*edit:
Valefor.Slipispsycho said:
I loved my Lite-Brite! Wow, it looks so lame now, hehe. ^^
-------------------------------
When I was eight, my mom went through all that crazy near-rioting for a Cabbage Patch Doll that I didn't even ask for. I've still never told her that I had no desire for one, since she went through all the trouble. Maybe she just wanted me to want one. I dunno. She was so happy to give it to me, I just couldn't disappoint her.
But some things I remember enjoying as a kid around 8-11 years old:
Catching
honeybees in a little glass box, looking at them and watching them for a few minutes, and then letting them go.
Doing the same with
fireflies, but in the evening.
Making
peanut butter and bird seed bird feeders out of pinecones with my friend, and hanging them up in trees out in his parents' yard.
(This one's not as nice.) Putting leaves in my mouth and
pretending to throw them up on other kids at school during recess (yeah… I dunno what was up with that one; doesn't sound like so much fun now).
Those really awesome
chemistry and electronics sets they made for kids back in the early '80s. They were great. They gave you much better stuff to play with and experiment with in those kits than they do now. (I was gonna get one for a friend's kid, but chemistry sets are crap now, and the electronics sets aren't much better.)
I was fairly antisocial even as a kid, but I did tend to usually have a few friends, especially in elementary school. We would, at recess, have little
playground "wars" with some of the other kids. I was almost always the only girl in the group, and the boys would get all weird about playing rough around me, which in turn made me feel odd. I didn't get why until way later when I understood that boys could be very nervous around girls. I was naive and it took me a while to understand that kind of thing. But we still had lots of fun.
Those
"Choose Your Own Adventure" books. -- "If you decide to (such-and-such), then turn to page 27. If you decide to (some other action), then turn to page 11."
The
Xanth series.
Model rockets! Building, painting, and launching them with my dad, before things went sour. OMG the ones that would take shitty pictures once up in the air! So awesome. But the launch itself was always the best part. Hmmm. It might be time soon to go to the hobby shop and see if they still make good model rockets to build.
My
Commodore 64 *hearts hearts* I loved this and played games on it into the night when I was supposed to be in bed. (Hey! I STILL do that!)
(Forbidden Forest ftw!)
And the music was great.
When I was older and my little sis was old enough for Barbies and had some of those, I'd make them better for her. Thankfully she actually always enjoyed my
Barbie alterations. ^^ (Green mohawks, repainted faces, hand-sewn new outfits, and new jewelry. In later years I made very good money doing a much fancier version of Barbie- and Takara Jenny-altering!)
I could go on and on… it's been nice remembering the good parts of my early childhood.
