Oberlander (she was the kindergarten teacher for several of my siblings), but I don’t even remember who my teacher was. 

Yes, our very aged father can remember back into the dark ages when he went to kindergarten, but I cannot remember a single thing about it.

I can remember Isaac’s Kindergarten. . .

• First day of school part 1 and part 2,
• Halloween parade on his last day of Kindergarten in Utah
• New school
• Fun night 
• Knoxville kindergarten fieldtrip to the zoo
• Field day

I can remember having a Lite-Brite.  We had at least two kinds of wooden blocks (the kind with letters on them and the kind that you could stack and build with).  I collected Barbies at one point when I was young.  My brother had GI Joes.  I had a few My Little Pony toys, my friend Erin had a larger collection of them.  I can remember having some Little People sets including the Sesame Street house (without the characters), and a barn.  We had a Little People mail truck with plastic letters that went with a set with a police station where you could wind the crank on top to make a siren noise.  My grandma O’Bryant had this Little People boat that I spent many hours playing with in the bathtub.  My grandma Bird bought me lots of collectable dolls. 

I can remember spending lots of time playing outside on the swingset or exploring the woods across the street.  We liked to ride our bikes on a circular street across the street from our house as well and we regularly took walks along the street feeding grass to the cows and horses by our house.  We liked to hide out in the cornfield behind our house.  We’d sometimes knock over a few stalks to make a little house in the middle of the field.

I honestly can’t remember a single sports injury.  This shouldn’t be incredibly surprising considering I never really played any sports.  We did like to have volleyball parties at my house when I was a teenager.  We’d set up a big net in our yard and have lots of people over to play, but I can’t ever remember getting hurt playing.

Once I discovered a lump on my knee which the internet diagnosed it as “housemaid’s knee” from bending down and kneeling repeatedly.  I suppose you could call that an injury in the sport of motherhood?!

My first thought was what would I like to do if I had free time, but that sentence is dangerously close to making the forbidden joke about having none.

I suppose I generally work my leisure time into my other time.  I’ve been listening to audio books any chance I get.  Usually in the kitchen while cooking or cleaning or making lunches for the next day, but I sometimes take my audio books with me into the kids bedrooms while I tidy up or into my bedroom while I get dressed and make the bed.  I never just sit and listen.

All of my TV watching happens while folding laundry or feeding a baby.  Since putting Ila to bed earlier, I haven’t kept up with my shows as well since I’m trapped in my chair for less time while the kids are in bed.  I can never just sit and watch TV, I get ancy (sp?) that I should be doing something productive.  If I had time to do whatever I pleased, I wouldn’t be in front of the TV.

I used to have some time when I picked Isaac up for school each day.  All of the kids were trapped in their seats and I couldn’t do any housework.  I would often get the mail right before leaving so that I could sort mail while I waited, but by the end of the school year I started using that time as my phone call time.  Krista always knew that if the phone rang and it was close to 1:00, that it was probably me.

If I get a moment or two to sit down during the day, I usually check my email, Google reader, and Facebook.  I sometimes check them from my phone while feeding Ila in the living room.  I rarely do more than that during the time the kids are awake. 

Once the kids are in bed, I have a little more freedom over what I do, but I still have a list of chores in my head each night.  I like to write about things so blogging has become an important “free time”activity.  I love pictures so I sort and upload them in the evenings, but to be honest, it almost seems more like a chore these days.

I used to enjoy scrapbooking.  I don’t have enough kid free time to get to it anymore and it’s not something I want to leave out because of the danger that it would get destroyed.  I have told myself that right now I just need to collect things and take lots of pictures and one day I’ll have the time to compile it all.  I do my best to keep a record of memories through blog and through my funny-things-kids-say log.  I also use Facebook sometimes to type up something amusing the kids say and I’ll go through my old status updates and copy them into my log later.

I do like to organize, but I don’t know if that can be counted under the category of free time.

Some of my favorite things to do are spending time with family.  I love to sit and talk for hours with my mom or Krista.  I enjoy playing games, not console or computer games.  I like card games or the type you play in a group.  Playing games always makes me think if my Grandma O’Bryant because she loved to play games. 

If I was given a few hours to do anything that I wanted to, I think I’d want to spend it taking one of my kids out for ice cream or playing a game with one of them.  The thing I crave the most and don’t get enough time doing is spending time with my kids one-on-one.  I honestly can’t imagine ever getting enough of this.  

Zach thinks I’m boring sometimes because I don’t have grand dreams of things like sailing the seas on my own yacht or any real hobbies that interest me.  I think I’m a fairly boring straight forward person.  What I like the very most is spending time with family and being a mom.