My next set of questions are: "What were you like as a child? What did you like to eat? What did you do for fun? What were your favorite toys or games? Did you ever have a secret place or a favorite hiding spot?"
When I read the first question, I thought that question was pretty general! But then the questions that follow help narrow it down a bit. There's still a lot of information to cover, though!
I guess when I think about what I was like as a child, I think that I was a lot like I am now. I'm older now, of course, and hopefully I've gained a little bit of wisdom along the way and maybe become a better person in some ways. But when I send my mind back--far, far, back to my little girl self with my little girl thoughts, I feel like exactly the same person, almost. For example, I've always been a perfectionist and an over-achiever. I've never liked to impose on other people in any way. I've always hated to be embarrassed, or to look foolish, or to be laughed at. Because of this, I don't like asking for help or asking for directions. I worry way too much about what other people think of me. (Although I've been working on all this as an adult.) Because of those traits, I tend to keep my emotions--both happy and sad--very private, and I've always been somewhat quiet in any situation where I'm not feeling comfortable or confident, and often don't say what I'm really thinking because I don't want people to laugh at me or to disagree with me. Which reminds me--I hate conflict too, and I'll avoid it at almost any cost. I think overall I was a fairly responsible and conscientious child. Oh, and very compliant! I am fastidious about following rules, even if I think they are dumb rules. I have a huge conscience and although I obviously get mad at others sometimes, I've always wanted to be nice to other people, and to be a good person. I pretty much skipped the teenage girl "cattiness" stage and was quite wounded by all my girl friends who didn't skip it. (And yes, I was pretty sensitive and got my feelings hurt too easily.) I hated it when I felt like something wasn't fair. I remember that my wails of "But that's not fair" were always met with the response "Life isn't fair." It made me so mad that I vowed I would never say that to my own kids--and I haven't! ( But I have been known to say something similar such as "I'm sorry. That's how life is sometimes.") I've learned to accept injustice a lot more gracefully than I used to, I hope. I've always been a bit cautious; I'm not very impulsive; I'm a planner and an organizer. For the most part, I've always been that way. (Except I remember being quite messy as a child--the neatness gene didn't kick in until I was about 10 years old I did like to have fun and at home and other places where I was comfortable, I could be quite loud and boisterous. So in a nutshell, that's what I was like as a child.
What did I like to eat? Well, a lot of things. I was not a very picky eater and liked a lot of things although I'm sure I had my fussy moments. I was not a big fan of broccoli as a child but I like it ok now. Things I remember liking especially are macaroni & cheese, pork chops, roast beef (my mom made yummy roast beef with carrots & potatoes on Sundays a lot), strawberries, and ice cream. I still like those things although I'm not very fond of macaroni & cheese from the box anymore. (Homemade is better.) Ice cream is especially worth noting because ice cream was a Pew family tradition. We had ice cream every Sunday night. We were allowed to choose two flavors, and there were always several flavors to choose from. People visiting our house were usually surprised by the amount and variety of ice cream in our freezer! Dad always dished our ice cream for us, and we ate it out of little brown melamine bowls. We loved it so much that we even licked the bowls clean (literally!) although I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that--and I don't do that anymore! Dad always dished the youngest child's bowl first and then went up the row, dishing his own bowl last. What that meant is that the youngest child would finish his / her ice cream about the time that Dad was starting on his. The youngest child when then go stand by Dad and look pleadingly up at him, and his / her efforts were usually rewarded by receiving a few bites of Dad's ice cream too.
What did I do for fun? I played with my sister Amy a LOT. Sometimes we played with Tim and Ben too. And of course I had friends I played with too. I loved playing in my room with my dolls and toys. We played a lot of imaginative games. We also liked to play outside--in the sandbox, riding bikes, tag games, playing on swings and slides and so forth. A favorite evening outside game was "No Bears Out Tonight". I loved going to the park as a child, although we didn't get to do that much.
Coming down the slide at a Denver park.
On the swing set that we got the summer of 1972
I enjoyed coloring, painting, and drawing as well as writing stories. I enjoyed puzzle books with simple cross word and word search puzzles. Here is a favorite little coloring book that I remember buying for myself:
We liked watching television too but our tv time was fairly limited and there certainly weren't many choices. I'm old enough that I remember television without remote controls or cable! We only had a few channels--I remember in the afternoons turning the knob to channel 13--UHF--hoping they would have cartoons on. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't! I also remember liking a few game shows (Wheel of Fortune, The Price Is Right) and some kids' shows (Sesame Street, the Electric Company, and a Spanish show called Villa Allegra). All these shows only came on during the day, so I only saw them when I was home sick from school.
Oh, and I LOVED to read. I spent hours and hours reading. Some of my favorite books came in series, like the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, and the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor. I remember my mom reading us the Winnie the Pooh books as well as the Chronicles of Narnia. Great books! Some other authors I remember enjoying are Jean Little, Mary Stolz, and Beverly Cleary. There were many others that I've forgotten now. I also read and loved a lot of Newberry Award winning books. I'm still working on reading all of them!
I had a tendency to re-read books that I really liked over and over. (I still do that sometimes!) But I also loved to go to the library to get new books, and nearly every birthday and Christmas I received at least one new book. I loved all of them--my mom was really good at picking out great books! Another thing I liked to read--believe it or not--was the encyclopedia. We had a set of World Book encyclopedias that were easy to read and had lots of color pictures:
I loved to look things up in them. I remember I particularly enjoyed the articles on dogs and flowers because there were so many pictures. I also liked to look up articles on the different states of the United States and on different countries, so I could see pictures of those places and learn a little bit about them. (As an adult, I like to "visit" places through Google Maps. Haven't outgrown that tendency!)
Besides the encyclopedias, we also had a set of reference books for children called Childcraft:
I read most of the books in that set, cover to cover, more than once. I particularly liked the book about different places, the book about holidays, the book about animals, the book about art, and another book called "Look and Learn"--not sure what the topic of that one was; there were just a variety of different articles about things that interested me. Oh, and there was one about the human body that was pretty interesting too.
What were my favorite toys and games? Well, I had a lot of favorites. I already did a whole post about the awesome dollhouse I had--definitely a favorite! This picture from Christmas 1976 gives you an idea of some of my other favorites:
Stuffed animals, board games like Clue, records, and DOLLS. Oh, I loved dolls! I spent a lot of my playtime as a little girl "mothering" my dolls. My favorite stuffed animal was a pink and purple checked (yes, really--it was the 70's, after all) stuffed hippo I named Charlie. I received him when I was five, and I slept with him instead of with a teddy bear. Charlie is visible in the toy box below, just to the right of the doll Anna is holding:
(I still have Charlie, but...I can't find him! I know he's here somewhere.) This picture also shows a lot of my dolls and stuffed animals. The baby doll that Anna is holding was a favorite.
I also loved to play with the Fisher Price playsets--we had a lot of them. In this picture (same Christmas as above) I am playing with the Fisher Price hospital, which I had just received. We also had the dollhouse, the school, the farm, the boat, the airport, the castle, the garage, and the Sesame Street playsets. Basically, an entire little town--and we loved to get them all out and play with them all together:
Other favorites can be seen in the picture below, from my 9th birthday:
Legos! We accumulated a lot of Lego sets over the years, and I loved to build with them. I also loved Colorforms sets--you can see the cool Holly Hobbie dollhouse set I had on the left of the photo. I also remember our family having a few "Peanuts" colorforms sets, and a Mickey Mouse set, and Amy had a Holly Hobbie General Store set:
Another favorite toy was the View Master:
We had a lot of reels for ours and I spent hours looking at all of them, even though most of them were "engaging" topics such as the 1960-something Little League World Series and the 1960-something Winter Olympics. (Left over from older brothers.) I was pretty excited when I found out you could still buy reels for this classic toy--Amy and I got a Holly Hobbie reel set. I bought View Masters for my boys, too, and they had much more entertaining reels but they never got into them as much as I did.
As I mentioned before, I loved to play board games. Besides Clue, the Cat's Eye game in the picture above was a favorite and I remember playing a game called Who's It? for hours on end!:
I also liked paint by numbers (there's one behind the Cat's Eye game in the 9th birthday picture above) and something called "Doodle Art", I think it was--large "busy" posters that were just black outlines that could be colored in with pens. I loved making designs with the Spirograph set:
And creating outfits with this fashion plates set:
I liked craft sets like the pom pom animals you can see in the 9th birthday picture. I also remember having a "shrinky dinks" set and a thing called Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker II, which made plastic bugs:
Of course Play Dough was a favorite too. We had this classic set:
In the birthday picture you can also see a tea set--I liked to play "house" too. When I was little, Amy and I had a play stove, fridge, and sink with toy dishes. I remember having a cake baking set too. (But I never had an Easy Bake Oven--sigh!) Because Mom was such a good seamstress, I was interested in learning to sew and when we got older she helped us make a few simple doll clothes and other little projects. (I didn't really learn to sew until I was in high school.) We also liked to play "school"--I remember playing with this toy a lot:
And we played "hospital" using doctor kits like this:
I remember playing with dolls the most, though. I was never into Barbies much (the only Barbie doll I ever owned was the one in the Christmas picture--Ballerina Barbie--and I was interested in her only because of the pretty ballerina outfits.) Oh, and I had one of these because I thought it would be fun to do her hair and put on makeup:
I loved baby dolls the most. I think I had a couple of "Baby Tender Love" dolls. I would have gone crazy over the American Girl dolls they have now (as a matter of fact, I'd still like one of those!) if they had been around back then. When I got older, I started collecting dolls and thanks to all my brothers who went on missions to foreign countries, I accumulated a pretty nice little collection. (I still have those dolls, but sadly they reside in a box. Someday I am going to find a way to display them.) I also liked paper dolls. Amy and I loved to color them, cut them out, dress them, and act out different stories with them. We made "beds" for them to sleep in and "dressers" for their clothes out of envelopes. Most of the paper dolls we had were from old "Friend" magazines, but I also remember loving this set:
Other dolls we loved were "Rosebud" dolls:
(I had this one)
(Amy had this one)
And some little Holly Hobbie playsets that had small dolls and a few pieces of furniture / accessories:
I remember making "houses" for these dolls out of shoeboxes--we even cut out little windows and glued scraps of fabric to them for the curtains. Good times!
I could probably go on for a long time (I have never really outgrown toys), but those are the toys I remember the most. You can see that we found a lot to entertain us even though video games had not been invented yet. Those started appearing in my late childhood, and I actually won an Atari set like this when I was 9 years old:
I won it for a picture I drew for the Kellogg's "Stick Up for Breakfast" contest. (I don't think they have those anymore, but it used to be an annual event.) I drew Toucan Sam, riding on a comet through outer space. It was pretty cool, actually! The Atari came with the "exciting" game of "Pong", and over the years we acquired other games--Breakout, Frogger, Asteroids, and Pitfall are ones I remember. The graphics are laughable compared to the games we have these days, but we had fun with them. I don't remember spending tons of time playing them, though.
Finally, did I ever have a secret place or a favorite hiding spot? I don't really remember having anything like that. I remember that I liked to crawl under my bed to play sometimes (when I was still small enough to get under there) and when we were really little we had a little "house" that was quite clever, actually. My mom made it for us out of fabric, with details painted on. It was sewed so that it fit over the top of a card table. It had a "door" (flap) that we could crawl through and then play inside, under the card table. It was fun! It looked kind of like this (I don't remember ours being quite so colorful):
This was a particularly fun stroll down memory lane. I hope you've enjoyed it! How about you? What were your favorite toys when you were growing up?
