APPLES ON A STICK, MAKE ME SICK, MAKE MY STOMACH GO TWO-FORTY-SIX....

For some reason I'm on a kick about writing about when I was a kid, so here goes another one:

When I was a kid, I loved to be outdoors. I literally lived outdoors and don't remember playing in my house as much as I did outside. I loved to Jump Rope. We never had fancy jump ropes. We just used the cotton clothesline. You can jump rope by yourself, but that is really not that fun. You really need a mimimum of 3 people to jump rope. My friend Cindy and I used to tie one end of the jump rope to the handle of the stair railing and that sort of worked. It was more fun to have two people turning the rope and at least two people jumping. We loved to "run in" and jump and "run out". It was really challenging to get like 4 or 5 people jumping and running in and out. We thought we were so cool that we could do that. It was really something when someone learned a new jump rope song. I can remember we used to jump so much that at night when I went to bed my legs would hurt.

I also loved to play Hopscotch. We would draw a Hopscotch on the driveway and play everyday. I can remember we used to look around so we could find a "cool" Hopscotch rock. When we found one, we would find a special hiding place outside to put them so we could use them everyday. I don't know if anyone knows how to play Hopscotch, but here's how we did it: You draw a Hopscotch board on the driveway. It really doesn't matter what it looks like, as long as you have boxes or triangles with numbers on them from 1 to 10. You could have more numbers or less numbers. Then you start by putting your rock on #1. You're really supposed to toss it, but #1 is so close, it's like a "given". Then without stepping on #1, you hop on either one foot or two (depending on the pattern) all the way up, and doing a hop, turn around and go back. When you get to #2, you stand (either on one foot or two, depending on the pattern) and pick up your rock and then hop onto #1 and go off. Then it is the other person's turn and then when it is your turn again, you toss your rock on #2 and do it again. If you fall, or don't get your feet all the way into the box or triangle, or accidently hop into the one with your rock, you miss. Also if you toss your rock and you miss, it is the other person't turn. First one back through all the numbers wins. You may have played it different - that's how I played it.

The other thing I loved to do was ride my brother's bike. I know I've talked about this before in a couple of blogs. His bike was red and I thought it was way cooler than my bike, because it was red, more lightweight than my bike, and it was a boy's bike. I used to love to ride it about 3 blocks away to a cul-de-sac. As soon as I would turn into the cul-de-sac, I would let go of the handlebars and go completely around that cul-de-sac without using my hands. I know, it was awesome. And I thought I was so awesome that I could do it. Admit it, you're impressed. :0) (jk)I also used to love to ride it up at the Junior High School after school was out, or on a Saturday. The Junior High had big wide sidewalks and I loved riding it on their nice smooth walkways. Also in the back of the school there were big wide steps that you could actually ride your bike down. Then once you finished at the school, there was a loooong sidewalk all the way down the hill (the Junior High sat on a big hill) to the dead end that led to my street.

I loved to roller skate. We didn't have shoe skates, but we had these metal skates that clipped on to your shoes, and they weren't inline skates either. They came with a "skate key" that you wore around your neck on a chain or string. You used the skate key make the skates wider or narrower to fit to your shoes tight. You needed to keep the key around your neck in case they loosened up, or in case you needed to take off your skates. Once again, the best place to skate was the nice, smooth sidewalks at the Junior High.

When I started getting to old for skating, skateboards were invented. We never had any money to buy stuff, and we knew it didn't do any good to ask our parents to buy us stuff, because they didn't have money either, so we made our skate boards. We found a board and dug out those skates and Voila! A skateboard! Everyone wanted to use the skateboard, so that prompted us to find other things we could ride down the street. My mother had this cushion on wheels that she used to use to scrub the floor with. It makes my knees hurt to think people actually got on their hands and knees to scrub the floor. We used that scrub cushion until we literally wore the wheels off of it riding it on the rough cement. Another thing we found in the basement one day was an old office chair that my dad once used in his office. Not many people were brave enough to ride that office chair down the street. Once you got on it, there was no steering to be had, and you were at the mercy of the chair. For some reason I remember either Twist or Sticks riding it and it tipping over. We may not have used it that much, but the image of one of them riding it down the street makes me crack up to this day. It was a funny sight!

Kids today just don't know what they're missing.....

FAMILY VACATION

When I was a kid we went on vacation every year to my Grandparents house. We left every year about the middle of June and didn't come back until about the middle of August. Dad could never take that much time off work, so Mom would drive us out by herself and Dad would come out the last 2 weeks of our vacation and then he'd drive back with us. I don't know how Mom did it - especially after two days in a row. I can remember mom actually having blisters on her hands from gripping the steering wheel. I'll save blogging about our actual vacation for another time, but right now I'd like to blog about getting there.

Every year, my mom would let us each buy 2 or 3 comic books. As we got older, my sister and I used to get the True Love comic books, although I liked the Archie ones too. We also had the Car Bingo games and we'd play the License Plate game where you watched for car license plates and tried to get all 50 states. We had an old station wagon, and my favorite place to be was the very back where my mom would make a bed. We had most of our luggage on top of our station wagon, but we always had one suitcase with our overnight stuff in it since it took us two days to get there.

Before cars had air conditioning, I remember we had a window air conditioner. No, it's not like you think. It was a metal thing that went in the passenger window. You filled it with water, rolled the window down, stuck it in and rolled the window back up. Then the wind would blow through the water and come out cool inside the car. There was one problem with this, it always leaked on whoever sat in the passenger seat, so you had to sit there with a diaper or towel on your shoulder, but even then your shoulder got wet.

We never stopped for lunch and went inside to eat. At least not that I remember. We always ate in our car. My very favorite place to eat was an A&W Root Beer stand. Usually mom would eat hers and then she would start driving again while the slower eaters would finish. When everyone was through with their hamburgers, we would gather up all the trash and put it in the bag it came in and then - are you ready for this? - we threw it out the window! I'm not kidding. Everyone did back then. I can also remember throwing leftover drinks out the window. Mom would never let my brothers throw their drinks out because they would just toss it out and then the drink would go all over the car. I used to think I was a pro at throwing the drinks out because not one drop would go on the car. Thank goodness people don't do this anymore.

We always had stations wagons when I was a kid. One station wagon we had was a Buick Vista Cruiser. This was a cool car. It had long narrow sun-roof type windows that went around the luggage carrier on the roof. This was especially cool at night when you could look up and see the stars. When my parents traded this car in, they got a Dodge station wagon that had a third seat in it that faced the rear. This was a cool place to sit also, although sometimes you got tired of looking at the people behind you if they followed you for very long. This was also not a place for the weak of stomach.

If anyone got car sick, mom always had her trusty bottle of Coke syrup. Coke syrup settled your stomach and helped you feel better. I never got car sick, but one day I wised up. After mom would give whoever was feeling car sick a spoonful of syrup, she would ask if anyone else felt queasy. I finally decided that maybe my stomach might feel queasy too, so I would tell her this and then I could get a taste of coke syrup too. See, mom is the one that got us addicted to Coke!

We were never allowed to argue in the car. If anyone started it, they'd better stop ASAP or mom would warn us that if we didn't stop that she was going to pull over. If anyone was brave enough, or ornery enough to keep it up, then she would throw on the brakes and pull over to the side of the road, and there we'd sit. Oh, and if you started arguing about who started it first, then she'd just turn off the car and sit. Not only would it get pretty hot real fast, but my sister and I were anxious to get there. We couldn't wait to get there to see our cousins!

KICK THE CAN

When I was a kid, my favorite outdoor game to play was Kick the Can. If you've never played this, it goes like this: You get a can - hopefully someone would get a nice big coffee can or juice can, but if not you settled for just a canned vegetable or fruit can. Then one person is the seeker. They stand with their eyes closed, and one foot on the can and count to 100. All the other people go hide. After the seeker has reached 100, he/she goes to find the people. Now this is the tricky part, because you can't let youself get too far away from the can. While the seeker is trying to find the hiders, the hiders are trying to work their way to the can so they can kick it and yell: Olly, Olly, Oxen Free! I have no idea who Olly is or why the Oxen are free. :0) Then all the hiders come in and you start a new game and the person who was the seeker has to be it again. If you have a really stupid person, they can be the seeker the whole time. If the seeker sees someone trying to sneak in to kick the can, he/she runs back to the can, puts his/her foot on it and points to the person and yells something like You're Out or something like that. I can't really remember what you say. Then the person who was caught has to sit out while the seeker goes out to find someone else. If the seeker finds anyone in their hiding place, they are out too and have to sit out.

One day we decided to play Kick the Can. We always thought it was loads more fun if you had lots of people, so we would try to get as many kids as possible to play. This one day we decided to go all the way down the block and knock on all the doors and ask the kids to come play Kick the Can with us. By the time we got to the end of the block we had quite a few kids - at least 15. We went to the second to the last house on the block (the very last house only had babies). No one answered the door, but someone said they thought they saw the curtain move. Well you know what great imaginations a bunch of kids have. The moving of the curtain escalated to us deciding that someone must be in their house trying to rob it. We weren't going to let anyone rob our friend's house, so we all decided we would surround the house and then one of the older boys would pretend like he was a cop and yell and tell the supposed robber inside that he was surrounded and he should give himself up. This sounded like a great plan. We thought for sure that if we did this, that the robber would try to sneak out the back door, so those of us who were more "in charge" went to the backyard and we designated other kids to surround the front. What we didn't count on was that the ones we put in the front were scaredy-cats and so they snuck back around to the back to be with us. After the police-impersonator called out for the robber to give himself up because we had surrounded him, someone said they thought they heard the garage door. We all ran around to the front, but the garage door was down. We surmised that he must have gotten away. Just then our neighbors came home. They had been to the grocery store and as they were getting groceries out, we bombarded them with the story of a robber in their house. The lady was a good sport and let all of us go from room to room to "make sure" that there were no robbers in her house.

WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?

I used to hardly ever watch tv, but the past few years I have watched several programs. Here are the only tv shows I've been watching:

Battle Star Galactica - this finished a few months ago and is not on anymore.

Lost - This only has this year and next year and then it will be over.

Eli Stone - this also finished a few weeks ago (here in Ireland) and is not on anymore.

I think I need some new tv shows. What is your favorite tv show that you are watching now?

DUMB AND DUMBER

Conversation with my husband after watching 2 1/2 hours of educational programs on National Geographic:

Me: (Picking up the tv remote and browsing through channels) I can't take it anymore.
Him: Why? Don't you like my educational programs?
Me: No, I want to be stupid for awhile.

"Live well. It is the greatest revenge." - The Talmud

When I was a teenager, there was a man who was my Seminary teacher. He was also my Sunday School teacher. I often wondered why he taught Seminary every day and then taught us again on Sundays. He was a great guy. If you were in his class, you knew he liked and cared about you. You just knew it. When we went on our youth trip to Mesa, Arizona to the temple, he was one of the chaperones. He just loved the youth, and whatever we did, he was there. He used to ask me to babysit his kids. I didn't do it a whole lot, but I did it several times. I always felt bad when I quit going to Seminary and Sunday School and Young Women's(my parents made me still go to Sacrament Meeting). I felt like I had let him down. Then years and years later - like 15 years later - I ran into him. I told him I was active in the church and what calling I had (can't remember right now). I said to him, "I just wanted you to know that I'm a good person now and I'm active in the church." He said, "I never doubted you." I don't know why, but it totally shocked me that he said that. I know for a fact that there were several people from that ward who in fact never did forgive me for being a rebellious teenager - they've more or less told me so. But I guess secretly I'm glad I could prove all those people wrong.

"You see Mr. Scott? In the water, I'm a very skinny lady..." - The Poseidon Adventure

I'm reading The Devil Wears Prada and it's disgusting to hear how skinny these girls are, but at the same time funny to read about how fat they think they are. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the book"

"Fat was on everyone's minds, if not actually their bodies. Emily swore that her thighs had a 'wider circumference than a giant sequoia.' Jessica believed that her 'jiggly upper arms' looked like Roseanne Barr's. James complained that his [butt] had looked so big that morning when he got out of the shower that he'd 'contemplated calling in fat to work.'"

"I could feel her eyes examining the size of my butt as I walked back to my desk and briefly considered whipping around to walk backward like a religious Jew would do when leaving the Wailing Wall. Instead, I tried to glide toward the hidden safety of my desk while pictureing thousands and thousands of Hasidim in Prada black, walking backward circles around Miranda Priestly."

Maybe I should try Amber's Duct Tape Diet....

THE VOCA PEOPLE

Thanks to Val for sending me this video. I think it is amazing! Music people, you're going to love this!

FAMILY

I was lookin in my drafts and noticed that I had never posted this. I wrote this back in February.

"Don't believe in everything you hear but if there is one thing you need to believe in it's your family." - Logan Butler

I heard a comical saying one time that said something like: "You can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family". The family is an interesting institution. No matter how many children you may have, each one is a different, unique and separate being. They may have the same beliefs, and maybe even the same goals and aspirations, but their personalities are as different as night and day. But this is a good thing. How dull would it be if our children were all just clones of ourselves.
It is interesting to me that some people can have lots of friends, yet are strangers to their family. Some children grow up, leave home, and hardly ever have contact with their brothers and sisters again. Other families are so close the children are a part of each other's daily lives. What makes the difference? I think the difference is one simple word: EFFORT.

It's interesting to get to know your brothers and sisters as adults. They are quite different creatures than they were when they were just your bratty brother or sister. Sometimes people think that that person who teased and bullied them growing up is not able to change, and so labels them as a bully, teaser, loser, brat, etc. and never bothers to find out that yes indeed, most everyone can change.

In some cases, getting to know your brother or sister can even be harder than making friends with a total stranger. Why is this? Is it because we are afraid to open ourselves up to those we are actually closer to? Maybe we are afraid because we see a teensy little bit of ourselves in our siblings? Do we think "Mom liked him/her/me best?"

I am so grateful that my brothers and sisters and I have "made the effort" to get to know each other better. We try to spend two weeks of every summer together, we have a "sibling chat" every Sunday night for an hour, and of course we email each other. I have learned to appreciate my siblings for the good people that they are and I admire their good qualities and characteristics. We can get together and talk with each other non-stop for hours.

APRIL FOOL'S JOKE

I was googling "April Fool's Day" and came across this video. This is a BBC news show back in 1957 that announced for an April Fool's Joke, that thanks to a very mild winter, the Swiss Farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Many people called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. :0)