Childhood activities meme

[primsong]

Thanks to tree-and-leaf, I've now spent the past half hour playing around with a meme, but I can rationalize that I haven't done any memes for long enough I'm surely overdue.  Besides, it made for some fun memories.

Here we go..

Embolden the ones you did before you were 11 ¾ (as far as you can remember!)
Italicise the ones you have done since then.
 

1. Climb a tree – Yup. We had an apple orchard in our back yard for a while.  Lots of trees to climb.

2. Roll down a really big hill – At least I think it was big.  Seemed big at the time!

3. Camp out in the wild – my dad had a penchant for dragging us out into the middle of nowhere so he could find lakes and such for fishing.  One early memory involved getting so many mosquito bites on my face while I was sleeping that my eyes swelled shut and I freaked out because I thought I’d gone blind.  Thanks dad… Now I get a hotel room if I can.

4. Build a den. – Do pillow-forts and blankets over tables count as a den? Some of them were quite elaborate, with multiple rooms and hallways between them.

5. Skim a stone. – I sort of could, if I was lucky. My brother was much better than I was. I was mostly kept busy with looking for nice, flat stones for him to throw.

6. Run around in the rain – I live in Oregon. A better question would be ‘run around in the sun’…

7. Fly a kite – Badly, but yes.  And once we even had a parachute to play with on a windy beach and my brother actually went airborne.

8. Catch a fish with a net. – We had a trip on one of those little charter fishing boats and I did this… though what I remember more clearly is catching fish fry with my hands in a creek, because they tickled.

9. Eat an apple straight from a tree. – Yom yom nom nom nom… Poor people eat a lot of apples.  My mom still avoids fresh apples to this day because we OD’d on them in our poor days.

10. Play conkers – what are conkers?  I did play conch shells when I was a kid, but I doubt that’s what’s being referred to here as most folks don’t have conch shells around the house.  My dad found a nice big one while scuba diving and hid it in a tree in the park for the ants to clean it out (we lived in parks in a van at that point in my life), then we had it to play with after that.

11. Throw some snow – my brother and I pitched snowballs at one another any time there was any around, which wasn’t often in Oregon unless we went up into the mountains to find some for fun.  Later when we lived in Colorado and were stuck in the mountains all the time we didn’t bother throwing it often, it was just something you had to slog through.

12. Hunt for treasure on the beach – crab shells, broken sea dollars and long stinky ropes of kelp are totally treasures to a child.

13. Make a mud pie – complete with daisies and bits of decorative leaves for topping.

14. Dam a stream – on a small scale I loved to build dams in the roadside ditches, on a larger scale I remember lugging river rocks to try to dam up a stream enough for us kids to go swimming instead of just wading while my dad was fishing, with limited effect.

15. Go sledging – oh yes! At high speed down hills. Yeehaw! Shriek! Ow!

16. Bury someone in the sand – a brother can be wiggly, but sometimes they humor you.

17. Set up a snail race .- assuming slugs count, yes.  I also like poking slugs eye-stalks just to watch them suck them back into their head, then would wait to see how long it would be until they started moving again.  Unless my mom found them, at which point she would freak out and practically bury them in salt.

18. Balance on a fallen tree – Um, yes. Ouch. Thankfully it was a small one.

19. Swing on a rope swing – at a friend’s house, though I never could hang on for more than a moment and thought it hurt my hands.  Never had one of our own.

20. Make a mud slide. – at least never on purpose.  I did slip down muddy slopes accidentally, however.

21. Eat blackberries growing in the wild.- I lived in Oregon.  If you know anything at all about this part of the world, it includes blackberries popping up every time you turn your back.  It was a given that everyone ate blackberries, when they weren’t trying to kill them.

22. Take a look inside a tree – My family went to see the giant redwoods and I got to walk around inside a tree, heh… though I’d also had my share of crawling around in tree crevasses at parks before that.  Lots of bugs involved, it always looked cooler than it was.

23. Visit an island – we lived on Maui.  I think this qualifies.

24. Feel like you're flying in the wind – Or really go flying, as I did when I picked up some big hunks of cardboard on a very breezy day and had my feet leave the ground.

25. Make a grass trumpet – I tried and tried to do this, never could get the hang of it. 

26. Hunt for fossils and bones. – Imaginary ones, that is. I have no memory of finding any real ones, but I loved hoarding bits of unusually shaped rock.

27. Watch the sun wake up – Sunrises are so pretty, and I was a morning person even before I was forced to see them during early going-to-school days.

28. Climb a huge hill – as the camping question above also noted, we ended up out in the “wild” which included hiking up mountains, so yeah.  That’s good and huge to a little kid.

29. Get behind a waterfall – there’s a wonderful park where you can follow the trail down and go behind the falls, it’s pretty darn cool.  I remember it from when I was small, as it always makes an impression.

30. Feed a bird from your hand – we had a parakeet that would do this, he also loved to take a bath under a dribble of water in the kitchen sink.  Does it still count if it was a tame one? 

31. Hunt for bugs – is there such a thing as a child who never did this?

32. Find some frogspawn – I gathered it into a jar and we took it home where we watched the tadpoles develop on the kitchen windowsill until they started to get legs.  Mom made us dump them back into the wide ditch they’d come from then.

33. Catch a butterfly in a net – I chased a lot more than I ever caught.  When we were in North Carolina we caught fireflies in jars too, which was pretty funky.  Wish we had those around where I am now.

34. Track wild animals – Did this later, in Colorado.  We had all kinds of tracks around our cabin.

35. Discover what's in a pond – Haha! Accidentally or on purpose?  I did both. Very slimy on the bottom, ponds.

36. Call an owl – While I may have made owl sounds as a younger kid, it wasn’t until a bit later that I remember them answering me.

37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool – Absolutely, both fresh water and ocean tide pools.  Poking anenomes and giving them pieces of rock to spit out was a favorite.

38. Bring up a butterfly – I always wanted to do this, but never did.  Alas!

39. Catch a crab – if crawdads count, yes!  If ocean crabs only, well…I tried, but failed.

40. Go on a nature walk at night – Sometimes, but only where mom knew there wasn’t any poison oak or ivy.   And if you walk on the beach on Maui at night sometimes you leave phosphorescent footprints, it’s sooo cool. 

41. Plant it, grow it, eat it – Yes indeed, though I definitely had a lot of help from my mom.

42. Go wild swimming – as in not in a pool?  Streams and oceans, yup.  Brrrr!  Sometimes they include weird things like dog-paddling along at twilight in a stream and coming face to face with a dead, bloated frog and screaming your head off so it’s definitely a different experience than a pool.

43. Go rafting – In a tame way, playing around with a rubber raft on a lake, no rapids involved.  We did have our own little dinghy for a while, though, the “Tigger.”

44. Light a fire without matches – I did smoulder something with a magnifying glass once, but it never would catch fire.

45. Find your way with a map and compass. – Bro was in cub scouts, but not me…

46. Try bouldering – is this rock climbing?

47. Cook on a campfire – I loved fire. I think we were all pyromaniacs in our own way, and fresh-caught trout cooked over a campfire is a memorable thing, as are flaming marshmallows.

48. Try abseiling – wait…isn’t this rock climbing too? 

49. Find a geocache – they didn’t have GPS when I was a kid… what would be the substitute for us older people?  Going on a scavenger hunt, maybe?

50. Canoe down a river. – nope…but I went on a glass-bottom boat and snorkeled a lot. That should be worth half a point or so, being water oriented.

 

Comments

[linaewen]

This is a nice list! I've done quite a bit of this, but I need to look at it more carefully to be sure.

Conkers is another word for horse chestnuts. Here's how to play the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers

I don't think I ever played that, but we did used to collect them!

Grass trumpets caught my eye -- that's something I was fairly successful at doing, though my hubby is better at it than I am. And butterflies!! Bringing up monarch butterflies was an annual event for us. It's hard to find the caterpillars anymore, though, as there are so few milkweed plants. :-(

This meme makes me want to run outside and do some of this stuff again!!

[primsong]

Doesn't it? I think that's why I ended up taking the time to really think about them, the thinking is such a pleasant thing on such a subject. And thanks, I never would have thought of chestnuts being conkers - I collected them too, along with pussywillow catkins and other tidbits, but never played a game with them.

[tree_and_leaf]

Abseiling is what N. Americans call rappelling.

[tree_and_leaf]

And 'bouldering' is a subset of rock climbing, but without ropes and not far off the ground - named because typically you'd be scrambling about on boulders, rather than going up El Capitain the hard way.