Before You Knew Her....

This week Danae is at cross country camp.  Literally 5 minutes before she ran out the door to leave for Spring Arbor, she handed me a Post it note with her blog login and password and told me to write an entry on her blog this week for you faithful readers.  Inwardly I panicked because my writing does not compare to hers.  For the past several days I have pondered what to write about…… even thinking about it long after I should have been asleep at night.  So to lift my conscience I’m finally making time to sit down and write.  What better topic to share about than this blog’s writer, Danae Marie....... 

The world became a better place July 9, 1992 when at 11:08am Danae Marie Dracht was born.  When my Mom was pregnant with Danae we didn't know she would be a girl.  Back then it wasn’t common for a mother to get an ultrasound midway through her pregnancy like this era.  Everyone had to wait 9 months to find out the gender of a baby.  After Danae’s birth when I was told I had a baby sister, I was thrilled!  I was 5 years and 9 months old at the time.

Danae was “the easiest child to raise” in my Mom’s words…… and she truly was and still is an easy going person.  Even as a baby, Danae was a determined person.  She would constantly spit out her pacifier only to cry for it a second later.

Our Dad got smart and rigged up a way to keep the paci in her mouth by propping a roll of wallpaper against a chair which kept her from spitting the paci out. 

Danae could have been the Shirley Temple of her time with her bouncing brown curls and sweet demeanor.  Ironically, Danae was a natural born tomboy and mostly preferred dressing like a boy and doing whatever her big brother Nate was doing. The two of them were inseparable.  You couldn’t find one without the other as they would play for hours together. 

On occasion Danae would humor me and play with baby dolls or have a tea party for our teddy bears, but Nate was her best bud.  One time when Nate and Danae were painting at the kitchen counter, Nate spilled red paint on the carpet.  He told Danae to claim that she spilled it when Mom asked…… so she did.  Our Mom wasn’t mad at Danae because she was young enough to have such an accident with paint.  It wasn’t until years later that the truth came out about that story.

I would be missing a huge chunk of who Danae is if I left out that she is a unique individual and always has been.  As a child, she was notorious for dressing rather oddly.  She once wore 5 layers of shirts in the summer.  Only God knows why.  She also put on all of the random gear that was in our garage like a jump rope, garden gloves, bike helmet, and Dad’s work goggles, and waved at every passing car on our street.

Once after watching Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she was inspired to mine for diamonds like the dwarfs did.  So she pounded a hammer to the drywall in the entry hallway and left 5 feet of dents in the wall.  Only wallpaper was able to cover up those deep marks.

Another time after Mom took Danae to get her hair cut, Danae felt like her bangs were still too long so she hacked them off with a pair of scissors herself.  It took a few months for her hair to grow back right after that.    She was also incredibly imaginative and dressed up in one our Dad’s t-shirts, rigged up a turban for her head, then proceeded to walk down the road with her “sheep” who was really the family dog, stating she was "David" from the Bible.  Growing up with Danae was never dull to say the least.

 

Eventually in the midst of everyday life and the passing of years, Danae grew up.  Danae is beautiful, intelligent, and has large aspirations for her life with Christ at the center.  I feel blessed by having Danae for my sister.  She inspires me to branch out of my comfort zone and to live life to the fullest.  Love you Nae!