Childhood questions

A day from my childhood that i will always remember is when i found out that i had an older sister. When i was in fifth grade, there was a day that my parents got a letter in the mail and they made a huge deal out of it but wouldn't tell my brother and i what it was about. We had plans to go to a friends house but my parents went into a different room to talk about it and read the letter while Grayson and i sat and talked ourselves in the living room waiting to go to Megan's. They soon came out and asked us if we wanted to hear a surprise now or go to our friend Megan's house for an hour. Of course we weren't that interested in the letter as we thought so we went to my friends house. When we got back an hour later, we all sat in the kitchen and my mom explained to us that we had an older sister named Rachel. My mom had her when she was in high school but didn't think that she could give her the best life that she deserved so after Rachel was born she put her up for adoption. Twenty three years later Rachel found my mom on a website for adopted kids to find their birth parents and she sent her a letter that said she wanted to meet her and talk about how her life has been and see how my moms life has played out. It was so crazy to me that i had a sister that i never knew and to this day i have a very good relationship with her.

There are a lot of cultural influences in my dads side of the family. My dad and his siblings were born in Brazil because my grandparents are missionaries there. My grandparents both originally lived in Crane Missouri and Arkansas but after they got married they moved to Brazil and started a family, and because they were both from the united states they wanted their kids to all speak both english and Portuguese. I know a lot about the culture in Brazil and I've always been around people who speak Portuguese but i never learned the language and i have visited there once.

When i lived in Colorado, my old best friend and i loved to play outside and pretend that we were going on adventures and playing with our imaginary friends. And so one day we were walking through this giant field in my backyard and saw tons and tons of these giant black beetles, of course we were fearless so we would pick them up and let them crawl all over us. We realized that its getting cold outside so we thought that we should collect as many of these black beetles as we can and put them in my empty fish tank so they "can stay warm in the winter". She would inspect them and tell which ones she thought were boys and which ones were girls and we would paint blue nail polish on the boys and pink on the girls. We made a mini world for them inside the fish tank and would only give them veggies to keep them healthy.