Challenge 8 My family is very big.  In the first 4 generations I have about 35+ people on my mother’s side and father’s side combined.  Most of my family members had very interesting lives and some didn’t.My mother is from Massachusetts.  She was born there and she lived there for her entire childhood.  Her mother, Edith Dabney (I call her nana), was a nurse at the M.G.H hospital in Boston.  That’s where she met my grandfather, John Knowles.  They started dating, got married and then had 6 children.  Their names were Joe, Charlie, Jimmy, Bob, Muffin and my mother, Laurie.  A couple years after they had their last child, Bob, John past away.  Nana was very sad and so were all her children.  Later she met Lewis Dabney who was a pilot in World War 2.  They got married but didn’t have any children.   They lived many happy years together and they are still going to this day.  Nana’s children grew up very happy too.  Bob got married and had 3 kids and so did Joe.  Muffin got married but didn’t have any kids and Jimmy didn’t get married at all.  Charlie got married and adopted a child from China.  A couple months after they adopted Kagan Charlie died of unknown reasons.  That was another sad day for not just his mother and siblings but for all the husbands, wives and children of the siblings.  His wife was very devastated but she was Strong and raised Kagan all by herself.  We all get together on Thanksgiving and Easter.  We all always have a good time.

My father is from Sweden and his name is Johan (yo-hon).  If you saw him you would think that he is American because he has no accent and he has black hair.  He had a very sad childhood.  He was a foster child.  He was adopted first by some German people who already had kids.  They had him for about 2 seconds because my father wasn’t at all a very inactive or peaceful person in the world.  He went back in to foster care and then another family adopted him.  This family was great because no matter how bad of a trouble maker my father was the foster parents would never let him go.  My father had so many stories to tell me that I couldn’t even fit thew all in.  One of my favorite stories was when he was fooling around look for rocks and stuff when all of a sudden a giant swan came out of no where and chased him all around the place.  My father tried to climb up a wall and get away but right when he was about to jump over the swan bit him in the bottom!  You might have thought that swan were very pretty and nice but apparently their not.  He still has the scar from the bite today.  Another great story was when my father and some friends went a carnival.  He and his friends noticed that there was one of those spinning around rides.  His friends dared him to ride it.  He tried to refuse but his friends wouldn’t back down so he decided to go on it.  He had eaten a lot of food before that so maybe you can guess what happened next.  The ride started and as it got faster and faster my father started to barf.  He barfed all over the people below him including him friends!

My father came over to America when he was 18.  At the airport when he arrived he met his real mother, Cina and her mother Guja (gu-ya).  That was a very exciting and happy day for my father.  We go to Sweden every summer to go and visit his second foster parents and his grandmother.  His mother goes back and forth between Sweden and the U.S.A.  We always see her at Christmas though.