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Dennis Dewayne September 13, 1960 |
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Danny with Dingo, Sarah and Dennis |
Our next door neighbors had been Doctor Bradsher and his wife and when they had decide to move to Paragould to be closer to the hospital, we moved into the house where they had lived. It was a much nicer house. Dennis was a long labor. I had false labor for about two weeks. Danny was so much help, bless his heart. I had to stay in bed much of the time the last couple of weeks and he would take care of me.
He started
to school July 9, 1960, the day before his sixth birthday. He would bring his homework in to the bedroom
and stay by my bed. He knew he was going to have a baby soon. He would lay his little hand on my stomach
and feel the baby kick. Then one day the
work finally came, “I think its time to go get Daddy” and off he went to get
Loran. Dr. Bradsher still had to induce
labor. I was in the delivery room for
five hours. We almost didn’t make
it. The baby had a very hard time coming
into this old world.
When we
finally got to take Dennis home, Danny came with his daddy to get us. I can still the sparkle in his eyes when he
saw his little brother for the first time.
When we made it home, we sat Danny up in the middle of the bed and
unwrapped Dennis and handed him to Danny.
We told Danny that this was his little brother and he held Dennis until
he was tired.
We moved to
the country in November of 1961 to the “Sweetest Little Home I Ever Knew”. That is what Mrs. Lype use to say to me. I remember we would all be in the kitchen and
we would look out the window and Mr. and Mrs. Lype would be out in the garden. I felt like we were somehow in private
property for a long time, especially since this had been their home for so many
years.
Dennis
started walking real well here real early, but then one day he fell and decided
it was easier to crawl than walk.
When we
moved to this house, I was six months pregnant with yet another baby. When we were moving in, we were trying to get
the bedroom rug down and I got tickled and Loran got tickled because we couldn’t
get it out of the tube it was in. We
only used three rooms that winter, three rooms and the path, the path to the
outside toilet. We used the living room
where Danny slept on the couch and Dennis slept in the baby bed over where the
television sits now. Loran and I had the
big bedroom, which we had to go through to get into the kitchen. We were very happy.
Loran and I
had our sweetest Christmas here that I can ever remember. We had very little money and had decided not
to buy each other anything. I can still
see him looking out our bedroom window when I walked up behind him and put my
arms around him. He turned and kissed me
and reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a tube of lipstick. That was and will always be the nicest gift I
will ever receive.
Dennis was
a good and happy child. When he was
seventeen months old, we finally got our little girl, Donna Kay. Danny was in school. He would walk across the field on nice days
or sometimes he road the bus. He wasn’t
sure he wanted to ride the bus, so I told him that John Ray Evans was a church
of Christ preacher, a man of God. So the
first evening that John Ray let him off out here, I was waiting on Danny as he
yelled “Good Bye, John the Baptist”.