Ten on Tuesday: 7 things I miss from my childhood.

I sort of can't wait to here what others have on their lists.  Ten on Tuesday comes from the CaroleKnits blog.

1.  Vacations in Whitesboro, NY.



I think one of the luckiest things as a kid is this combination:  4 wonderful grandparents all living in the same town.  Most of the "traveling" vacations we took were to my grandparents' homes in Whtiesboro.  We would sleep at my dad's parents house and spend a lot of the days at my mom's parents house.  Aunts and Uncles would converge on their parents' house whenever we were in town.  It was great.  It feels like I spent most of the summers of my youth floating in a pool, watching planes approach either the Oneida County Airport or Griffiss Air Force Base or otherwise in a bathing suit in their back yard, spitting out watermelon seeds. 



2.  I miss being 5 miles from the beach.  One of the memories from summer vacation as a teenager/home from college was my sister and I was getting up dark and early (9am) and heading straight to the beach.  The ocean was flat as a pancake and nearly perfect.
The road to the beach (crappy phone photo, taken while driving):


My Beach (Hobe Sound Public).  I haven't really found any like it since.


3.  I sort of miss the sitcoms.  I'm not sure that this should really be #3 in importance, but there was a slew of "good" (not very questionable) TV on afterschool and on Saturday mornings.  And I have been spending a lot of time on the sofa keeping the girls company as they watch TV today.  Aside from the advent of MTV, there was not a lot of editing of what my sister and I watched, and I think it was because it wasn't too necessary.  It was the Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, the Addams Family/the Munsters, I Dream of Jeanie/Bewitched, Happy Days/Mork&Mindy/Laverne&Shirley, stuff like that.  Sure, OTOH, it may not have reflected real life that much, but I think that was also a good thing.  It also could be that I was young or oblivious enough that the subtext eluded me.

4.  Cheaper stamps.  I'm sure that the price of stamps was similar to today, when you compensate for inflation, but I'm amazed that the price of postcards today is the price of letters when I was a kid.   Cheaper gas too.  (Do you remember when $1.50/gallon seemed crazy expensive?)

5.  Fashion Plates.  Do you remember that toy?  Where you put together the outfits using the plates, then make a rubbing of it with this sideways mounted black crayon and then color in the picture you made?  Brilliant.  What would be great is to reinvent that toy and have "add-on packs" for it.  So you could make kid fasion, menswear, or formalwear, 50's styles, or whatever. 

6.  Roller skating/bike riding/playing outside.  La's school has pretty regular skate nights at the local rink.  The music is a lot different, although I realized it still has that skatemusicness about it.  Call Me Maybe is not that much different than the Cars or Another One Bites the Dust.  El has been going with us to skate night since she was little (she's 5 now and La is in 4th grade) and El has just gotten to the point where she's ditching me and skating by herself.  She actually does much better on her own than with me next to her.  So, I took the opportunity to skate by myself for a little while.  I learned two things:  1.  I really am in my early 40s.  2.  El was not holding me back as much as I thought she was.  I do not know why I keep having to relearn this, I pretty much do it with every sport:  swimming, basketball, biking, etc. 

7. One of the things that I'm still getting used to is that there are 4 directions in Orlando.  Where I grew up, there were, in effect, only three.  If you went too far east you would know pretty quickly because you'd be in the ocean (or the inter-coastal).

I'm finding that there's not a lot of "stuff" that I miss from my childhood.  I think that the people I miss from my childhood are because they are not there anymore - everyone misses them.  The places I don't have anymore (no summer homes in Whitesboro, no winter homes in Hobe Sound, but the people who made them important are still the people who are important.  There are things that I used to do that I miss, but wouldn't trade them for the things I get to do now.  I wouldn't trade in the chance to be the kid for the chance that I have to be the mom.  I get to help my kids have these experiences and traditions that they can pack up in their memory and carry around with them, while I have flashes of what my mom must have been thinking when she took us to skate outings and Girl Scout trips or my dad rode bikes with us to the beach or softball practice.  I miss the youngness of childhood - you didn't hurt yourself doing goofy things like putting your foot down wrong or twisting to reach something.  When you fell and got hurt, it was a skinned knee (or in my case a skinned elbow, chest, knee, and black eye one time.  The day before pictures.)  And you healed up pretty quickly.  I don't know.  It's hard for me to look back and think about then without thinking about now.  And now is pretty good.