Community Chat

[itiswhatitis]

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@LdyBugz wrote:

@itiswhatitis  What a fun post!  Love all of the responses.  We also did the Elmer's glue thing on our hands.

Some of the responses took me down memory lane.  I wouldn't consider these weird, but they popped in my head:

• Clipping baseball cards to the wheel spokes on our bikes to make that flutter sound.
• Saving gum wrappers to make that zig-zaggy chain thing
• Making those folded paper fortune teller thingies
• Walking down to the corner store for candy and buying those little wax bottles with fruity liquid inside.  We would drink the liquid and then chew on the wax for hours.

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@LdyBugz, I did that too!  I would drink all the juice and put the wax aside for chewing!

[itiswhatitis]

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@Trinity11 wrote:

I distinctly remember around the age of 5 or 6, going to the local A&P and when my mom was checking out and not watching me, I would eat the coffee grounds left over in the Coffee Grinder at the register. I used to think they tasted like chocolate. To this day I love my coffee.....just don't eat the grounds. LOL

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A&P was where we shopped.  Large presence in the northeast when I was young.

[QueenDanceALot]

This is a fun trip down memory lane 

I too remember spending hours making chains out of gum wrappers.

And more hours "playing horses" with my equally as horse crazy friend.  We'd run around our yards neighing and pawing the ground.  

I remember making covers for my school books out of brown paper bags (do kids still do this?) and decorating them with my own artwork.

AND I remember pulling up dandelions after they'd gone to seed and blowing the seed heads through the air.  I think if you did that these days a neighbor would have you arrested or shoot you!

[Nonametoday]

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@Coastalcarolina wrote:

I grew up on a farm that my father used to raise tobacco, corn and soybeans.  It was rather large and there was a long path that went between the farmland.  He had two large barns on either side of the path that they used to cure the tobacco.  In late summer, early fall the barns would be full of all the tobacco that had been cropped in the summer.  The smell of the tobacco was intoxicating.  Nothing like cigarette smoke, had a sweet smell to it.  I would come home from school and ride my bike down that path.  The weather would have started turning cool from fall, and you could feel the residual heat from the barns and that wonderful aroma.  I think of it and I am ten or eleven all over again .  I would love to smell that one more time.

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Can you grow nicotiana plants in your garden?  If so in the evening, they have that smell.  I, too, am a country farm girl!  

[cody2]

All of our neighborhood girls whiled away many a summer day playing jacks and pickup sticks. I especially loved to play jacks with the old, heavier ones and a golf ball. The golf ball would go way high and you could just scoop up all 15 or 20 jacks in your hand if you didn't throw them hard enough to scatter. The newer lightweight jacks didn't herd together too well.

[RedTop]

I didn't pay much attention to fads at school until 2nd grade when my friends learned to play jacks, and collected finger "clackers" from gumball machines.  3rd and 4th grades the fad at my school was troll dolls.  In 5th grade it was key rings and charm bracelets made from gumball machine trinkets.   By 6th grade it was gum wrapper chains.  

My brother and I loved fizzies.  We saved the coins from Mallo cups, and peanut butter smoothies, and mailed them in to get free boxes of candy.   I still save the coins and send them in for a $2.00 rebate, although there is a prize catalogue now where you can redeem the points for merchandise.   Mallo cups still taste exactly the same; no disappointments there.   I will never be too old to enjoy pixie sticks, sweet tarts, tootsie rolls, and suckers.   

[Carmie]

Some dumb things I did as a child:

I pushed the gums around my eye teeth with a popsicle stick because I liked the feeling. They never fully came back down.

I would bite the skin over my thumb knuckles, not breaking the skin or anything, but both thumbs have a deep skin ridge on them.

i ate the ends off of matches because I liked the taste.

I used to break thermometers and dump the mercury into a dessert dish and play with it.  It would roll around in small balls' then merge back into one large ball.  Very interesting to watch.

i baked at a young age.  I would light an uncooked spaghetti strand on the stove and use the flame to light the oven.

PIerced ears were uncommon when I was very young, but my mother had pierced ears and I wanted them too. I used to glue pearls and other faux gems on my ear lobes with contact cement.

Once when my mother was on the phone with my aunt, I threaded a needle and pierced one ear lobe.  When I showed my mother, she hung up the phone and made an appointment for me to get my ears pierced...finally.

i used to like to catch garden snakes and put them in a box.  My mother was deathly afraid of snakes, so I couldn't bring them near the house.

i  cut the grass with a gas mower when I was around 12.  My parents thought I was too young, but I begged.  I wondered what would happen if I pulled the wire off of the spark plug while the mower was running.  I got shocked and was thrown across the yard.  Never did that again.

[viva923]

I also ate sometimes that ice from the refridgerator . There was no frost free.

we use to play king on the mountain on huge dirt hills from the housing being built in the subdivision my house was in. We would play till late at night. Can't remember time, but it was dark. 

[catwhisperer]

I loved to play hop scotch, but got into a lot of trouble for using chalk on the sidewalk.

[chihuahuamom]

We always went on a vacation in the summer which consisted of driving to a city about 3 or 4 hours away where my dad combined a buying trip for his store with a vacation. My mother, dad and I (I was an only child) stayed in a motel with a swimming pool which was SO MUCH FUN for me since we had no pool in our town.  I think I must have stayed in that pool almost the whole time, except when we would go out to eat.  THAT was fun too, as there was no fast food or even a cafe in our tiny town. The greasier burger the better! We took our two cats with us as well because they were part of the family! We sneaked them in the motel..  

During this trip, my mother and I would take one day to go with my dad to this big warehouse of "everything under the sun" where he purchased store things.  I would always get ONE toy, and I would wander the aisles trying to decide what I wanted. One time I picked this fancy smancy platinum haired doll with a black velvet dress with a red flower.  Good memories!

One more memory of one of those vacation trips-we were sitting in a lounge waiting on my dad, and were listening on the radio to a commentator describing the orbit of the first man to fly in that little tiny space capsule.  We were all praying he would be safe.I was sitting on pins and needles.