Ten on Tuesday

Today's ten on tuesday hosted by carole knits is 10 things you miss from your childhood.
I have a very nostalgic-type soul.  How coudl i not answer this? and how can i limit it to ten?  But ten it is so ... i'll try ;P

Before i start though, let me just say that nearly everyone of my fondest memories is interlaced with my sisters as a constant presence (except the playing outside ones, i would hound them to play outside with me but they didnt seem to like to) and my whole childhood was serronaded by the best music ever - 80's music rocks!  My sisters and the music are more like the foliage or backdrop to more specific memories.

OK here we go, in no specific order :

1. Chasing the popsicle man around the neighborhood (and eating a ton of snowcones!)
2. Ball-park concession stands (and snowcones, see a theme lol.  and 5 cent pal bubblegum and those chalkyish yet delicious and tantalizingly textured 10 cent lollipops and the ringpops and the candy cigarettes)
3. walking to the gas station with allison to fill up on candy (pal, cigs, lik'n'dips, nerds, bigmouths, cherry lifesavers, zero candybars)
4. reading and doing math problems for my gaandparents' best friends who always gave me money for it (i learned to read at 3 and was doing math at 4 so they thought that was pretty cool entertainement.  they would make up math problems with 4-5 digits to add or subtract or get me to read the newspaper when i was 4)
5. afternoons with papa : puzzles (was he pretending to be that bad at putting them together for my sake?), sitting in the "owl's nest" watching woody woodpecker and bugs bunny while he napped, stacking the coins in wrappers to take to fidelity federal, always accompanied by krystals chili and gut-bombs = awesome!!!
6. back to school preparations : new pens, fresh paper and notebooks, leaves falling, "helping" teachers with the black-boards (we lived right across the street and i was always underfoot as soon as the teachers started showing up to ready their classrooms)
7. spaghetti factory  with dad and wanda and the whole crew - that was the best freakin' garlic butter and bread and salad and spaghetti with clam sauce and shirley temples and and and! seems we went there almost every time i went to their house which was every other weekend but im sure it wasnt every time
8. playing outside all day in the longlonglong summer days.  i would climb trees, run around the yard (we had a large backyard), make mudpies, make up and sing songs to myself, catch lightening bugs in the evenings (i hate that smell - was it the pill bottles we put them in or the bugs themselves?), play on playground at haywood (the school across the street), roll down the hill (jeronimo !  that was always done with siblings lol), and my fave - scratch and dig into the wall of mud way back behind our yard, beyond our little "foresty" border of the back yard, where there was a little cliff that went down in to the subdivision below).  I was quite a tom-boy which is so wierd to me now lol.  i like glitter and strass and skirts and hate heat and insects and worms and mud under my nails and stuff.
9. crawling into my sister allison's bed at night.  i was such a scaredy-cat - a much too precocious exposure to too many horror films. we would be so silly and make up songs and commercials and stuff and take turns putting our feet in the oven (in between each others' legs to warm up lol)
10. hanging out with my sisters. i thought they were so cool (still do ;) ).  i emulated them, tried to dress like them, liked the same music they did.  i was really quite pitiful, little tag-along. 

oh i loved those days, the innocence, the way the days seemed to last forever (now they seem to fly by!  unbelievable), the way i could eat anything i wanted and not worry about it, the way my body moved effortlessly, the lack of cares and worries... ahhh
thanks carole for this fun trip down memory lane :D