Aging..lol..what is that..do not sign up or fear it..Friday is the birthday 64..heck..what!!! No way..no gray hairs..I am slim..a 63 year old woman is supposed to be chubby, and wrinkled..ha..Not if you don't want to be..Magic is my belief..Mirror-mirror..you lie. :)..seriously not going there..
I am taking you back in time to Sopot, Gdansk (Poland)..I must say those 9 years of my childhood were the best. We live a block from the Baltic Sea. Four of us lived in one large room and shared a kitchen with an elderly woman whose room was next to ours. Poland was communist at that time and we had our moments when we did not have enough food, especially oranges and bananas. They were a luxury at Christmas time.
Toys, we had none. I never cared but I did want a doll and got her (rubber one few days before departing to Canada). Technology (not yet).. We had no TV..only a handful of people did. However, we had a radio and every Sunday a program for children would come on in the afternoon, story telling..there were sounds to broaden the mind..like sleigh bells and the story would be told and us children, avidly listen.
My point is, why do kids have too much and no appreciation. When I got a pad of sketching paper and colored pencils. I had died and gone to heaven. Talk about imagination and drawing. Our toys, were outdoors, running with friends, chasing each other and sharing a toy. Best time was when tata (dad) made a huge sled for us children (sis and myself). We hitched a few sleds and the boys would pull the girls and vice versa. We would race our sleds on the beach as it was on an incline.
School..wow. We used fountain pens in math..God forbid if you made a blob. For fun, my teacher whom spoiled and loved the rich kids said do not do a figure 8 like 2 attached circles. What did I do? Exactly that and out came her stick over my back. I had her 3 years in a row as she told us how much she loved us and wanted to be our teacher, to my utter horror. Saving grace was leaving forever. Once she got wind of that..she became a phony and so nice..Mama asked what should we buy her as a going away present. I told mama, NADA..and explained why.
As a child, I loved trains and there were plenty of rides from city to city on trains. Field trips were exciting and fun, learning about nature and identifying trees, leaves. Books were treasured and learning was a joy.
I must say, I never ever felt a lack of anything, in spite of there was no TV, no phones, no computers, and women never wore pants..lol. We have come such a long way.
...My fondest memory is that of visiting grandma on a farm in another city. I went skating and came home with frost bite..SNOW was plentiful and exciting. We were leaving grandma when a friend told us that he would give us a ride to the train station. That ride was on a sleigh pulled by horses and covered in blankets with tons of snow going through the forest.
LESSON: As a parent, do you really need to go overboard with toys ad crazy things? Imagination is more fun. Reading to your toddler ..and my wish is that there was a program every Sunday where the children would gather around a radio and let the images soar whilst a story was read and sounds in the background (birds, music, bells) made the magic real.
..more to come