Poor Atwat....

[Paleoanth]

Yes, all this nostalgia is great, but I need MOAR gossip!

[WedgewoodBlue]

I grew up on a small working farm. We were never inside, inside was boring, outside had limitless possibilities and adventures. The hayloft in the barn provided endless hours of swinging by the rope, building forts in the straw, and playing with the animals.
We rode our bikes all over the neighbourhood and spent countless hours visiting relatives. We were also fortunate enough to have a bush at the end of our property and that was a terriffic place to play.
The TV was rarely turned on in the summer. Even the cold of winter didn't stop us from playing outside for hour and hours. Back then the snow drifts were so high we were able to build elaborate forts with tunnels. Some forts took us days and days to complete. We never seemed to notice the cold. Our imaginations knew no bounds or limits, no game was to girly or rough, we tried everything to pass the time.
To this day there are cartoons that I have never heard of from back then. We could be gone the entire day and not once were our parents worried or concerned. If we weren't home for lunch it was assumed we were at my Aunt's house, which we most probably were. My Aunt had these big metal tubs, she would fill them with water and we would swim in them. It was actually rare for us to play with toys. Mostly because we had very few toys, there being no extra money for such luxuries.
I see the young ones today and my heart aches for them. The constant, "I'm bored, there's nothing to do", just breaks my heart. I feel so sad that thier imaginations are stifled by video games and the constant blare of the TV.
Sadly the young ones don't seem to enjoy the adventure of reading a good book either.
Yeah, I do admit, I am old...LOL

[DaBuschckah]

You guys arent old.

My mom locked us outside everytime she wanted quality time with either my dad, a romance novel or some rum, so we had all sorts of imagination games going on. We had a hole in our fence, so we'd always play with our next door neighbor, and we'd pretend we were 'lost in the jungle', or 'the floor is lava', or 'Circus gymnastics', or my favorite 'Hide-and-seek-with-no-time-outs-unless-its-really-really-serious-this-time-okay-Laura-we-mean-it-you'll-automatically-be-it-if-you-do-what-you-did-last-time-again"

Plus we have lots of cats, so thats oodles of entertainment right there.

I know I'm not old...just missing the days when I didn't have to work ...or plan my 21st birthday party...

I think that every child everywhere has played 'the floor is made of lava'  even the Simpsons kids have played it.

I draw pictures with my cousins when I babysit them, an attempt to make them have fun MAKING something, and all the 10 year old ever draws is a flat green ground at the bottom, a tree on the right side, a red flower on the left side, and a rainbow across the top. ALWAYS. When I was her age, I started drawing comics...

[Quinctia]

Eh, I spent a lot of time outside and playing and such...but when I was 12, I was in 8th grade and I played video games quite a bit.  So unless that's all a 12 year old has done their life, I don't know if it's age-appropriate to rag on them not playing outside.  By then, it was mostly reading, video games, and various crafts that kept me busy.  Was never big on television, even though I had unlimited access to one in a playroom when I was really little.

Looking back (and I didn't live in a neighborhood with very many kids, so this didn't happen too often), my best times outside were when we managed to get a baseball game going, or something similar.  I remember a hugely contentious round of capture the flag that lasted all damn day.  Oh, and my father's always been big on Halloween, and he made several fake tombstones, so we had this tag type game called "Ghosts in the Graveyard" that we played in my yard, where you wanted to be the last one standing, and everyone tagged had to go lie down by a tombstone and rise from the grave. XD

[Paleoanth]

I spent my entire childhood in a house that had a mouse stuck in a box with a fox, eating green eggs and ham.

[Phelim]

Eh, I spent a lot of time outside and playing and such...but when I was 12, I was in 8th grade and I played video games quite a bit.  So unless that's all a 12 year old has done their life, I don't know if it's age-appropriate to rag on them not playing outside.  By then, it was mostly reading, video games, and various crafts that kept me busy.

The first computer I ever got my hands on was when I was twelve.  Sadly, it was a DEC PDP-11, but still . . . they had Apples in the other part of the computer lab.  Shortly after, I discovered the utter delight of Infocom.  But I still played outside and read voraciously.  Then again, we lived in the middle of nowhere, with no other kids my age nearby, so my brother and I made use of our imaginations, plus the liberal fields, woods, river, swimming hole, and other places of interest.  Oh yeah, and that whole macramé thing my mother had going for a while.

[calalily]

We sound old, I say.  My grandpa used to say this crap to me after I got an SNES.

I don't think we do - my Dad was born in 1920 and he sneered at any kind of safety device for kids.  He used to play with old cans attached to bits of wire, with rocks in for rolling.  That's old.

[Markus]

I always played outside as a kid in the summer. I had one of those sandboxes shaped like a turtle(still in the yard for the nieces and nephew) and in the summer we'd take the sand out and fill it up like a pool. Even indoors I would make things with paper or small buildings out of boxes and marker like malls and stuff. I had a huge imagination as a kid and in fact still do. I don't know if there's a lot of kids now who get entertained as easy.

I am not much of a gamer aside from the sims, so aside from some old DOS games I never played much as a kid. Didn't get into it til recently and aside from Sims I don't know if I'll ever be a big gamer really...

[Clawdee]

I always played outside as a kid in the summer. I had one of those sandboxes shaped like a turtle(still in the yard for the nieces and nephew) and in the summer we'd take the sand out and fill it up like a pool. Even indoors I would make things with paper or small buildings out of boxes and marker like malls and stuff. I had a huge imagination as a kid and in fact still do. I don't know if there's a lot of kids now who get entertained as easy.

I am not much of a gamer aside from the sims, so aside from some old DOS games I never played much as a kid. Didn't get into it til recently and aside from Sims I don't know if I'll ever be a big gamer really...

I had that turtle too! lol, never had sand in it, alway's water or dirt/mud. And I still make things with paper and clay. I have a girl Pirate I made of clay in my bathroom, made before I knew about PMBD, and I made her a ship out of cardboard... Gawd I act 12 sometimes.

[gayle_afcb]

Haha my son has that turtle too - it currently is full of sand, water, mud and a few other nicities.    There is currently a camp fire next to my chair comprising of a circle of stones nicked from next doors garden and various branches, leaves and mud!!  As he is autistic I have to restrict him to staying in the garden but we do take the dog down to a pond a couple of miles away every day and the pair of them run round there for hours while I sit and read - I eventually take them home when I can no longer see skin or fur beneath the mud! LOL

In doors he plays with magnetix - best thing I ever bough him.  He spends hours building elaborate models or making dinosaurs and power rangers and the such like out of them, he has an amazing imagination thankfully 

[Millie]

I don't think we do - my Dad was born in 1920 and he sneered at any kind of safety device for kids.  He used to play with old cans attached to bits of wire, with rocks in for rolling.  That's old.

My dad still has a set of those old tin soldiers from when he was a youngun.

You know, in this country, many schools have banned conkers? That used to be the highlight of autumn, that game did.

[Piratey]

I think that every child everywhere has played 'the floor is made of lava'  even the Simpsons kids have played it.

I just thinking about that. Even I played it once, having never even seen it before either. Maybe it's one of those things that's supposedly passed down from prehistoric times, where presumably cavemen had to dodge offended dinosaurs while avoiding lava.

[Feverish]

I use to play outside most of the time when I was younger. In fact, from the time I was around two, I use to tear the screen door and take off running down the street in just a diaper with no shoes.  Someone would eventually catch up with me and bring me back. One time, some stranger brought me back home. I'm lucky he didn't kidnap me. When I was in grade school I still did the same thing. Wake up and run out the house with no shoes to my friends house to play. I miss those days.

[calalily]

My dad still has a set of those old tin soldiers from when he was a youngun.

You know, in this country, many schools have banned conkers? That used to be the highlight of autumn, that game did.

Oh yes - my Dad loved it when (I think) it was Kinder Surprise brought out their tin soldiers - I collected them for him.  Unfortunately, the nature of litigation and the liturgy of fear stops a lot of these old games.  Schools ban conkers and other games because of liability, and parents support it because despite the child death rates being so low in the Western world, we still fear the deaths of our children so badly, we're willing to rob them of things in the name of safety. 

[Millie]

My conkers were enough to break knuckles! My dad used to drill the holes in them for me. I'd collect them and leave them until the next year to play. I'm such a cheat 

They have at the kids school now, a variation on conkers. It's a rubber ball attached to a short string (not long enough to wrap round your arm, never mind your neck). Obviously, they don't break (where's the satisfaction in that........die conker, die) and it is played with a teacher supervising