I was watching my kids play and seeing the looks of pure happiness and joy on their faces made me happy. Which I'm sure it does with most proud parents, but it got me to thinking...Well remembering is more like it, about some of my happy memories when I was a kid and playing with my brother and cousins. I grew up in a tiny little neighborhood, on a dead-end street, and almost everyone there was related to each other. There were about 16 or so houses in our little neighborhood and I think 14 of those houses were relatives. Well we still are relatives, we just have spread out over the years and not everyone still lives there.
Now that I think about it, that is pretty out of the ordinary. How many people grow up or even as adults live in a neighborhood where just about everyone is related. When you're a kid though it is pretty awesome because you always have someone to play with! Some of my happiest and fondest memories as a child are those of running around playing with my cousins. Then on weekends and the summer months my cousins Daniel and Adam would come stay with their dad, my uncle, and it would be even more people to join in on the fun. I look back now and wonder why we would sometimes complain "I'm bored" or "We're bored", we should have never been bored with that many kids running around! It's a wonder our parents didn't double over in fits of laughter when we said that.
My most favorite thing in the world when I was a little girl was Barbies. I was a child hoarder of Barbie dolls and anything that was related to Barbie. It was also one of my favorite things to play, either by myself but especially with my cousins. The girls that is, the boys became demonically possessed when in close proximity to Barbies. (In a previous blog I mentioned some of the tortures they would inflict upon my Barbies which thank God hasn't scared me for life giving me nightmares of Barbie mass murders.) The torture wasn't part of the fond memories, just an unfortunate truth that still haunts me a little bit. We girls though (we girls being Samantha, Nina and Jessie) could sit for hours and be perfectly content playing with our Barbies. Getting them dressed up countless times to go on countless dates. Never with Ken though, I had The New Kids on the Block guy dolls. I know, I know...it was the early 90's and that should be excuse enough. People were still recovering from the 80's!
Another thing we all loved to play was Hide and Seek. This was before there were countless video and computer games and kids actually went outdoors to play and exercised more than their thumbs. I can't tell you how many hours we spent running around the neighborhood hiding and seeking. I wish we could still play it now as adults without looking like a bunch of crazies running around hiding in bushes and stuff. Now we'd be presumed to be up to no good or something and it would raise suspicion, and probably rightly so. I know if I saw a bunch of grown people running around my neighborhood hiding in bushes and screaming and all that goes with it I'd be suspicious. Well this is my current neighborhood and weirder things have happened so maybe...just maybe?
We all also loved riding our bikes. We would pretend and create elaborate stories of where we imagined that we were traveling to various places, usually somewhere like California or Florida. Our bikes would be our favorite cars. Or our dream cars that we just knew we were going to have when we grew up, usually Corvettes and convertibles of various makes & models. Lord forbid someone also pretended to have the same car that you were pretending to have. There was sure to be an argument followed by someone "telling" to a grown-up on the other person that you were pretending to drive that car first, now make them stop! This happened more times than I can count, and so much that it's stuck with me all these years. A few trees, due to their low branches and easy access to leaves were our pretend ATMs. If only money really grew on trees right? When your a kid and having a blast just pretending the day away and playing it almost seems real.
A few years when I was a kid my grandmother had huge piles of wood and old lumber during the winter months that she would use for her wood burning stove. So we would take some of the longer pieces of lumber and build tepees and forts. This never went over too well with the adults because they feared we would either get bitten by one of the thousands of spiders that lived in the woodpile, we would get a huge splinter, or any other harm that could potentially occur. Which on a few occasions a spider bite or splinter did in-fact happen. None of these risks ever out weigh the potential levels of fun that were to be had enough to make us actually stop building our play shacks.
These are just a few of my memories that I thought about and wanted to share. I hope you enjoyed them at least a little bit as much as I did making and remembering them myself. I hope everyone, no matter how great or difficult their childhood might have been has at least a few great memories as a child playing with their friends, cousins or siblings like I do. Thanks for taking the time to read my little stories and I'm glad to have something of a more pleasant nature to share with you this time. Until next time, be happy, peaceful and love one another! :)
