Imagine two little girls with wild imaginations getting into constant predicaments. I don’t have to imagine that, that perfectly describes my sister and me. My sister Elizabeth was born on May 12, 1999. Then a short twenty months later, I was born. My sister didn’t like how much attention was being given to me, so she would always try and be the center of attention. My parents are smart and know that an infant is way more important than a toddler! I mean I can’t even talk yet and she thinks that my parents should give her more attention. Eventually Elizabeth would learn to love me and accept that she’s the middle child and they never get the attention.

Ever since I could talk, my sister would always convince me to do dumb things, but I didn’t know better when I was three years old. So on one cold January morning, my sister and I were playing outside and she told me that she wanted to give me a spa day. She was like “Alison, everyone in spas take mud baths.” Of course I don’t go along with it at first, but she always influences me to do dumb stuff. She told me that mud was great for your skin and that I would never grow old if I took a mud bath! So my sister started preparing the “mud” for our spa day. In my backyard, we don’t really have nice brown dirt, we have Georgia’s red clay that will literally stain everything. She then got the hose and made “mud”. Elizabeth and I proceeded to strip down until we were but naked in the nearly freezing weather. We started by sticking our feet in the mud and then we worked our way up to the tops of our heads.

After a solid fifteen minutes of us lathering ourselves up with mud, we decided that we wanted to play in our treehouse. Since it was January, it was fitting to have a snowball fight, there was only one problem with that, it hardly ever snows in Georgia. So Elizabeth and I improvised, we made mudballs. I was on the top level of the treehouse throwing mud at her and she was on the ground throwing the mud up at me. Of course I had little to no hand eye coordination at this age so I threw a mudball and it hit our glass doors and left a bright red imprint. My stay at home mom was doing the laundry and heard the bang and walked over to our back door. Elizabeth and I heard the creaky door handle twisting and we knew that we were in too deep and that there was no going back now. “ELIZABETH, ALISON GET INSIDE NOW,” my mother yelled. We both knew that we were going to get a spanking so we both thought we would have a little more fun especially if we were already in too deep. With the mud that had been thrown in the treehouse I made the final mudball. I took that red lookin’ mudball and I chucked it at my mom and hit her.

Next thing we knew, the kitchen sink was being filled with hot, soapy water. My mom proceeded to bathe my sister and me. After what seemed to be hours of intense scrubbing, my mother walked upstairs and left us on the bottom floor. We thought we were off the hook and then we heard the dreaded crack of my father’s belt. That sound was the most sinister sound of my entire childhood. Anyways, we both ended up getting spankings. We did learn that day that we should leave the mud baths for the spa. I believe that there is still Georgia red clay in my hair to this day.

The most important thing that I learned from this event was how important it is to have fun when you’re a child. When you’re an adult, if you go out and get naked and started throwing mud around, you can be charged with serious sex crimes. It’s important for you to do dumb stuff before you’re an adult. If you never live a little, you will always regret it. So my advice is go run around naked while it’s still legal.