Gen. "X"er's

Not to mention skateboarding down steep streets, riding bikes with no hands and a friend on the back.  Acorn fights.   Playing kickball and SPUD in the street.  Trick -or-treating with a pack of kids without grown-ups.

Devil dogs. Ring Dings.  Kool Aid.  Skinny dipping.

I've got three kids of my own now and things are sure different.  They are encouraged to play outside and explore.  If they say they're "bored" they get no sympathy from me.  They do eventually figure out what to do and have fun.

Thanks for the post -- it brought back some fond memories.

I'm a gen X member, technically, but a lot of the stuff below applied to us.  There are a few items I take exception with, however.

"Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, .. and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.)

As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags."

These things are nothing to brag about and are gladly gone.  My mother was in an accident in a car that had no seatbelts and the only thing that kept her from flying through the windshield was slamming her hands on the dashboard and fracturing both of her wrists.

Not all progress is bad.

That being said, much of the rest of this sounds like my childhood.  Heck, I used to have a leaky rowboat that I would row across the bayou to see my friend.  We had to keep a bucket in it to occasionally bail out water!

I guess the real test is when we become parents.  Will it be easy to raise our kids as we were raised?

I used to ride facing backwards, window open, no seatbelt, in the neighbor's stationwagon... They used to have that little seat in the back there...

And of course there's always my railroad track/change squashing fetish.... which I neither endorse nor condone. 

I never wore a helmet while riding my bike as a kid or teenager, but after whacking my head last year... I wear one all the time now.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I remember playing "sewer to sewer," where one sewer was my team's base and the other sewer was the other team's base. We would just run like crazy in the middle of the street. Until one day we were running and a car came barreling down our block. We knew it wasn't from our neighborhood because most cars slowed down to the 5 mph speed limit but this car kept going and plowed through. Many of us ran to the sidewalk but one little boy wasn't so lucky. I can still remember seeing his legs sticking out from under the back trunk of that car and one shoe off to the right and the other across the street in Mrs. Ferrel's yard.

It was a heart breaking day and we couldn't play sewer to sewer any more. Bittersweet memories.

I remember taking a computer course in Grade 10. Infomatics it was called. We never actually touched a computer. I never used one until third year university. Evenings in the 70's were Ghost in the Graveyard, Red Rover and British Bulldog. Til your mom called you in and made you take a bath, and it was still light out and you could hear other kids (with NICE moms) still outside playing.

I think nostalgia is a wonderful part of growing up, but don't feel too sorry for "kids these days".  They'll be able to look back with good memories too, and feel sorry for all the "kids these days" 20 years  down the road. Just like people born in the 40's and 50's thought OUR generation missed out on the good old fashioned fun. But on that note .. do kids today still play "jumpsies" with a 20 foot long rope made of elastics tied together????

I, too remember smear the queer ( I grew up in NJ).  We also played a game called pickle or running bases where you had two "bases" and two kids throwing balls to each other.  You had to run from one base to another without getting hit by the ball.

I also remember at jr high and high school "dances", the slow-dance song was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird"

The other day, I dug out my old Physical Grafiti album.  Played the side with "Kashmir" -- sweet.

FYI -- at my last visit to my folk's house, my kids found an old metal Tonka truck. It was my brother's. I remember narrowly escaping injury when he threw it at me.

Oh Lara you're speaking my language. My first computer was a Commadore 64. I was nine years old when my Dad taught me Cobalt! Taught my Commadore how to say hi, and how may I help you! Boy if I'd stuck with that I would be a millionaire right now! Aw well. I had what was probably the first at home miniature video game - Vextrex. I still have it. A guy wanted to give me $2,000 for it cause they're so rare or something. I used to play asteroids for hours. Think I'll play it when I get home for Christmas.

Ditto on the Atari 6400, Space Invaders was my game. Boy I could kick some major butt playing that game. I can still hear the "puff," of the shot when it hit an invader. Connect Four, Operation and Candyland were also my favs.

But the best game that I ever played was Centapied. To this day I have gotten the high score on every machine I've ever played. I'm legendary. If they had Centapeid tournaments like they had Poker tournaments I'd be a millionaire by now.

Boy those were the days.