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TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's & 80's!!
Just thought i'd share this with you as it made me think.......
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate bleu cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or high colesterol.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints and pictures of Little Lambs which were not specially designed to enhance our intellectual development and help us get a PhD before reaching the age of seven.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets - and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or kneepads.
Everyone rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Cars with seatbelts were a luxury, and if you were lucky enough to ride in one, you fought with your siblings over who would get to use one!
Speaking of fighting with your siblings, there was no such thing as air conditioning in cars. Well... there was: it was called 4-60 air conditioning (4 open windows at 60 miles an hour!) You fought with your siblings over who got to sit next to a window. And NOBODY DIED OF HEAT PROSTRATION!
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose, or even the kitchen tap - NEVER from a bottle (unless it was the "ice water" bottle in the fridge, which everyone drank from - and you got to fight with your siblings about who drank the last sip without refilling it from the tap!)
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. (OK some of us had mom's with really good lungs, and we could hear them hollering for us - but we could always pretend we didn't hear them - and we usually got away with it...
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and old lumber with nails sticking out of it (somehow none of these scraps ever seemed to include an engine of any sort, though we did dream of someday obtaining one!) and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms... WE HAD FRIENDS, and we went outside and found them!
When we DID watch TV, we had to get up and walk ALL the way across the room to change the channel! (I guess it's a good thing there were only 3 channels, or we might have died from exhaustion, eh?)
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, obtained scars - and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We played in dirt, in fact, we ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We petted strange dogs and did not get worms, rabies, bitten, or sued by the dogs' owners.
We went to petting zoos where we would fling goat-dung at our siblings and then have a picnic lunch immediately afterwards without slathering ourselves in "anticacterial hand wash," which didn't exist then - and nobody died from this.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine tha
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It's all true for me.
Except for the parents siding with the law at the bottom there.
Drinking from the hose was sooooooo much fun.
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And the riding bikes all around the neighborhood with no protective gear and without parents around. Fun, fun, fun. And if you fell, you just got up and wiped off the dirt from the scrapes on your knees, hopped back on the bike, and started riding again.
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Hahahahaha- same here Japa. And the kids whose parents made them wear a helmet would just take them off once they were out of sight, haha. God, from the time I was about 8 I would just take off for the day- tell my parents I was going for a bike-ride and that I would be back before dark. Man, a few years ago I went back to my old neighbourhood and rode my bike along the streets I used to take- damn, I went a longways! A few kilometers at least.
As for driving in cars with no A/C and not wearing seatbelts- lol, did anyone ever own a K-Car? (Otherwise known as a nice Reliant automobile, from the Barenaked Ladies song). My parents had matching ones- death traps on wheels. No A/C, seats that managed to eat the backseat seatbelts like a fat kid eats cake, and doors that would freeze in the winter and wouldn't close- or would occasionally pop open if you went over a big bump. Since there was no A/C and it was always humid as hell- of course the windows would be open. When I was in the front- I used to torture my brother by spitting- it would fly in the back window and get him in the face (you know, if it could make it past the fact that the windows in the back wouldnt go down all the way).
Speaking of which- did anyone else fight for the front seat when you were a kid? My brother and I would wage an all out war to see who could get the coveted position. Now apparently kids not onlycan't sit in the front seat, but if they are under 6 or something have to be in a carseat. Yeah, yeah, I understand about the whole airbag thing but still- safety concerns seem to suck the fun out of everything.
*amber*
