mini Emily article.

RGPageantqueen wrote:

bcriet wrote:

THX1138 wrote:

RGPageantqueen wrote:wow, your parents must've really loved you....

Tough love, El, tough love. We didn't nurse, we hunted for our own food. Kids today, they got it easy. lol

RM

LOL I have 3 older brothers and you know how they say boys will be boys will it is true....my mother says her sons were raised by wolves

I do agree kids now days have it so easy it some times makes me sick to think about it. But then again you do have to factor in the how and the where children are raised.....but yeah they got it easy.

I don't know what you call "easy"?

You know some kids have it all handed to them and some don't...it wasn't like that for me I had to work my butt of in high school and now I have 3 jobs just to pay for college. It sucks but at the end I will be really happy.
On the other hand kids just don't know how to just go out and have fun and be a kid. I tell my sisters kids go out climb a tree skin a knee lol.
Your a sweetie Ella don't ever change.

i_heart_bones wrote:

THX1138 wrote:

RGPageantqueen wrote:

bcriet wrote:

THX1138 wrote:

RGPageantqueen wrote:wow, your parents must've really loved you....

Tough love, El, tough love. We didn't nurse, we hunted for our own food. Kids today, they got it easy. lol

RM

LOL I have 3 older brothers and you know how they say boys will be boys will it is true....my mother says her sons were raised by wolves

I do agree kids now days have it so easy it some times makes me sick to think about it. But then again you do have to factor in the how and the where children are raised.....but yeah they got it easy.

I don't know what you call "easy"?

Well I'm just guessing here but you didn't spend you summer 'vacation' bucking bales and stringing barbed wire fence. By the time I was old enough to drive I had more scars and broken bones than I care to think about. One particularly fun summer I was thrown off the top of a hay wagon and fell 15 feet into some fence and the barbs tore through my shirt laid open a patch of skin about 4 inches long on the back of my right shoulder and all I got was a 'Hurry up, those bales won't load themselves onto the conveyor!" So you know, easy compared to that.

RM

In my father's defense neither of us knew I'd been seriously hurt until the blood started dripping down my arm onto the bales.

i think the term "easy" differs due to upbringing, not the generation in which you were born... my parents certainly didnt have to endure any of the above, but still had their fair share of hardships...and i wouldnt say my childhood was easy even with the lack of "physical" hardship..

That's true. I grew up spending half my life on a family farm so a lot of what I did as a kid I just accepted as the chores I had to do, and stretching fence is something I actually like to do so it wasn't ever a hardship to me. At the same time while my life was physically much more onerous than many of my friends, some of them definitely had much, much more difficult childhoods.

That said I do think there's an undercurrent of whiney-ness among some elements of today's youth (present company excluded Ella et al), and by that I mean when something needs to be done I was raised you just did it. You could bitch all you want but that didn't mean you left it for someone else to do the job. Today, while there are certainly kids out there who are hard working, industrious, and conscientious, there are a lot more whinging slackers

OMG. I'm channeling my father. Great, so maybe it's not just generational but hereditary as well. So that means in another thirty years I'll still have my own hair and it'll still be mostly brown, but I'll have developed an allergy to pants that results in me walking around the house in my boxers even when company shows up.

RM

bcriet wrote:You know some kids have it all handed to them and some don't...it wasn't like that for me I had to work my butt of in high school and now I have 3 jobs just to pay for college. It sucks but at the end I will be really happy.
On the other hand kids just don't know how to just go out and have fun and be a kid. I tell my sisters kids go out climb a tree skin a knee lol.
Your a sweetie Ella don't ever change.

Same here. And the thing about being a kid is so true. It's like the flipside of the whiging slacker, kids that are so busy that they've got actual schedules with all their activities and what not. I mean, can you imagine being a parent and telling your kid "Have fun, be home in time for dinner!" and then turning them loose on a summer day? Yet that's how I grew up. There were summer days when I saw my parents in the morning for breakfast and then again in the evening for dinner, and the ten hours in between the only thing they knew was about where I was and who I was with. That was awesome, the freedom to just be a kid. Wouldn't trade that for anything they have now days, except a really nice alienware laptop maybe...

RM

Oh, and to echo bcriet, don't go changin on us Ella, you're perfect just the way you are!

Oh THX I so miss those summer days .......sweet times

I'm the baby of five oh the stories I could tell you about those summer days

THX1138 wrote:I mean, can you imagine being a parent and telling your kid "Have fun, be home in time for dinner!" and then turning them loose on a summer day? Yet that's how I grew up. There were summer days when I saw my parents in the morning for breakfast and then again in the evening for dinner, and the ten hours in between the only thing they knew was about where I was and who I was with. That was awesome, the freedom to just be a kid. Wouldn't trade that for anything they have now days, except a really nice alienware laptop maybe...

That's sort of how my childhood was--and at the age of 6 or possibly 7, it was a case of "come home once Taps is finished." Taps being played at sundown, of course. And that was every kid's rule, pretty much. (yes, Navy brat, small base in Puerto Rico---it was a trifle more structured once we were back on the mainland, in that we didn't hear Taps in housing. But I was all over the place there too.). I could think of a lot of things like that...
But my sister worries, even in small town Iowa, about letting her boys too far out of sight. That's society, more than anything, I suppose, and it's sad it's come to that. She tries not to schedule them too much, and I think that's great, but it also seems to make them stand out a bit. But how do you be a kid when your parents have to worry about far more things these days?

I do agree with you dawnsfire it is so hard to not worry about your kids this day and age. You can have a hard time trusting society and it's sad but true....maybe even then you couldn't by now it is even worst.

Some scheduling is good but then just let them be kids....let adults worry about adult things.

dawnsfire wrote:

THX1138 wrote:I mean, can you imagine being a parent and telling your kid "Have fun, be home in time for dinner!" and then turning them loose on a summer day? Yet that's how I grew up. There were summer days when I saw my parents in the morning for breakfast and then again in the evening for dinner, and the ten hours in between the only thing they knew was about where I was and who I was with. That was awesome, the freedom to just be a kid. Wouldn't trade that for anything they have now days, except a really nice alienware laptop maybe...

That's sort of how my childhood was--and at the age of 6 or possibly 7, it was a case of "come home once Taps is finished." Taps being played at sundown, of course. And that was every kid's rule, pretty much. (yes, Navy brat, small base in Puerto Rico---it was a trifle more structured once we were back on the mainland, in that we didn't hear Taps in housing. But I was all over the place there too.). I could think of a lot of things like that...
But my sister worries, even in small town Iowa, about letting her boys too far out of sight. That's society, more than anything, I suppose, and it's sad it's come to that. She tries not to schedule them too much, and I think that's great, but it also seems to make them stand out a bit. But how do you be a kid when your parents have to worry about far more things these days?

We didn't have taps on the air force base. Our rule was before it got dark at sundown. I still remember getting a whipping for staying out just till dark!

There's the dangers of the big bad world aspect to it, definitely, but somewhere I started believing that that's just too much news coverage of the tragedies that do occur. I still worry about it tho, but it's just harder to get kids outside now than before. In my day there were 3 TV stations and there wasn't kids programming except right after school. Nowadays there's umpteen channels geared right at keeping the kid in front of the tube. Not to mention all the games that they make for them too. Kids are so moulded by media nowadays that they can hardly do much but inflow - finding a kid that can spend an evening without electronics pumping them is getting more difficult. But when you see one of those kids it's totally refreshing.

The other thing that I worry about now that I don't think my parents ever contended with is ... you don't have a clue how other kids are being raised. I've let my kids go home or to the movies or elsewhere with friends that I thought were safe, only to be upset by things that their parents did or allowed to go on. Way back when I think my parents and most all the other parents were on the same page.

Very good point about the electronics. I gave my nephews all the Legos I had and they were thrilled! Of course, one of them wants to build strictly to spec and the other is more free-form... But it's not electronic, and their TV/computer time is limited.

And I know what you mean about the TV--I kinda miss Saturday mornings, and the hour after school. Cable and VCRs and pc's (we had a Timex-Sinclair, then a Commodore 64--all together now: "a what?!") came in when I was a wee lass.

I don't know about the part about other parents, though; I think my parents occasionally were shocked at what our friends's parents let them do or not do. Depends on your definition of way back when, I guess.

Oh, and Taps was simply the signal to head home--there would still be some light in the sky. Being on the base, we had to stop, face where the flag was, and wait until it was done; then we could all scatter in the twilight. When my mom was a kid, there was a "hospital" near to her house and they had a siren that served the same purpose--that's when she went home. No Taps on an AFB? Really?

Legos are really good. I got one of mine the Pokemon Charizard where you build it on a slate, in 3-D. We spent tons of time doing that.

I'm 11 years older than you, so we didn't even have cable or VCRs until I was out of the house. And about the only video game I ever played was Pong! -- until being coaxed into Guitar Hero! The 11 years difference might account for some of the parenting styles too.

And no Taps that I recall. I do remember singing it at our Brownie meetings though! I always thought it was beautiful. What I do vividly remember is singing The Star Spangled Banner before every movie! The first time I saw a movie off-base I was shocked. I had no idea it was a military thing. It took a long time to get over that custom.

dawnsfire wrote:Very good point about the electronics. I gave my nephews all the Legos I had and they were thrilled! Of course, one of them wants to build strictly to spec and the other is more free-form... But it's not electronic, and their TV/computer time is limited.

OMFG! An Engineer in training! I was like that as a kid, I wanted to build things just like they looked on the box. The term 'artistic license' was foreign to me.

And I know what you mean about the TV--I kinda miss Saturday mornings, and the hour after school. Cable and VCRs and pc's (we had a Timex-Sinclair, then a Commodore 64--all together now: "a what?!") came in when I was a wee lass.

Ahh, the Timez-Sinclair, a C64, and an Apple IIc - they all still work and from time to time I've been known to wax poetic about the various command sets of the Zilog Z-80 processor series and CP/M (WordStar, best word processor ever written, period). Okay, I'm an ubergeek, so shoot me.

Ahh, the good ol' days of kiddom. I can distinctly recall accidentally setting fire to a wheat field once. I say accidentally because I was trying to start a fire using a magnifying glass, I just didn't realize that a single spark could cause that much damage. Our neighbors were not amused.

Come to think of it, if kids these days are like I was, maybe it's a good thing to have them closely supervised, or monitored with electronic ankle shackles, or maybe have an RFID just implanted in the back of their necks. Shifty little buggers.

RM

DBCrazy wrote:Legos are really good. I got one of mine the Pokemon Charizard where you build it on a slate, in 3-D. We spent tons of time doing that.

You can do anything with legos now days, they are still cool and not just for kids, totally.

I'm 11 years older than you, so we didn't even have cable or VCRs until I was out of the house. And about the only video game I ever played was Pong! -- until being coaxed into Guitar Hero! The 11 years difference might account for some of the parenting styles too.

That's probably a lot of it really DB. I think you and I are closer in age and I know when I had to take care of my three neices for a while my style differed radically from their parents. I'm a pretty easy going guy but I'm very much discipline oriented, tough love like I said. I know my brother and sister-in-law got back three much better behaved girls than they gave me.

And no Taps that I recall. I do remember singing it at our Brownie meetings though! I always thought it was beautiful. What I do vividly remember is singing The Star Spangled Banner before every movie! The first time I saw a movie off-base I was shocked. I had no idea it was a military thing. It took a long time to get over that custom.

You know I think it's not just a military thing, I mean on base it most certainly is, but Americans sing their national anthem more than any other group of people I know. Granted I haven't been everywhere but I have been overseas, and I think we really do play it more than anyone else. Ww play it before every game, concerts (not always but a lot of them I've been to have started out with the SPB), races, and other big events. It's like, 'look, a crowd of people has gathered, let's all sing the Star Spangled Banner!'. I've often wondered if we really do sing it so much more than other folks do. Non-Americans, care to provide input?

RM

is this even on topic anymore?

RGPageantqueen wrote:is this even on topic anymore?

Good point. We left the topic about five miles back. You know how it is El, you get a bunch of us old fogies together and next thing you know we're talking about the time we took the train to Shelbyville...

Back on topic from here on out. I promise.

RM

Seriously, no crossed fingers, no changies and no takebacks!

THX1138 wrote:Back on topic from here on out. I promise.

Me too!