Sunday, June 10, 2012

When I was a kid......Part 2

So as I've said in Part 1, I've had a wave of nostalgia come over me, maybe it's hormones with being pregnant, who knows, and I wanted to capture some of my own childhood memories...

I have 2 sisters, and I distinctly remember how we loved to play indoors when we weren't killing each other. My poor mother was always having her ears chewed off particularly by me and my younger sister :) Some of the happiest family memories I have are when we all got involved; when we all played together.

I liked to think I was 'artsy craftsy', as I child one of my biggest woes was that we didn't use Fairy washing up liquid or have pipe cleaners, as it was always that brand's bottle that was suggested in the kids craft programs on TV like 'Art Attack'. Making endless pencil holders with empty toilet rolls wrapped in leftover Christmas wrapping paper was great fun, but since I didn't have double sided sticky tape I had to ball up regular tape making the whole thing wonky. Still I loved it!

My parents bought me plaster moulding sets and stenciling kits and I spent hours having great fun and annoying the hell out of everyone else with all my creations. In reality, I'm terrible at art, much to my chagrin as a teenager in school.

My sisters and I had a whole selection of board games that we loved and played to death, favourites were The Game of Life which took about 3 hours to complete if the whole family played; my parents later admitted they took to moving the pieces along when we weren't looking!

Cluedo, Ludo (below) and Monopoly were house favourites, as were Scrabble, and card games like Go Fish! and Snap!



When I got a bit older, my best friend and I concocted the idea of having our own radio station, which we played at by recording ourselves on a cassette deck, complete with jingle, keyboard music and fake stories, and then recorded ourselves singing the hits. This was hours of fun although I'm not sure all the lyrics in the songs were suitable for 12 year olds to be singing! I think we called it Bayside FM :)

Do families still play board games together? I think it's definitely not as common as it was, perhaps the kids are left to play them by themselves, but I hope to ensure it's definitely part of my kids' memories inshaAllah that we all played together.

At Halloween we never ever bought costumes (plastic masks the odd time), we always made them, usually an hour before we ran out onto the street with plastic supermarket bags trick or treating for sweets and mandarin oranges. One year my dad halved a black plastic binliner and taped it to my neck so it had a collar, then put tomato ketchup on my chin to look like blood and my mam put some eyeliner on me. We all laughed hysterically at the state of me and I happily tripped along holding my sister's hand and answering 'Vampire' whenever a neighbour asked what I came as!
My dad would sometimes make a treasure hunt for me, with rhyming clues hidden all over the house leading to chocolate or sweets. My mam would spend ages cutting a pumpkin and creating decorations for the house with us from crepe paper and glitter glue.

Loads of fun that I hope to recreate for Eid for my kids, apart from the pumpkin and vampire costume maybe!










No comments:

Post a Comment