21 Years Ago

A recent photo of Stacy holding a cake she made.

Stacy, 21 years ago, with her grandpa, Steve's dad, Ray Burrell

Twenty-one years ago today, our daughter, Stacy Marie Burrell came into the world at 2:17 PM on Wednesday April 17th, 1991 at All Saint's Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, during a big thunderstorm. Thankfully, Stacy was in perfect health, she was perfect in every way, ten fingers, ten toes and everything working perfectly. I remember her looking up with her big, beautiful brown eyes, right after she was born.  We knew nothing of the thunderstorm that day until later on because the birth area of that hospital was underground. I didn't find out until I was brought up to my room and there was news about the weather on TV. Steve had to go home, pick up Jeff from daycare and feed the cats. Later that evening, Steve brought Jeff to the hospital to meet his new sister.

Stacy on the day she was born, being held by her dad

A later photo taken of Jeff and Stacy

The thunderstorms that occurred that day were pretty bad. The house of our neighbor across the street got badly flooded that afternoon. Fortunately, our house had no problems. We had no idea of the impending weather when we left for the hospital that morning, it was bright and sunny. Stacy was due April 23rd, but the OB doctor was going out of town, so he arranged for her to be born a few days early. He had given me a shot a few days prior to induce labor and said if they baby hadn't been born by the 17th, to come into the hospital that morning. I hadn't had much in the way of contractions, until we got in a great big traffic jam in the mix-master in Fort Worth on the way to the hospital, then I had a humdinger of a contraction. Having been through the birth of Jeffrey a few years earlier, I knew it was only the beginning and didn't say a word of it to Steve, who was driving. It's just as well that I didn't say anything because when we got to the hospital, the contractions stopped. We relaxed and hung out in labor and delivery and the hospital staff said if things hadn't started after lunch, they would get things going with a little pitocin. My body was ready for it, but Stacy was content to stay put. After the shot, things got going and it wasn't long until Stacy came into the world. I had a lot of asthma during the delivery, this was in the days before 'Advair Diskus.' Despite the asthma, the delivery was normal. She didn't come into the world screaming, she was very quiet at first. She made up for it later, especially several years later when she won a screaming contest between her and two neighbor girls.

We hadn't settled on a name for her, we had two names in mind, 'Stacy' and 'Patricia.' We hadn't really worked out a boy's name. I had a feeling it would be a girl and the nurses said that often, the mother's feelings about whether her baby will be a boy or a girl are surprisingly accurate. These days, future parents know the baby's gender long before the baby is born, but back then, it wasn't an exact science and we didn't want to know ahead of time, we wanted it to be a surprise. Jeffrey used to say that I was going to have a boy and his name was going to be 'Kevin.' I remember telling him that I thought it was going to be a girl. Anyway, after Stacy was born, the feelings of everybody in the delivery room were unanimous, that she looked like a 'Stacy.' Years later, Stacy told us that she was glad that we didn't name her 'Patricia.'

In those days, it was uncommon for people to own a computer. Cell phones were uncommon and mostly used by the rich. You made calls from your house, your friend's house, your office or a pay-phone. Video cameras, thankfully, were not a common thing for the delivery room. Video cameras in those days were bulky things that got heavy on your shoulders. We do have videos of just after Stacy was born, in the hospital room.  Digital cameras hadn't come along yet, we used film cameras and sent the pictures out to be developed. I took pictures of her with a 35mm film camera we had gotten at Sears. It was a great camera, I have some wonderful pictures taken of her.

 Video games back then were very basic, shapes and pixels that looked like little people moving around on the screen. Jeff had our old Intellivison in his room, hooked up to a little black and white TV. There was a parachute game he liked. The parachuting person that was a couple of squares with a parachute would jump out of the plane and you would work the joystick and make sure he had a safe landing, only Jeffrey liked to watch him splat onto the ground. I remember hearing the plane noise, the splat and then wild laughter coming from his room. I think that was a few years before Stacy came along, but it was around that time. Jeffrey also entertained himself playing Super Mario Bros on his old basic Nintendo game. Most of the music I remember from those days are the tunes from the games he played.

We drove a white 1990 Mazda 323 hatchback. It had a standard transmission and amazing pick-up. I remember when I was at the hospital to have Stacy, I could see, from my room window, a whole fleet of the same kind of car, parked in the hospital parking lot. Our other car was an old tan 1980 Chrysler Lebaron that was always breaking down. Every time we took it to get inspected it needed a new muffler. It had a carburetor and always stalled out at intersections when it was rainy. It was a real money pit and it didn't even have 80,000 miles on it. When I was 7 months pregnant with Stacy, it broke down on me on my way to work on 408 early one morning. Normally, Steve and I went to work together, but he had stayed home to take Jeffrey to the doctor that day.The old Lebaron just slowed down and stopped. I could see that it wasn't going to work much longer, pulled off the highway and walked to a gas station, which fortunately, was not far away and call AAA. When I called them, they were annoyed with me that I didn't know the exact location (this was in the days before GPS), until I told them that I was 7 months pregnant and would have known if I had far to walk. After that, they were real nice to me. Looking back, I think it was the fuel pump that went out. It was always something with that car. After that, we stopped driving that old car and it sat in our driveway for about a year, until we gave it to a neighbor who gave it to somebody who fixed cars and could fix it without breaking the bank.

Back then, we watched TV off the air without any cable, satellite or anything. We lived near some seriously large TV towers and got a good signal with our outdoor antenna. We kept it that way until I had to be on bed rest  due to complications in my pregnancy in February of that year. Then Steve got cable and we got free HBO for a while, so I watched 'Driving Miss Daisy' and 'Christmas Vacation' a lot.  I remember there was a show called 'Arsenio Hall' that was on late at night, right when Stacy liked to dig her head into my back, so I would stay up a lot and watched that occasionally.

The cats we had back then were  Natira, Bo and Princess. Natira sat with me a lot when I was on bed rest. We called her our 'nurse cat' because when someone was under the weather, in bed, she would sit with them and keep them company. Princess was a long-haired Turkish Angora mix who had bathroom issues and Bo was a part-blue-point Siamese who was occasionally a little psycho.

We lived in our little yellow house on Sedaila in Arlington, Texas. We had real nice neighbors, it was a real nice neighborhood back then. Unfortunately, years later, that neighborhood went downhill, but at the time, it was a great place to raise kids.I remember my one neighbor, Tina, her daughter had a baby boy just a couple of months before I had Stacy. Tina also had a big dog named 'Silver' who was part German Shepherd and part Husky. He had one yellow eye and one blue eye. When I went outside, he'd keep me company, looking over from Tina's yard by standing on her air-conditioner and wanting to be petted.  He  knew Stacy since she was born and was very protective of her.

Twenty-one years ago, it was a different world. It was before 9-11. The World Trade Center was part of the New York City skyline. Texting was not a verb, it wasn't even a word. Text was copy in a book or in an ad or in the newspaper. Photoshopping was also not a verb, there was no Photoshop. This was before I-phones, I-pods, I-pads and mac computers. When you thought of androids, you thought of little robots like R2-D2. I think this Apple computers were boxy little things with less memory than my smallest jump drive. They didn't have jump drives  back then either. Data was stored on floppy disks and they didn't hold much either. We had an old Tandy model 12 computer that was in the garage. It used 8 inch floppy discs. When you turned it on it said 'TRSDOS ready' and didn't even have a mouse. I was a 'Keyline' artist at JCPenney Catalog and pasted corrections manually on pasteboards for catalog pages. Type was set on a typesetting machine.  Word processing was in its infancy with programs such as Tandy's 'SCRIPSIT.'

Twenty-one years ago, it didn't even occur to us that JCPenney would some day decide to eliminate Steve's position. He wasn't worried about his job there back then. There were sample room sales when you worked there and you could get really great stuff dirt cheap. We got Stacy's crib at a sample room sale. I got my big furry coat with the leopard spots at a sample room sale. They don't have sample room sales any more. Steve doesn't work there anymore, he works at Southwest Re now. The thought of ageism didn't even enter our minds. We were only in our mid-thirties. Twenty-one years ago, I didn't have to dye my hair every few weeks, it was naturally dark brown.. I also couldn't sit back with a computer on my lap, typing a blog and getting on facebook. There was no facebook or any social network back then. Your social network was when you were in the front yard, chatting with your neighbors or at work between cubicles.

Twenty-one years ago, most of the people I work with at Kroger these days either hadn't been born yet, or were just kids. Twenty-one years ago, a lot of the people out in the working world who are the ones most wanted for jobs today were watching Sesame Street and playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures or Barbie dolls.George Herbert Walker Bush (the older one) was president. Gas in April of 1991 was $1.10 per gallon. The only thing I could really find that happened in the news on that day was that the Dow Jones closed above 3000, it was apparently a slow news day. Movies that came out that year include 'Terminator 2, Judgement Day', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Hook.'

Things have changed a lot since our daughter was born. She loves animals, especially sharks and lobsters, she's going to Collin College and loves to bake. She's a special, smart and beautiful young lady.We are really lucky to have her. She may be all grown-up in a different world, but she'll always be our 'little girl.'