Early memories

Sitting in class my economics class today, doodling and only half paying attention to a lecture on the history of WWII (so redundant!), I started daydreaming.  I tried to figure out why I've always had a curiosity with foreign languages.  Granted, I'm not exactly fluent at Spanish and I struggle a lot with verb conjugations...but it's something I've always had a fascination with. So I thought back:

I'm at our home in Westford Vermont, and it's early morning.  I know this, because I'm still in my pajama's curled up on my parent's bed. I must have woken them up early, because they were still in bed, trying to sleep.  I'm young enough that my little brother Caleb wasn't born yet, but old enough to be able to remember it now.  Dad must have been annoyed with me, or something, as I was always asking questions and wanting to go do something.  So he taught me how to count in Spanish. "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez," he said. "It means: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten."  Confused, I repeated it back, trying to comprehend that there was another way to count to ten than what I had been taught!  Spanish, he called it.  And so it began; my first exposure to foreign languages.

Fast forward: it's second grade, and a new kid is introduced to the class.  But he's different from any other new kids we had ever had.  With a foreign name and different clothes, he's from a place the teacher called "Bosnia."  He couldn't speak English, and couldn't understand what we said to him.  This confused me!  How could somebody not understand what the teacher said to him? I learned later that he had to leave his home because of a war, but too young to grasp what this meant, I did understand that he was much better at soccer than all the other boys.  And this was the commonality for now.  Who needed words and sentences when we could just play a game!

As I recalled these memories, though brief and fuzzy, I can't believe:
1) How quickly I've grown up, and
2) that I'm here in Europe, finally learning Spanish.