OT: for anyone born prior to 1970.....

Cute! Aside from the mother who smoked and drank (my Mom never smoked or drank at all), (I *think* I remember my Mom saying something about my crib wasn't painted... just stained wood), "daddy's belt" (my Dad only ever spanked me once and then got mad at my Mom because he felt bad for doing it. LOL), I *think* we had more than 3 TV channels but we *did* get up to change them and didn't complain about it either, being Canadian we didn't do the pledge of allegiance but instead sang "God Save The Queen" or "The Maple Leaf Forever" (which I loved and wish that had been our National Anthem) and later "Oh Canada" and we *did* pray which they aren't allowed to do in public schools now (however in our Catholic schools, where I went and where Matthew also went, it is still done every morning... if you send your child there, expect them to pray and don't complain about it)... so yeah, aside from the above mentioned parts, I can relate to that poem.

An add-on that won't have any meaning to anyone else because it happened in MY town... they totally demolished the store that used to be on the corner by where I grew up. It was kind of like a variety store, but had a meat counter... so more like a mini grocery store, where we could go by ourselves when I was very tiny, to buy an ice-cream cone, popsicle, chocolate bar, or a bottle of pop... or with a note from our Mom's to pick up a couple of grocery items which the clerks would help us get. Yes, eventually the inside part of the building became something else (a hardware store), but the outside of the building remained and the neighborhood didn't look much different from when I was tiny.... but they just totally levelled it and there is nothing there anymore but a flat piece of ground. It wouldn't have even been quite so bad if they built something else there right away... but it's just a big empty space now. *sigh* Okay, my b*tch is over now! ;o)

Oooh... about popsicles (ice lollies, for the Brits among us)... once in a while Mac's Milk will do a special where you can buy one for .25c, compared to the over $1 regular price on them now. And does anyone else remember the rootbeer popsicles? I loved those!! We tried making them at home last summer and I'm sure they weren't made with the proper recipe because they turned out pretty nasty! LOL

*hugs* Gemini

I thought "The Maple Leaf Forever" used to be the Canadian National Anthem, didn't it?

Noreen,

I have similar writings and love to read them.

Hugs & God bless, Dennis & Gail

Not Likely spun a FINE 'yarn':

>

Now, what's a 'vanity' store?

Mary

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My mother didn't, but my Dad did. My mother's still alive at 96, Dad died of cancer when he was 60 ...

We stopped smoking but drink far too much wine according to our nanny government.

So?

Who had a car when I was a child? The doctor, that's all.

Yes, through other vicissitudes.

Only once - and I deserved it :-)

No television until I was about twenty. We don't have one now, our children were brought up without one and some of their children are too.

What on Earth were those?

And sometimes a long way from home - in rivers! Cycling into the country alone at eight years old, eating my sandwiches in a cowslip covered field. It's now housing.

Better in some ways, worse in others.

We don't have a pledge of allegiance, we had an assembly with prayers, a hymn, notices of achievements and sometimes a little sermon. It was the only time, apart from Speech Day, when the shole school was together. I enjoyed it.

I never tried and was rarely chosen :-)

I wasn't disappointed, I'd rather read in the changing rooms than be out on the hockey field.

Some of us :-)

My theory is that even now most of the children we consider the 'worst' grow up to be responsible adults with something to offer society.

Unless we filled a Tizer bottle from the tap to take on our picnics.

We had no garden and no hose.

And Wednesday afternoons too. Who needs to shop every day?

And perhaps our grandchildren will be reading similar poetry when they're old :-)

"Fancy," I can hear them saying, "Having to drink water from bottles!"

Mary

I was born after 1970. Apart from the obvious "Americanisms" all this is true for me too. The only thing I managed to "miss" by my age was corporal punishment in school - the boys still got the strap but girls couldn't be punished that way.

We had only two TV channels when I was a kid, the third came around in

1989 and even now there are only 5 national free to air (yes, you can pay for Sky if you fancy 300 channels of utter rubbish).

But women were paid less than men and were unable to pursue the same range of careers. Racism was common place and same-sex relationships were illegal. I feel I live in a much more tolerant era, it's not perfect but my corner of the world has definitely made progress.

Besides I can still play outside and drink from the garden hose if I want to. :)

VP

LOL! I've done it - and survived :-)

But would you let your children do it? I encouraged ours to but our grandchildren are more 'protected' - though from what I don't know.

Children riding bikes on busy roads isn't really sensible, nor is playing football/cricket/whatever in the street. But going for a bus ride by themselves or with friends to outside the city is, I think, desirable.

We never hit our children, to me that seems to give the message that if you're bigger you can do what you want. They survived. One of our sons in law hit his children though, they don't like him and won't live with him now that they're free to live by themselves. I was chastised at school by two rulers held together and rapped on my kuckles, it wasn't fair because it was always for untidy writing and I couldn't help that. I was the cleverest child in the school but that wasn't taken into account. At grammar school I was only punished once, by a detention, and I deserved it. Oh, and once I had to stay in the changing room and learn a chapter from a First Aid book. I didn't mind that and can't remember what it was to punish :-)

I agree that some things are far better than when I was a child but not everything.

Mary

You're welcome! I was married to a Brit, which is why I knew that some of you wouldn't recognize the word "popsicles". :o)

LOL You just had me go back and re-read my own message thinking that I had actually called it a "vanity" store.... I hadn't! It is a "variety", which is exactly what it sounds like... a store with a variety of things in it. Just a little corner store where they sell a little bit of everything... snacks, bathroom products, a few groceries, etc... but they are normally more expensive than a grocery store. They do come in handy though, when you're late getting to the grocery store and find it closed and you *really* need something right away. I know they have them in England (not sure what they might be called there... just a store, I suppose) as I stopped into one in the little village I was staying in while over there a few years ago. ;o)

*hugs* Gemini

"Melinda Meahan - take out TRASH to reply" wrote in message news:469968eb$0$27202$ snipped-for-privacy@news.sonic.net...

As I recall when I was little they used *both* "The Maple Leaf Forever" and "Oh Canada" as our National Anthems... but somewhere along the way the powers that be decided we only needed one and "Oh Canada" was the one they chose for us. *shrug*

I guess it's kind of like the American "The Star Spangled Banner" and "America The Beautiful". Don't they just use "The Star Spangled Banner" as the official National Anthem? I actually think "America The Beautiful" sounds like a much prettier song, but then that's just my opinion. :o)

*hugs* Gemini

Makes you wonder why they bothered having kids at all, doesn't it?

I know that one for a fact... I have scars and had many bruises from falling off my bicycle and while ice and roller skating (and over the stairs a few times too by the way), and being hit accidentally with a baseball bat and ball a few times... and even once being hit deliberately on the head with a bottle by a small girl who *really* didn't want me to go home... but I lived through it all.

My own son had a few falls and bumps, bruises and cuts while he was growing up. Yes, I worried about him when it happened (just like my own parents worried about me), but I didn't put him in a bubble to protect him from life and the many things that will happen to him throughout his life.

It's like my family doctor has a major problem with people labelling their children "allergic" to whatever. He says (and Matthew and I totally agree with him) "If everyone who sneezed whenever they are around pets, or dust was allergic, most of the whole world would be classified as allergic! You can't and shouldn't protect children from everything that makes them sneeze, or even itch... they will never build their ammune systems that way. Obviously, if someone swells up and cannot breath, then they do need to be assessed for allergies and likely need medications to help them... but even then, don't over-protect from things or the ammune system will never have a chance to develop to protect them in future." My cousin's son has asthma and a few allergies which he takes medications for... but they had cats at their house his entire life... my cousin refused to make him live without ever having a pet just because he has allergies. He is a big strapping 25 year old man now, who still has allergies and asthma, but still loves his pet cat and will most likely always have a pet because of the way he was raised.

*hugs* Gemini

I've heqrd of it but I thought it was a trade name for a particular type of ice lolloes. You can tell how often I treat myself to such a thing :-)

Nor had you! Sorry, I went back to your post too and 'variety' is perfectly clear! I still don't know wht it is ...

They used to be called a general store or a 'corner shop'. Now they're called supermarkets and are open 24 hours a day.

Mary

We were never hit with anything but an open hand, my parents didn't believe in it. Like I said though, *I* was only ever spanked once by Daddy (the older ones got it from him) and then he got ticked off with my Mom because he did it. LOL My Mom was the main one who spanked us, when we really deserved it. And even though we were spanked, we lived, and we respected our parents, even if at the time we were upset with them!

I spanked Matthew a few times when he was little... when he did something that was dangerous to himself or someone else. For instance, when he put a nail into an electrical outlet... didn't he find the ONLY one in the entire house that didn't have a cover on it?!? I pointed it out to him and lifted his ass for him so he would NEVER do it again, and he never did. Another time (still don't know how he managed to pick it up without falling off balance, he was very tiny then) he was in the backyard with my Dad who was stooped down looking at the bottom of the barbeque. I happened to walk into the back porch and glanced toward the window when I spotted Matthew running toward my Dad holding a pitchfork over his head with the prongs aimed at my Dad's back. I bolted out the door and yelled so loudly I scared the life out of my Dad. I grabbed the pitchfork from Matthew and once again lifted his ass for him, telling him "NO!" He said he was "helping Poppa in the yardin!" My Dad was p*ssed with himself because he didn't even realize he had leaned the pitchfork on the *inside* of the fence... he normally put it on the vegetable garden side of the fence where little hands couldn't touch it.

I don't approve of people spanking their children for no reason (or obviously beating them for *any* reason), but in those instances where someone could be in danger because of something they had done... yes, it gets the point across a whole lot better than just talking. Besides I have seen way too many people try to talk to their kids (who, by the way, were being extremely bratty at the time), and the kids just whined or cried or screamed and didn't listen to one single word that was being said. If talking, standing them in a corner, or taking away TV or whatever else from them for a punishment doesn't work and they continue to do what they are not supposed to be doing... then lift their asses for them! The shock factor alone often does the trick.

As for temper tantrums... Matthew only ever tried that *once* when he was five years old, in a store while I was trying to buy him hooded sweaters for the fall. He was insisting that he wanted to look at toys, and I told him we would look at the toys *after* we picked out the sweaters. When I turned my back, he took off to the toy aisle... I took him by the hand and walked him back to the sweaters where he started carrying on loudly about wanting to look at toys. Fine! I simply and calmly put the sweaters back on the shelf and took him by the hand and walked out of the store with him crying the entire time. I strapped him into his car seat and told him "If you had behaved you would have gotten sweaters *and* a toy, but because you acted up like you did... you get nothing at all." He cried and kept saying "I'm sorry, I'll be good now!" but I drove off all the way home the 30 miles with nothing to show for our shopping trip. Guess what? He NEVER pulled another temper tantrum or acted up in a store again!! I have seen too many parents and grandparents give in and buy the child whatever it is that they are screaming about, just to shut them up. What does that tell the child?.... If you scream, cry and yell and act like a brat, you will get whatever it is that you want! THERE'S a good lesson to teach your child or grandchild... not!!!

*hugs* Gem

They weren't invented when I was young - except for some cricketers.

LOL!

Did she persuade you to stay?

I have bike riding scars from all through my life and a huge one on my knee from falling down the stone cellar stairs while going to get coal in a metal bucket while wearing wooden clogs (no money for shoes until we had to have them for school).

Good for you. I can't think of any of our children who weren't bitten by dogs, break bones, have stitched heads ... it got so common that the last time the 'baby' broke his arm he wouldn't go to A&E, he said I could set it for him so I had to scratch round for cotton wool and plaster. He was about fifteen at the time and had had enough of hospitals, having spent weeks or months in a burns unit for doing something very silly.

Ha yes!

Adults are the same thought, they all seem to have allergies and say they have flu when it's a cold. I had real flu once, it laid me very low and lasted for two weeks. I couldn't get out of bed. No fun. Our GP practice keeps urging us to have flu jabs now that we're old, we refuse and the GP supports us but he has to invite us because the Government insists on it.

And we drink unpasteurised milk and each unpasteurised cheese (when we can get it), don't eat oily fish twice a week and drink far too much wine - etc.

It's amazing that we're still alive, even without the dangerous childhood we somehow survived. Along with millions of others :-)

Hugs,

Mary

This made me smile. When I was little my friends and I would take our sandwiches and go out by the railroad tracks, or down by the river (mind you, our parents didn't know this or they would have had a fit... they thought we went to a park, which we sometimes did) to have a little picnic.

They closed the stores here on Wednesday afternoons too.

We also used to have Saturday afternoon matinees at the movie theatres too, where the younger children could go while their parents were grocery shopping. In those matinees they used to start the show off with a cartoon before the actual movie started.

*hugs* Gemini

"Mary Fisher" wrote in message news:469b97cb$0$1449$ snipped-for-privacy@master.news.zetnet.net...

LOL Noooo, in fact she actually split my head open and her mother (they were Chinese and her mother couldn't speak English at all) put .... are you ready?.... horse linament on the open wound which sent me home screaming in pain. My Mom took me to the doctor thinking there was more damage to my head than there was because I was screaming so loudly. The doctor said it was fine and would heal up without any stitches, but he called the man of the house and asked him what his wife had put on my head... when he was told he said "No wonder the child was screaming, it was bloody horse linament!" ;o)

Yikes! That's one thing I can honestly say... in all the falls I took (and there were MANY... I was the klutz of the family) I never broke anything. Ummm... let me make that a little clearer... *I* never broke anything, which is not to say that one of my siblings didn't break (or at least crack) something of mine.. One day when I was 20 my brother was sitting across the table from me and kept staring until I asked what the heck he was staring at... he said "You're nose is crooked." Of course I told him he was crazy that my nose wasn't crooked... afterall, I had never noticed it before, and no one else had ever said anything. He insisted... so I went to look in the mirror. Sure enough the one side of the bridge of my nose is VERY slightly flatter than the other side, but my nose isn't actually *crooked*. It obviously happened when I was smashed in the face with a baseball bat by either my brother or one of my sisters when I stood too close behind while they were playing baseball. It happened with the bat either in the nose or under the chin about four times (knocking me out each time, and making my sister think she had killed me the first time it happened), and with a baseball three other times... still I went back for more. DUH... I was definitely a blonde child in *every* sense of the word. LOL No wonder I couldn't play catcher in baseball when I tried out in school when I was 12 -

13 years old, and would dive for the ground whenever the batter would swing or the ball would come toward me. LOL

My Mom used to swear that everytime she got the flu shot she ended up getting sick from it. I have had the flu shot and it never affected me at all. Depending on how I feel that particular year, there are some years when I feel that I should get the shot, and other years when I feel healthy as a horse and don't feel I need it. My doctor is like yours and respects my decision whichever way I decide to go with it.

*hugs* Gemini

Sounds like a discussion I had with my mother about a year after I had moved out. She seemed to think that my husband had hurt my nose; there was a bump she said I'd never had before. I had to pull out two specific school photos and prove to her that it had happened when I was younger, reminding her that it was when I got hit in the face with the "Time Bomb" game my brother threw at me (instead of 'to' me, as I kept telling him as we were playing with it across her double bed at the time). No one had believed me when I said my nose was broken; the general thought was that it just hurt a lot, and how would I know that it was broken? As I recall, it hurt so much I wouldn't let my father get my hands off my face, and that would have been doing something, since I was under the age of 10. (Of course, when Dad fell shoveling snow and I told him he'd broken something in his shoulder, he didn't believe me, until the Emergency Room said it was a broken collar bone or shoulder blade and put him in a cast/sling/etc.)

Seems as I get older the tilt to the side seems more pronounced, as well as the bump that my mother noticed.

That, a rock in the head requiring a stitch, and the tip of a pinky finger caught & amputated by a school door were the worst that I managed to survive, along with no seat belts, no bicycle helmets(though I did wear a riding helmet on horseback, most times), and tree climbing. I stayed away from sports with flying objects because I had real poor depth perception, due to being extremely nearsighted in one eye, with normal vision in the other, and would most likely get hit in the face (Or at least I was terrified I would!!).

And yet, here we still are. Just amazing, huh?

-- Carey in MA

Wonderful! No wonder you remember it so vividly!

A fellow schoolgirl once drew blood from my eyebrow by hitting me with a hockey stick - while we were practising NOT raising the stick above our shoulders :-)

As for noses, I deviated my septum by behicing stupidly on my bike after playing tennis and being dragged along the gravel road for quite a few yards. I wouldn't have minded but I had a large dressing on it and had to go on the school stage and collect my certificates on Speech Day with this THING which drew attention to me. I didn't like drawing attention to myself.

In those days :-)

My mother has it and never gets flu. She's 96. We don't have it and never get flu.

We don't get colds either.

In a way it would be an anti climax to die from flu ... we both have cancer and I've had a brain tumour and he's had a heart attack (in 1984) - all things for which people bring flowers, chocolates and champagne, nobody does that for flu!

But all this, while fascinating, has nothing to do with knitting, I really should get back and finish the three cornered hat but my fingers and knuckles are so painful ... my neighbour used to tell me that I'd get arthritic knuckles because I wrung out nappies (diapers) by hand (having no mechanical aid). She was right, it seems. And nobody brings flowers, chocolates and champagne for arthritis either :-( I had to give up keeping bees after 25 years because of the arthritic fingers ...

An afterthought - I used to say that I wouldn't mind ending up in a wheelchair as long as I could use my hands. It looks as though I might end up in the chair AND not be able to use my hands - if I survive :-)

But I refuse to die of flu!!!

Mary