Email tidbits & memories

I received this email in my box today and it brought back tons of memories so I thought I would share:

Here's to those of us who were born between 1930 - 1970. No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us, we are awesome. Our life is living proof. We survived....

1. ...being born to mothers who smoked and drank while pregnant with us. They took aspirin and ate blue cheese dressing and tuna from a can.
   
2. ...sleeping on our stomachs in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.
3. ...riding in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts and no air bags. - We also rode in the front seat before we were twelve years old. I remember having to call for the front seat with my brother before we went somewhere. Scoring the front seat was the ultimate. I don't remember really worrying about seat belts until we started high school.
4. ...drinking water from a garden hose instead of from a bottle. - We did everything possible to keep from having to go inside our house. Downside to drinking out of the hose was that in the summer the hose was hot so the water was warm. Upside was we could squirt ourselves and others to cool off.
5. ...playing outdoors all summer long, leaving in the morning and not returning until dinner time. - And then we gobbled down our dinner so that we could go back outside and play ghost in the graveyard until bedtime.
6. ...not having playstations, nintendo's, X-boxes, DVD's, cell phones, and computers. - Instead we had to clean our rooms and maybe more, polish the silver, mow the lawn, and wash the car. We had to look things up in books. Upside was that we could do some great crank phone calling without caller ID!
7. ...spending hours on building things out of scraps and then using them. - We use to put on plays and singing shows in our backyard using an industrial wire and cable wheel for our stage.
   
8. ...falling out of trees, getting cut, breaking bones, loosing teeth and not getting sued from any of these accidents. - I could spend an entire post just listing all the mishaps that happened to our gang of friends playing throughout our neighborhood. My brother alone made or caused several trips to the hospital for stitches. Most of the time we tried to perform our own first aid so that we wouldn't get into any trouble or have to go inside.
   
9. ...spankings with wooden spoons, ping pong paddles, switches, and a bare hand. - I can remember my brother running around the house from my mother who was chasing him with a yardstick. I can remember my neighbors across the street having belts hanging on their bedroom doors. I can remember being spanked by my dad with his bare hand, telling me, "this is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you."
10. ...not having organized playdates, instead going outside knocking on friend's doors, ringing their bells, or just walking in- This one brought back tons of memories as we had a special knock with our neighbors before we just let ourselves into their house or they into ours. If we got bored or shoved outside by our parents, we always had someone in the neighborhood to play with and we just knocked on their door to get them.
11. ...playing with BB guns, and making up games with sticks and tennis balls. - Again, tons of BB stories and my brother. He once shot out the window of our neighbor's house and he had to work his butt off to pay for the new window too. One of the best games we played was one we all made up using a tennis racket and ball with bases that was played like baseball....AND WE PLAYED IT IN THE STREET.
12. ...riding our bikes without helmets. - We always walked or rode our bikes everywhere. We had a bike trail down the street from our house that we lived in during the summer and spring. Riding our bikes with the wind blowing our sweaty hair back from our hot, sweaty faces...priceless.
13. ...our parents not bailing us out if we broke the law. - This weekend I told the story of my brother getting hauled down to the sheriff's office when he was about nine for shooting a neighbor's pet squirrel with a BB gun. When the deputy asked him for his parents name and phone number he sadly shook his head and told the man, "Don't bother calling them. They won't come and get me." My dad always told us that if we broke the law, "don't call us to bail you out." The deputy thought that was the funniest thing. Thing was our parents made us take responsibility for our actions. Break a window? Pay for it with your own money. Get caught soaping windows or toilet papering trees? Clean it up.
14. ...not having elaborate and expensive birthday parties. - Okay, this one wasn't in the email, but I was whining about this to a friend of mine the other day when she told me she was planning to take a group of kids for the weekend to the Nickelodeon hotel to celebrate her daughter's 11th birthday. Then recently I ran across this picture while doing my brother's birthday video and so I added this one because it is true. We had cake and ice cream with the neighbors for our birthday, and as we got older slumber parties at the house. And they were the best damn birthday parties EVER!
    

Guess that's why it's called "the good old days".