MAY 24, 1986

Aunt Janis takes Andrew in his “I’m the big

brother shirt” to do Hands across America

Mommy and daddy

rented 2 ponies for

$150—Jillian hated

them and was only on

long enough for

mommy to take the

fastest picture ever.

Not afraid of

clowns here, that

must come later

Jillian came home one day from Kindergarten and was excited to tell us about her new friends, “Sa” and “Hamma Bamma”. Karl walked her to school the next day to meet Sarah and Herman Bernhard.

One of the teachers pulled me aside one day and said “Mrs. Doblinger we need you to talk to Jillian about the new boy in class”. Turns out the new boy was Polish and the teachers were trying to teach him German, but Jillian’s intentions were to teach him English.

There was a little boy in class named Constantine who was obsessed with her. Even his mother thought it was odd.

Every afternoon walking home from Kindergarten mom and Jillian would stop at the bakery and Jillian was always given a free brötchen.

Mom named her after one of the character’s

on Ryan’s Hope soap opera. The character

was a lawyer, so obviously mom thought that

that is what she would be.

Dad wanted to name her Sade after the

singer.

Christine, because it sounded good.

Somewhere there is an audio

recording of Jillian saying “Christine

Doblinger, ooookaaaaay” like a

million times, in different octaves.

Jillian loved this book, so we read

it, a lot. One night while out to

dinner these two old ladies were

making a fuss over how cute she

was and asked her name. She told

them her name was Carol and

that she was in Kindergarten.

Karl and I are always shocked that Jillian survived her “biting on glass” year at the age of 2 to 3.

When we were flying to Germany, on the plane I gave her a drink of water from a plastic cup and she bit down on it and destroyed it with her teeth.

Then twice while in Germany she bit down on glasses when she went to take a drink. AYE AYE AYE—would freak me out every time!

Jillian always loved to be in the kitchen with me—she had a little rolling pin, and if I was making tortillas or cookies I would always give her some of her own dough to work with. What I’m leading to is that she always loved being in the kitchen. Our house in Germany, for some crazy reason, had locks on every door, in every room, with old keys in them. One day, Jillian decided to go in the kitchen and she shut the door and locked herself in. The good news was that there was a glass door and I could see everything she was doing. After a frantic call to Karl at work, a worker arrived to help remove the door so we could get her out. Of course while waiting I was talking to her trying to get her to slip me the key under the door. Stubborn little thing that she was, though, she wasn’t having it. She just went about looking in cupboards and pulling pots and pans out.

When Jillian turned 5, she got an ice cream set with sprinkles and such. We decided it would be fun if we set her up with a little table and she and Andrew could sell ice cream to the neighbor kids along with some left over muffins. Unfortunately for her, her father had a state of the art computer and printer and designed a flyer that Andrew and his friends passed out to the neighbors. The flyer looked so good that a neighbor decided to call the City to shut down the ice cream business that was being run out of a home. When the City official pulled up, he had the flyer in his hand. He immediately saw Jillian, this little girl, behind a table with melting ice cream and laughed and shook his head.

Mom finding

Andrew standing in

the “timeout”

corner: “Andrew

what are you doing

in the corner?”

Andrew: “Jillian

said you told me to

go to the corner!”

What really

happened is Jillian

got mad at Andrew,

left the room,

came back and told

him that I sent him

to the corner. Who

knows how long he

was there.

Sadly we know how this one ends,

but we certainly had a great party.