"Mommmmmm! I'm bored!"

Ok, each of the daughters has a computer.  The older two have cell phones.  We have a wii, and a choice of tv's (with about 3^5 more channels than I ever dreamed of having~back then I was excited when we got a color tv, and eventually, cable to replace the tin foil and rabbit ears antenna.)  All three of them have a Nintendo DS, with about 8,000 little black squares that have games in them.  They live in a freaking zoo, for crying out loud!  They have a pool!  How the hell can they be bored?

When I was a kid, if we wanted electronic entertainment we had this:

Or possibly, if you did your chores and earned a roll of quarters, this

But that wasn't until the 80's.  Before that, mostly what we had were a couple of bikes, and the entire world to fill with our imagination.  Oh, sure, I had a Barbie Dream house, and a few dolls, some board games (my favorite was Charlie's Angels) and the complete set of  Little House on the Prarie books, but those were for rainy days.  Because when I was a kid, if it was summer and the sun was out, your little ass was outside.  Period.  You got breakfast and went outside.  You were expected in for lunch, and then you went right back out till your mom hollered you home for dinner.  If you were inside, it meant you were grounded, and that was always the worst.  There was none of this going out for ten minutes and then coming back in for a snack, or to whine about how hot it was, or how bored you were, or to tattle on your sister because she said you were short and now the whole world is ending...and if you went through the house screaming for your mother you had by-god better have been bleeding massively from some sort of wound, because there was no other excuse for screaming like a banshee.  Our mothers knew what was what, and at least mine wasn't afraid to chase you out of the house with a broom if that's what it took.

Mostly, the whole neighborhood (at least the parts we could reach on foot or by bike) was our playground, and the things we found were our toys.  If I wanted to play house, I drew a fricking house in the dirt and furnished it with whatever I could find.  We climbed trees and caught frogs and played hide and seek.  And since we were pretty well unsupervised, we did a bunch of crazy shit that would send mothers today (and who knows, perhaps even the broom wielding "are you bleeding? No? Get back outside!" moms of the past) into headspins.

Like, one summer when we lived in the woods in South Carolina we found a couple of old, rusted out oil drums laying along a path through the trees that ran behind our little row of houses.  Now that was seriously cool.  Tip those suckers on their sides, watch out for the holes when you put your feet on them, and off you go rolling them along by running on top of them.  It took patience, a lot of falls, and a lot of balance to get those drums rolling, but once they were moving?  It was like flying!

image by <a href="http://stockarch.com/images/objects/rusted-oil-drum-2793" target="_blank">voodoostock - stockarch.com</a>

We didn't have "playdates" or need to make an appointment to see our friends.  You ran with whoever was around in the neighborhood (whether you really liked them or not.)  Which was mostly everybody who lived in your neighborhood, because kids weren't so flipping overscheduled in the summer time back then.  You walked or rode your bike, knocked on the door, and there you were.  Your friend had to do some chores before he could come out and play?  Guess what?  You freaking helped her so that you both could get to play that much faster.  It wasn't about being nice, either, it just...was.

We did stuff.  We built a raft and sailed it down a stream, and built a fire and roasted marshmellows and hot dogs over it.  When I was twelve.  And never mind that the stream was chained off and said "no trespassing."  We jumped off the roof of the garage into beanbag chairs, walked along the tops of 6 ft. high fences.  We played flashlight tag at twilight, told each other ghost stories until we were so freaked out we stayed awake for days, we invented games and stared at the clouds and counted the blades of grass in the lawn.  We poked sticks at wasps nests and played kickball in the street, because back then cars would actually slow down for you.

What we learned was risk management.  We figured out what was really fun and what was just plain stupid.  Fun? Flying through the air from the roof to the beanbag chair.  Stupid?  Having rock fights using metal garbage can lids as shields.

Me, calling my mother at work one afternoon:  "Mom?  I think you might want to come home.  I got the bleeding stopped (with your new white towels, btw), but I'm preetty sure he's gonna need stiches in his head..."

My brother:  "It was my fault, Mom, I forgot to duck."

Mostly we learned judgement, and gained experience.  If I do this, that will happen.  Maybe I shouldn't do "this" next time.  We learned how to get along with others without having to tattle (you know what I never hear anymore, that I heard all the time when I was a kid?  "Nobody likes a tattletale...")  We figured out, through trial and error, what to believe and what not to believe (when I was 8, a friend told me that the milk in milkweed was poisonous and if you drank it you would die, the day after I actually tasted it.  I waited a week to die before I got distracted by some other method someone said would kill me.)  We went out everyday to conquer the world and came home every night to eat and sleep and start it all over again. 

Kids today aren't overstimulated by all their tv time and video games and electronic this and scheduled that.  They're understimulated.  It's about the imagination, and relating, and endless summer days that beg to be filled...by something other than Mom and the great god of electricity.  So, maybe tomorrow, when I hear the whining and bickering start, I should chase them out with a broom, and lock the doors to see that they stay out.