For the longest time I have said and believed that there were almost no pictures of me as child.

I had never seen more than ten or fifteen of them. Two of me as a baby in Lesotho; one of me walking down a forest path in Colorado at about eighteen months; school pictures; a few appearances in family portraits and snapshots.

That was it, as far as I knew. And since my family has moved frequently since I was thirteen, the collection has dwindled as things got lost.

I attributed this lack of documentation to my place in the family order. I'm third.

The way I see it, the first baby is a superstar, and parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are paparazzi. Every moment of the apple of their collective eye must be recorded for the future first date, new spouse, etc.

The second child is pretty neat (or a devil): charmingly posed alongside the older sibling, doing cute brother-sister stuff together, or learning to get into stuff the first one never dreamed of.

The third child, however, is born into a family where the excitement over that new baby smell has completely worn off. Mom already has a superstar and a little devil, so why make a fuss about number three? She tags along, doesn't complain much, takes care of herself.

A friend of mine is number six of seven. I can only imagine, and that with a heart full of sympathy, what it must be like to be number six of seven.

In addition to being third, I was a naturally quiet child, prone to daydreaming. The way I have "remembered" it for many years, this made me even less of a contender for attention of all kinds, including photographic.

Hence the paltry collection of baby and childhood photos of me. Deep down I've always taken it to mean that no one really cared.

Today, however, a cardboard box arrived in the mail and turned the childhood I thought I had on its head.

It turns out that when we moved out of the country in the early eighties, my parents stored a number of boxes with my older brother, Stacy, who stayed in the States.

Stacy, in turn, schlepped these boxes of stuff around with him through one marriage and into a second, and finally to Los Angeles with his new wife.

Apparently Stacy got tired of dragging these things around with him, and decided to divest.

So today I received a surprise package from him. It was waiting for me as I came home from work. I opened it as soon as I got in the door, and then saw what it held: pictures.

I sat down on the back porch steps, and began taking them out, one by one.

Black and white pictures from Lesotho, lots of them, with me smiling, frowning, crying in the arms of our maid, sitting bare-bottomed in the yard.

Just hours old, in my mother's arms, her looking dazed, haggard, and smiling.

My sister, holding me for the first time-she looks happy to be holding me!

Then later, in the States, celebrating my first birthday. Frosting from an intricately decorated cake smeared on my face, my grandma, Avoa, grinning at the destruction of her beautiful handiwork. I was blond, and my eyes still look the same.

My mother was my age, twenty-nine, when that picture was taken.

I looked at each one, tears welling up. I have never been able to show my husband what my Avoa looked like, since I didn't have any pictures of her. She was the angel of my childhood, and I didn't have a single image of her.

Now there I am, little blond elf on the way to kindergarten, sitting sidesaddle on the bar of my father's 10-speed.

There I am asleep on the floor with our dog, Coby.

There is my class picture from kindergarten, pictures from camping trips, pictures of me with my face painted in clown makeup. Me in a play, dressed like a hippo, or something.