Flashback Friday

Yay, it's Friday!  Not that weekends are all that special any more since every day is a weekend day now that I'm retired.  But one of the joys of Friday is that it's Flashback Friday.  If anyone reading this wants to play along, just click on the Flashback Friday button above.

What toys do you remember from your childhood? What did you like to do to entertain yourself? Did you mostly play inside or outside? Did you ride a bike all over the neighborhood? Play baseball in the backyard? Basketball in the driveway? Did you have to "get permission" to play at a friend's house, or were you and your friends back and forth between houses all the time? If you had siblings, was there a distinction between your toys and theirs? Did you "inherit" any toys from older siblings? What were the "fad" or "must-have" toys of your generation? Did you parents buy them? Was there a toy you always wanted and never got to have?

During the majority of my childhood,  we lived in a teeny, tiny little house (which didn't seem all that small, even though it had just 2 small bedrooms, a small kitchen and a not-so-big living room; but when I drove by it about twenty? years ago, I was shocked at how small it was ... I can not believe how we managed to squeeze 2 adults and 3 kids into that house!).  Anywho, because the house was so tiny, we pretty much had two choices - we could play in the unfinished basement (where our favorite game was trying to drag our youngest sister over to the drain [she was quite afraid of it which was the point of our game LOL]) or to play outside.  Because little sister's protests and cries drew mom's attention, our basement games were short-lived, so our play area of choice was outside.  We rode bikes, played baseball in the back yard, and pretended to be the Sugar Creek Gang in the creek area about a block and a half away from our house.

I remember getting a Barbie when they first became available, which surprises me because my parents were never ones to get us anything simply because it was THE THING to have; a "fake Barbie" would have been more their style (because she would have been cheaper, dontcha know) - maybe the "fake Barbies" hadn't been produced yet?   


This discussion reminds me of the ongoing "joke" my mom would play on us girls at Christmastime.  We'd make a list of toys we wanted Santa to bring us, and my mom would always "threaten" that Santa was going to bring us a Hedda Get Betta doll instead.

Hedda had three faces -- a happy face, a sleepy face, and a "sick" face; you'd turn the knob on the top of her head to spin the faces around.  We girls thought Hedda was THE. UGLIEST. doll ever (when I searched for a picture of her to include here, I was surprised - she wasn't nearly as ugly as I remembered), so the thought of Santa bringing us a Hedda Get Betta instead of whatever we had on our lists was enough to keep us in line.  As we grew older, we realized that this was as much of a joke being played on us by mom as it was a threat, so we played along ... even into our adult years.  Ah, good times!  LOL