<p>northminnesota - I broke my arm playing Red Rover, but not in the way you’d think. I was the last one left on our team, so right before I attempted to run over, the other team decided they wanted the game to keep going, so they were going to let me through. I was a very fast runner, and when they opened up their arms at the last minute, there wasn’t any resistance to stop me before tripping over some edging along a flower bed, and flying into a chain-link fence… with my right arm taking the brunt of the fall.</p>
<p>I spent a ton of time fishing in our pond. An old man who lived down the road would come by our house and take me fishing - he was in his 80s and I was about 8. We didn’t talk much but he taught me how to fish with a pole, a cork and a night crawler. Lots of patience. As I got older, I lost interest and wouldn’t go any more. I never saw him after that - he stopped asking and fished alone. I feel badly about that now.</p>
<p>I know what made me a worrywart… My mom does not know that I took a chunk of flesh out of my left knee when I fell onto a broken bottle in an empty lot where my friends and I were palying despite our parents’ warnings. It is a miracle that the wound did not get infected, and the scar is still there. I had several close calls falling off of trees and barn roofs. Yikes, my skin crawls when I think about my tomboy adventures!</p>
<p>OT
Sorry to bring a sad aspect to this fun thread…
I freely admit I overcompensated when raising my son. Then again maybe not, there were several kids I knew in my childhood that died before high school.</p>
<p>Back on topic… More stories please!</p>
<p>When it snowed, we spent all day making a track for sledding that night. No sleds allowed - only the metal discs that were put back to back for Coca Cola signs - they came in 3 different sizes. My Dad burned tires. Mom made hot chocolate and people would line up to ride those discs. We flew down a long hill, spinning and spinning. No injuries except my Mom who broke her ribs when she hit a tree.</p>
<p>I can’t believe we even survived our childhoods. Hence the worrywart-ish tendencies.</p>
<p>We know how bad we could have been injured…or were. I remember flying into a huge thorny bush from roller skates. The wheels fell off (the old metal wheels) - before the cool polyurethane wheels came into vogue.</p>
<p>I also flipped over the handlebars on my bike in my teens. Before we wore helmets. </p>
<p>When I learned to drive, the car only had a lap belt. I got into an accident and hit the steering wheel so hard with my nose, that it broke. </p>
<p>So, yeah…I am a worrywart.</p>
<p>I grew up in Santa Monica, CA. We were shoved out of the house at 8 in the morning, and not back home until the “lights came on” (the street lamps). We would ride our bikes, go to the playground, go to friends houses, play on the street where we lived, ride our bikes the 12 blocks to the beach (soemtimes we’d play “Arabian Nights” at the beach, if it was windy) hang out on the swings and the rings at Muscle Beach, play on the pier, play at the mall, investigate stuff. This started when I was 6, and "just"aBrother was 8. We’d come home, take a bath or shower, get into pj’s and eat dinner. I don’t ever remember eating lunch during those times, unless it was at a friend’s house.</p>
<p>Once we were playing on a construction site, I picked up a 2x4 to throw and it didn’t leave my hand. A nail went through my hand. We were close to home and "just"aBrother grabbed me and we ran home. "just"OURmom almost died on the spot. We didn’t have a car, but lived in an apartment building and she ran from apartment to apartment, a neighbor’s husband picked me up and ran with me in his arms the 4 blocks to the hospital. I wasn’t bleeding, nor in pain. I assume I was in shock.</p>
<p>Times sure were different.</p>
<p>justamom,</p>
<p>We were practically neighbors, growing up.</p>
<p>Different world, now.</p>
<p>When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of other kids, all ages. We often played outisde together…pickle, softball, kickball…many games. We even used to walk the split rail fence of one of the houses. Also, we had a pond at the end of our street that was a source of many skating days , bonfires, ice hockey.
I feel sad to think so many of the traditions we had as kids sort of dried up and disappeared for our own children.
Everything seems to be waht I call organized play
There was no such thing as soccer teams for little kids. It was a school sport that began in middle school.
We didn’t have mother’s arranging play dates, we just went out and played with whoever was out and about.
The neighborhood we live in does have some of that, but only my youngest will have a small glimpse of what it was like for me growing up .</p>
<p>I grew up in a suburb of Boston on a ‘dead end’ street until at some point a new development moved in. It was a very stable neighborhood, very little movement during my childhood. We backed onto a marshy/swamp area and had huge backyards. We played outside all day every day. I loved baseball and football and was as tough as any of the boys! My worst accident involved (don’t read if you are squeamish) a fall off a bicycle at high speeds with an unfortunate landing resulting in a self inflicted episiotomy. I will spare you the rest of the details. Our dog managed to run in front of 2 cars and ended up with 3 legs (my issue resolved without amputation!!). By age 3 my sister was up at the top of many trees and the fireman came regularly to grab her out of the tree. One neighborhood parent had been a Marine Seargent and we avoided their backyard, but otherwise we were a back of ferral juveniles…(of course of the middle class suburban variety). </p>
<p>Besides the full time play the best fun came when the critters came out of the swamp. Huge box turtles and snakes all the time… and annoying racoons. </p>
<p>I operated with my kids in a ‘let me know if there is blood’ mode for the most part. Two of them were fearless as young children, one fearful-- but none of them had the childhood I did. Within the range of things our lives allow for I think I give them pretty free reign in other ways…</p>
<p>Along with forgetting about SPUD and a few other games, I also did not think of the various broken bones right away. My friend fell off her skateboard and broke her elbow, and according to her, her dad burned the skateboards in the fireplace. I fell while ice skating alone at the community rink and fractured an ankle. That injury I had to tell my mom about, but I also had a cut that I never told her about… I probably would have fallen on the ice even if I was not alone.</p>
<p>i grew up on a farm, as well. we didn’t dream of staying in the house. we would haul our toys outside and find something to do with them. we found things to do to keep busy or else my parents would find something for us to do! didn’t have central air, so it was nicer in the shade than in the house. </p>
<p>my kids were outside most of the time, too–but their days were so much more structured than mine. little league, basketball, football, all sorts of activities to fill up their summer days. </p>
<p>neither of my kids really enjoyed video games, so that was a big help in keeping them outside and busy. having the “neighborhood” pool in our back yard was a big plus also!</p>
<p>I’m not sure I buy our injuries and near injuries as reasons to be worrywarts now. My mom could, and does, tell lots of stories about growing up in Queens (a very suburban part) with all the same requisite adventures, freedom, and injuries that we experienced. I’m sure she’s not the only one. Yet, she let us have the same freedoms in the more rural Jersey suburbs we grew up in–yeah, I got stitches in my head twice (from running through a glass door and from the glider on our swing set) and other injuries, as did my sibs. I think they’re part of life.</p>
<p>Even though we live in a much more urban area, I tried to grant my kids the same freedoms. there were some modifications-mostly due to much increased car traffic. But as they got older, I did let them wander, and tried to make sure they had large swaths of unstructured time. I will have to ask them how they felt with that (and what they were doing.)</p>
<p>Garland, I got stitches in my head from the glider swing set too. My grandmother was watching me, but she was a post stroke victim so perhaps she was not really able to do it. That was a terrible day for her; I healed up just fine.</p>
<p>My H grew up in the bay area of Calif. in the 50’s. He remembers that there were seasons for certain activities. You did them in season, and when the season was over, you didn’t do them again until the next year. They included kite flying, attaching cards to the spokes of your bikes to make the funny noise, marbles, trading baseball cards and others he can’t recall. He only played with other boys, and there was lots of rough-and-tumble stuff like cowboys and Indians (would be very politically incorrect these days) and war. </p>
<p>I grew up in a suburb of Chicago and we were outside all the time, weather permitting. Mom definitely didn’t want us in the house, and there wasn’t too much interesting stuff going on in there anyway. I remember playing certain games only with girls, such as hopscotch, jump rope, cat’s cradle, jacks, tiddly-winks and “house”. Other games included boys, such as tag, red rover, hide-and-seek and Mother-May-I. We loved crack-the-whip. My sis and I were pretty calm, so I don’t remember anything physically dangerous, except for the sledding, skating and tobboganning we did in the winter. I remember lots of injuries related to those activities.</p>
<p>Both H and I make the requisite yearly visits to the dermatologist to have questionable patches of skin on our heads and hands removed. I remember many severe sunburns, where you would be peeling off giant patches of the outer layer of skin over a burn.</p>
<p>I cringe when I think of all the “stupid” stuff I did as a kid. I know my misadventures were all part of the learning process, but when I tally up the resulting injuries I wonder how I survived!! As a kid I broke my right arm (both bones simultaneously), got stitches in my head, knee, and foot (not all at the same time), got my two front (baby) teeth knocked out, melted off the bottom of my foot (see earlier entry for details), and took off part of a toe when I rode barefoot on a dirt path and caught the toe between my bike pedal and the stump of a tree. The near misses could have been worse, but luckily I avoided super serious injury. I admit freely that I wanted to protect my children from some of these injuries. In hindsight, I was probably too overprotective. Injurywise - S got stitches in his chin and D broke her arm (only one bone). Most of all, I kept the kids close to home because I feared they would get snatched. Too overprotective?</p>
<p>colmomto2, I don’t think you are overprotective for fearing that harm can come to your young children while left outside unsupervised. Somehow there were large groups of us kids in our neighborhood as kids, and we were unsupervised. But there hadn’t been the well-publicized news stories of abductions that we have seen in more recent years. Also, there were no drug or alcohol problems with kids “back in the day”, at least in my neighborhood.</p>
<p>Now, due to the easy availability of news from all over the country (and world!), we are much more aware of things that could go wrong. I watched my now 18 and 21 year-old kids pretty closely when they were young, and it doesn’t seem to have affected them negatively.</p>
<p>littlegreenmom, what’s your neighborhood?</p>
<p>I always played outside as a little kid, and I still do! (I’m 17 now). After sitting in school all week, I can never resist a beautiful day outside :)</p>
<p>I practically lived outside. The funny part is that I was also a really bookish child – I just brought my books with me to the tops of trees to read. :D</p>
<p>I like to say that I’m surprised I survived my childhood, and I truly am. I spent most of it in southern Texas, and between the animals, plants, people and the crazy things I did involving heights, abandoned properties and bicycles, it’s amazing that I didn’t even break a bone until I was 16.</p>
<p>Definitely moments I look back on fondly.</p>