Toy Story You: What were your favorite childhood activities?

[DeepGreenEyes]

Group or solitary?
Books? Toys? Art? Sand?
Bloody bone-crushing ER-trip games?

Share your tiny pre-Litster with us:
What were you into as a kid?

(this oughta be gooooood...)

 

[Vixandra]

I read. A lot... was reading Piers Anthony by 3rd grade because I'd read everything else in the house already. "Nightmare" was the first Xanth book I read, if I remember right. Tamora Pierce was (still is) a favorite.

Played with ponies and Ninja Turtles with Legos and the occasional GI Joe or Barbie for support cast.

Joined my brothers in running around, getting into and out of trouble.

We had a Super NES that we kept working, even after our maternal unit threw it out a second story window and took away the TV we had for it. We made it work with an old Apple IIE monitor. Super Mario Brothers in green screen looks odd but it's playable, much to maternal unit's shock/surprise/slight pride/kind of irritatedness.

I liked (hell, still like) small groups of friends instead of being a social butterfly. Most of my friends were a year to two younger than me though, usually not my own age as a kid.

 

[Netzach]

Solitary. Art. Pretend. Obsessive arranging of small plastic beings. Stuffed animal husbandry. One on one nerdy silliness and lots of high pitched screaming with friends for no real reason. Oh and prank calls with friends, because you actually could get away with it back in my day. Not mean ones on people I knew, just stupid shit with random manhattan numbers that felt good to dial.

 

[FurryFury]

I liked playing church with buttons as the "money".

I liked playing mommy with my baby dolls.

I loved the cat that preferred my dad but was supposed to be mine.

I loved my barbies but they played nasty games together.

Anytime I had a chore I'd make up a commercial, movie or TV show I was doing while completing the task.

I loved books but for a long time was allowed only to read the bible and biographies of the president and the occasional first ladies. When I found fiction I was in heaven. I also loved Greek and Roman mythology.

I loved trying to jump off things with my umbrella so I could "fly" a little.

 

[seela]

I learned to read really young and I used to read a lot - I still do. Like I've already said elsewhere, I absolutely adored The Baby-sitters Club books growing up. So much so, that I had to learn English just to read them, or rather learn English reading them. But basically I read anything and everything.

I also spent a lot of time with my friends outside, building little forts in the forest nearby, swimming, biking, playing (our version of) baseball, and a peculiar version of hide and seek. We had a very sophisticated spy network with a couple of friends - we spied on older kids and wrote down what they were doing together, especially if there was any handholding or kissing involved.

With one friend I also had a "radio station" of our own, using a CB radio. We played music and interviewed each other while pretending to be some celebrities and so on. Luckily our shows only lasted about 15 minutes at a time before we got bored with what we were doing. Later on we progressed from radio into making talk shows with a video cam - and by an unfortunate accident a lot of those talk show tapes ended up in Japan and were watched (with a lot of LOL-ing) by my friends' cousin and their neighbors.

I also loved building (and destroying) stuff. I got a knife of my own when I was 5 and my grandparents were building a house. My parents helped out a lot and I spent a lot of time at the construction site whittling stuff with my knife (yes, at least some of the time supervised) and hammering things.

And so many ER trips it isn't even funny.

 

[midwestyankee]

Books. I made a point of challenging myself to read things that were way beyond my years. Moby Dick in middle school, that kind of thing. Was and still am, a huge fan of P.G. Wodehouse.

And household science experiments. At one point my father had to deny my allowance for a couple weeks to cover the cost of replacing all the fuses that I'd blown and/or destroyed.

And listening to classical music. Nearly every afternoon after school from about third grade on; which is when a teacher introduced us to Beethoven.

 

[Netzach]

and I thought I was a good kid....

seela, that one reminds, me, no ham radio, not that ambitious, but I do remember making a lot of radio shows with this crappy tape recorder and friends. God, I wonder if I still have those tapes somewhere.

I definitely read, but I was not a bookworm either. I was not a "devour books" person, and not into serializations. I was kind of a non-fiction person. I remember a lot of bird field guide reading and non fiction, books about Native Americans that were not written for kid audience, animal books with good photos that I could draw from.

 

[seela]

I read a lot of different kinds of guide books too. Mushrooms, birds, fish, plants and so on. I spent a lot of time in the forest and I always wanted to know what's what. I also loved Steinbeck's Red Pony when I first read it in elementary school. At around 10-11 I got very into horror and detective stories, and because I loved to read right before going to bed, I often had to read something else to calm my nerves afterwards. Like MWY, I also liked to read books that were totally beyond my years. I started to read stuff like Shakespeare, Gogol and Mann at the advanced age of 12, but I think I still enjoyed those horror books a lot more.

The family of the radio and talk show friend of mine had a summer house pretty near where we lived, and her grandparents had a summer house right next to it. When we were about 12, we finally were allowed to spend a week or two of our summer at the summer house together, because the grandparents could check in on us if need be. After that it became a yearly tradition for us for until she moved away after high school.

There was an abandoned farm near the summer house and we spent a lot of time exploring it. We found a some documentaries with names on them and we tried to piece together what might have happened, who was who, why the farm was abandoned and so on. We wrote a screenplay based around the farm and planned on filming it, but we never did.

 

[Netzach]

I almost forgot, the one sport I'm not a spaz at, ice skating. Yes, tights and skating skirt and leg warmers, white figure skates and fingerless gloves, and I remember the breaks with quarters for playing Phoenix and Pac Man and scalding hot chocolate from machines, and crunchy cheetos. I was mediocre in a local competition and did one stint with 6am prior to school practices. That was insane. I can still spin, though sadly not on one foot anymore, and I can still jump a little, all hugeness of me. There's nothing like the well executed one foot spin for a shot of adrenaline.

 

[DVS]

I lived in a small town so we did small town things. I lived in a neighborhood with a fair amount of kids, a mix of girls and boys. The boys played army or football and the girls...I don't know what they did.

 

[IrisAlthea]

I loved stories - listening to them, reading, making up stories, pretend.

Building things was great fun too or taking things apart to see how they worked and if I could put them together again. The latter wasn't always that popular among the grown ups.

I like wild outdoorsy things also, like swimming for hours in the summer or playing in the snow in the winter.
Despite falling off a roof when playing mountaineer, being pushed out a window when playing thief and police and lots of other things like that, I don't think there were any ER-visits though.

 

[cfuhrer]

I honestly don't remember a whole lot about my leisure time as a kid. I know I had some but not sure what I did with it.

Reading, we had weekly visits to the bookmobile; played in a lot of dirt and sand and mud and snow, we had model horses and legos and barbies and baby dolls, spent a ton of time exploring the pastures at the back of the property. Riding bicycles, swimming, sledding, building snow men. As I got older I baked a lot. Guess I remember more than I thought I did.

We were in 4-H and rode in horse clubs, but that was as much work as it was leisure.

What I remember most about growing up was the work we did on the farm and how even though it was hard and tiring and made for some long days I really did enjoy it.

Gardening for food
Animal husbandry for food
Learning to build structures
Learning to maintenance vehicles
Conditioning the horses for show (we raised ours to sell so while other kids showed horses for fun we did it to advertise them for sale)
Canning and preserving
Baking
Cheesmaking

It was all work but it was lots of fun so it always felt more like leisure.

 

[desertslave]

I was an early reader, too. I started with the usual kid books, but got drawn to sci fi and fantasy by about age 8. I've been a voracious reader ever since.

I was also a tomboy. I loved playing, alone or with friends, with Tonka trucks, my huge collection of Matchbox cars, building with Lego or Erector Sets, or running around being silly and playing cowboys & indians or some other variation. Summers were for swimming (pool or beach), bike riding, digging for treasure along the river or lake, playing baseball, shooting marbles.

Later on there was Saturday morning bowling league, shooting pool, pinball machines and Pong. Climbing the towers of snow in the shopping center parking lot after a big storm. Sitting by the railroad yard and watching the trains get loaded. Figure skating lessons and horeseback riding lessons.

Oh, and always crafting of one sort or another...embroidery, woodburning, beadwork, sewing...loved it all. I was never bored.

 

[Redkate]

My childhood was pretty sheltered. You could describe me as your typical private Catholic School girl gone wild.

Boys were a nonfeature of my life until I finished highschool at nearly 18.

I dd have a very active fantasy life though. I read a lot, to escape to something more exciting. A common fantasy for me as a young girl was the idea of being alone with a group of boys and having them "do" things to me. I had no idea what, but it was exciting.

Other than that I loved craft and sewing, making all sorts of clothes for myself and later friends.

I also played a bit of sport, softball and netball mainly. I was never the "best and fairest" but I always got a "most improved" or "best team player".

Other than my playing sport I was a pretty lonely kid. I was bullied pretty consistantly from about the age of 9. I was mostly bullied I guess because I loved school and was so enthusiastic, it's not always cool to want to learn is it? I guess also because I wasn't one of the girls who had boyfriends, or anything, that made me a target too. So school was pretty solitary for me. I have more friends from school now that it's over than I ever did while we were actually attending school.

 

[DeepGreenEyes]

Thanks everbody. This is absolutely fascinating, and beyond cool! I keep imagining eveeyone's av on a little kid body.

 

[CutieMouse]

I was a pretty quiet and timid kid; I don't remember very many stories from childhood. Things weren't exactly conventional at home, so I spent a lot of time being as invisible as possible.

I read. A lot. I remember being told I could only check out as many books from the library as I could carry, so I spent a week doing "research" - measured the length of my arms, and took a tape measure with me to the library to figure out how many 100 [200, 400, etc] page books I could carry at once. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time.

I drew from a very early age; I understood perspective and light/balance by kindergarten... which meant way more hours with a private [college professor] art tutor than was good for me.

My father did woodworking as a hobby. One of my earliest memories was being given a "job" in the woodshop - pound penny nails into a block of wood, then use the claw end to pull them out. If I was good, I might be allowed use use the safety hand saw to cut up dowels. I was eventually allowed to sweep sawdust, but the 1940s era drill press and band saw scared me, so I never learned to use them.

Lots of dress up and imaginary games. Mud pies. One house had a HUGE back yard of field grass, and we'd stomp down elaborate labyrinths and "houses" to play in until it finally had to be mowed.

Lots of baking. I occasionally got in trouble for baking unsupervised. (Not because I was cooking, but because at 6 or 7 I might have done something I didn't realize was bad, and could have burned the house down. ) I still use my grandmother's rolling pin, and have recipes written down that I've depended on for more than 30 years.

Summer nights in Texas, catching fireflies, chasing down the ice cream truck, and popping tar bubbles in the street. My sister and I used to walk a mile or so to the grocery store's deli, order a [free] cup of water and add lemon and sugar packets to make our own lemonade before going to the dollar movie theater in the same shopping center. We thought we were sooooo smart. LOL

 

[kiwi_submissive]

I never had female friends my own age, I grew up on a small town and used to tag along with my brother and his friends everywhere so tended to do the boy thing.

I built forts and tree houses, played bullrush, cricket and rugby, built huge car racing tracks around the house, dug up mums front garden with Tonka trucks.

I also lived near the beach so would disappear for a day and just find crabs and other assorted sea life in the rockpools or would do bush walks up to the top of the cliffs where Bad Taste was filmed. Yes this was the days when parents actually let you out of the house without having to know where you were.

 

[Mirisa]

I never lacked for friends as a child, but I never minded spending time alone playing either. I had a few people that I loved playing with but the rest I could take or leave. It would be pretty fair to say that I'm still like that as an adult

With other people I enjoyed the usual, playing house, school, hide and seek, tag, riding bikes.

By myself I would read, draw, play music or play with my dollhouse. I would make elaborate scenes and the people in my dollhouse would act out various musicals.

I could pick up almost any instrument and have the basics figured out quickly. I would spend a lot of time with a tape recorder and an instrument and record and play duets with myself. My main instrument was piano, so a lot of time spent practicing for performances and competition.

I read pretty much constantly. Babysitters club, Sweet Valley High, and various other of the typical girl series of the 80's. And when I ran out of books to read, I would reread the ones I had.

I also spent many Friday nights at the skating rink. Skating with a boy and holding sweaty hands was quite romantic.

Lots of slumber parties- talking about boys, staying up all night, prank calls, truth or dare, junk food, light as a feather, ghost stories. One of my friends is going to have a big old fashioned slumber party for her birthday this year and I am so excited about it! It will be much fun.

Good memories

 

[midwestyankee]

Thanks everbody. This is absolutely fascinating, and beyond cool! I keep imagining eveeyone's av on a little kid body.

I've had a craggy face, white hair, and glasses since I was two. No need to imagine.

 

[Kurokami]

My childhood kind of had one rule: get out of the house and stay out of it for as long as possible. When I was younger I and my sisters were pretty limited in our ability to do that, but luckily we had a big back yard with a number of places where one could hide away from the folks and do pretty much whatever we wanted. There was a little paved courtyard separated from the rest of the house by a fence that was just perfect for us.

Since my sister was never one for girly toys, and I tended to concur with that assessment, we ended up getting a lot of Lego sets. I enjoyed building them more than actually playing with them, I think; I got really adept at throwing the things together without having to rely on the instructions. We still lost a few pieces; I think if you were to dig around in the garden beds of the house I grew up in, you'd find quite a few lost Legos without much trouble.

We also loved to read, which is when my older sister would generally join my half sister and I. We would sit out there for hours at a time, chewing through anything we could get our hands on. My folks had quite a collection of fantasy novels, so my childhood reading was filled with David Eddings and the like. Of course, we were also in the Harry Potter generation, leading to more than one session of all three of us crowding around a single copy of that series.

And then I discovered writing.

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with that particular activity; year four english class, when we were asked to write a short story for homework. With my shitty handwriting and (surprisingly advanced for my age, though obviously shitty by my current self's standards) grasp of language and plot, I wrote the longest story in the class; thirty pages from beginning to end. I got an award for that, and my teacher wrote beneath my grade for it that if I kept it up, I could be the next Terry Pratchett. I still have that story, and whenever I have writer's block I take it out and read a few paragraphs. Generally does the trick.

Of course, from then on I was hooked. I burned through notebook after notebook, pen after pen, filling them up with shitty pieces of short fiction, ideas for longer works... really, anything that caught my imagination. I was a really solitary kid, only had a few friends and my siblings because... well, I didn't feel safe inviting people around to my house, so I had a lot of time to write, or to read and then ape the style of that specific author. A lot of those notebooks got lost when I left home, but I seem to recall a lot of them being imitation, that early on.

Sometimes I do wonder whether that past version of myself would be at all appreciative of the fact that I used that love of writing to release kinky stories on the internet. But then I remember that preteen-me happened to have kept and reread a particularly bad fantasy novel pretty much exclusively because the middle of it had a lengthy scene of a young woman getting stripped naked and strapped down to an inquisitor's table, so... I doubt he would mind.

 

[Netzach]

Thanks everbody. This is absolutely fascinating, and beyond cool! I keep imagining eveeyone's av on a little kid body.

I looked like the girl on the Les Miz poster.

 

[Keroin]

It was either playing Star Wars, road hockey or playing around construction sites and wishing I could operate one of those big machines. The latter became a lifelong dream.

UNTIL...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQstoyTYJw&feature=share



Apologies for extremely bad video quality.

 

[BiBunny]

Basically everything I did when I was younger was a solitary pastime. I wasn't allowed to have friends like normal people--couldn't go to other people's houses, couldn't have other people come over to mine, nothing like that. I pretty much went to school and sat at home the rest of the time. Even when I got older, it was still more or less that way, even when I became old enough to drive and got my own car. I had very little freedom until I went to college at 18.

Mostly, I read a lot. It didn't even matter what it was. I read so much that nobody could keep me provided with new books, so I read the same ones over and over and over until I had nearly all of them memorized. I also loved music--radio, TV, it didn't matter--and roller skating, which I had to do on our tiny front porch.

When I was younger, I was heavily into gymnastics. Vault and bars were my best apparatuses. I could half-ass my way through a floor routine, but I was consistently awful on the beam. When it became clear that I really didn't have a talent for it (and was much too tall), I had to stop.

As I got older, I started playing softball and showing horses. I became a huge Atlanta Braves fan. My whole life revolved around books, music, softball, baseball, and horses, in the absence of people other than my family.

 

[cfuhrer]

It was either playing Star Wars, road hockey or playing around construction sites and wishing I could operate one of those big machines. The latter became a lifelong dream.

UNTIL...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQstoyTYJw&feature=share



Apologies for extremely bad video quality.

That was absolutely precious! You're certainly the most enthusiastic operator I've ever seen.

 

[the captians wench]

I remember my dad bought one of those kid leashes because my brother had a habit of running off while we were in the store. I would get mad and pout because he got to wear the leash and didn't want to and I wanted to and didn't get to even though I was a good girl. My dad eventually solved this by strapping me into the arm part that was supposed to be on the adult, and holding it in the middle.

I also was very good at getting all the boys in the neighborhood to play school, or dolls with me, but usually I'd rather play football with them. They stopped letting me play because I was too rough, and none of them could tackle me. I would have a kid on each leg, one holding on around my waist, and another holding on around my neck and still chug through another 20 or so yards. Eventually the boys' moms would call my mom and tell her to ask me to stop being so rough on them. *giggles*