23 Things I Miss about Childhood

1. Running through the corn stalks. My grandparents had a garden in their back yard and I could get lost in the corn stalk aisles. It was really fun to see who could run through them the fastest. You would get scratches all up and down your arms, but that just made the game even better. Who had the worst battle scars also meant who ran the fastest.

2. Jump Jumps: Those magical places where we could jump against the walls in sweaty abandon. here we had access to jump perfection. These days kids have jump castles, jungles, obstacle courses…which just proves that there is no limit to the size and shape of our ability to inflate rubber into a jumpable delight.

3. Lucky leaves. On the playground during elementary school, when I wasn’t chasing Jackson Tan around the big tree, I was catching Lucky Leaves. I am fairly positive that I made this game up in Kindergarten so I am wondering why I didn’t patent that shiZ and make some quick cash. The goal was (during autumn) to catch leaves as they fell from the trees, before they hit the ground. If you caught one you got a wish. And I wish I knew what I wished for in Kindergarten so I could tell you whether or not the magic is real.

4. Building mud bombs. At Sunshine School while Madison Russell was reading on a 5th grade level, I was building mud bombs with Sky Ashley to throw at her. And I kept one of said mud balls until about 7th grade. It was crusty and disgusting, but it was a piece of my childhood that I wasn’t ready to give up.

5. Picking Honeysuckles, and eating their honey. Did anyone else do this? Cripes honeysuckles smell amazing, and just one whiff can take me back to age 7.

6. POGS and SLAMMERS. I was the POGS Queen and my castle was atop the Big Red Slide at Sunshine School.

7. Bikes and buried treasure. My mom still recalls to this day when I told her that my life was over and that I would never have friends again because Beef and Cara lived down the street from each other, and I lived in BFE. They rode their bikes together every day and I sat on my dock and mourned the loss of my social life. Instead of giving up though, I just moved into Beef’s house for a summer and rode my bike with them. And we made a package of all of our greatest and most prized possessions along with our deepest secrets and sent it down a river (READ: sewage pipe) in hopes that we would someday find it. We haven’t yet.

8. Writing notes in church: Remember passing the bulletin back and forth during the sermon with notes of who had a crush on who and where we were going to eat lunch? It was a real buzz kill when you forgot your pen and had to use one of those gnarly miniature golf sized pencils that the church keeps in the back of the pew. I would rather not write than use that tiny half-pencil…especially since my hands
have always been so large, it was borderline impossible to write with such a small utensil.

9. The lack of body odor/hair. Remember when we could run all day long and not smell like death? Remember when we didn’t have to shave our legs? Back in the day when tube socks covered the hair and nobody cared. Ah those were the days.

10. My mom’s packed lunch. I wish that my mom would still pack my lunch for work. Because she would give me my sandwich ingredients in separate baggies so that my sandwich wasn’t soggy by the time I ate it. And she would pack strawberries and a baggy full of sugar to dip them in. And of course oreos for desert, which would WITHOUT FAIL, end up in my eyebrows.

11. Jump Start 4th Grade Haunted House. Did ANYONE play this awesome computer game!? This was the greatest game known to mankind. Jump Start 1st-3rd grade sucked and every Jump Start after 4th was lame, but they really hit the jackpot with this one. Cacka would agree, and Beef wouldn’t know as she wasn’t allowed to play games with haunted houses. Buzz Kill.

12. AOL/AIM. If I could count how many hours I spent talking to people on AOL/AIM …..well I would have counted a lot of hours. This was the only avenue to Middle School social life. If you didn’t have Instant Messanger you were a nobody. And so I’d be damned if Allypoo11 wasn’t online Every. Single. Night.

13. Vacation Bible School. The week you spent at church, playing games, learning songs, and eating generic cookies. Ah, bliss.

14. Feeding the ducks. I do not know why feeding the ducks was so fun as a toddler, but man oh man was it like the jackpot of afternoon activities. Birds creep me out at this point in my life and therefore this hobby would no longer prove enjoyable. But 4 year old Ally would differ.

15. Follies Practice. How Donna Middleton got a group of 10 5th graders to learn an organized dance to Elvis songs is something that I will never know or understand. I only hope that I can ask her one day when my future imaginary kids are driving me insane, I will just whip out the memory box and teach them our 5th grade rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes”.

16. Birthday dance parties in the Eagles Nest at Northridge. Ah the greatest parties were dance parties at Northridge Country Club. The blissful awkwardness of dancing with the opposite sex builds like a tower of ill placed jenga blocks. And everyone went big or went home. We had Elvis impersonators, choreographers for the sock hop (thanks Ali Burrow) and we even invited the people from the grade above us. Cripes, they could have made a TV show about PG’s middle schoolers.

17. The days when you could wear tennis shoes with ANY outfit.

18. Ryan Holman.

19. That Nokia phone that had the game “snake” (we are fairly positive that Emily Middleton may or may not still own her Nokia from 9th grade.) Anyways snake was the best thing to hit cellular devices since cellular devices themselves. It was a pixely version of heaven.

20. Making up Dances. This was the only thing acceptable of a sleepover between the ages of 8-15. You had to make up a dance if people were staying the night at your house. You could get creative and include a trampoline and shampoo and multitask, like Beef and I. Or you could record said dance and watch it when you are 23 and laugh, such as the time when our band, BAAM, (Bethany Ashton Allyson Megan) made up a one hit wonder routine to “Baby Got Back”. I could still perform at least the first 10 seconds.

21. Sonday’s Camp. Oh the beautiful bliss that was sleeping in uncomfortable twin sized bunk beds with over excited counselors waking you up at the crack of dawn to paint your entire body blue and orange and gear up for an entire, and I do mean from SUNRISE to SUNSET, day of screaming. What did we scream? Well we cheered for our church, our towns, our state, or just insignificant noises at the top of our lungs and we played trash cans as drums. We had blue and orange floaties, we had bandanas, we had matching socks and we had t-shirts. We were color coordinated and louder than a thunderstorm. Rain or shine, we rose the flag of extraordinary over the other mediocre churches who didn’t have the budget for matching shirts and proved what it really means to be a Christian by shouting out the letters that spelled the town where we came from. TEX – ARK – ANA - FBC. We were like Titans at that Christian Summer camp and I loved it.

22. Power Rangers, and pretending that I was the pink one.

23. Fraggle Rock.