My grandpa wrote poems and one of his was about the games they would play and the things they came up with for fun. They would climb up on the sheds and slide off the roof. The girls had to wear dresses so they tucked their bloomers under them and slid! Lots of times catching their clothes on the tin and getting in big trouble for it! LOL

I spent alot of time as a kid climbing trees and playing in them.
I remember taking sticks and sharpening them on the sidewalk to use as knives. I threw a rope up in the tree and made a pulley and tied it to a basket so I could take stuff up in the tree with me. One branch would be my bedroom and one branch would be the kitchen and one branch was the living room! LOL It was a great big old oak tree and I spent many hours there.

I am an only child so I spent alot of time by myself or with my lab Pudder. We got him when I was not quite two and my mom and dad named him Butterball. I couldn't say butterball so it came out Pudder and he was my playmate and best friend for 12 years.

My cousin and I used to make boats and cars out of walnut and pecan shells. We also played "house" with my grandmother's Avon jars under a big mimosa tree.

I too am an only child and used to have pretend playmates. Lassie and Timmy used come and play in my room. They never helped clean though.

I remember my Dad making me a play area outside by putting a tarp up next to the house. It was attached to the house on 1 side and stakes on the other side. I had turned into a house. I had all my kitchen stuff, dolls and barbies out there. I would spend hours playing under that tarp with my little brother.

Pudder is an adorable name.

Climbed trees and buildings. Painted (murals sometimes), drew, played board games & video games, went camping, acted in plays, ran around at night and made audio recordings.

I'd use the name on a dog now but there is only one Pudder so that would feel weird to use it again! LOL He was like a furry brother to me! LOL I told him all my secrets and whereever I played he was not far away.

I loved to play house. Would dressup when I could. Mom had a chenille robe and I wore it as a queen. No jewelry nor high heels nor lipstick, but I still reigned a beauty. I loved my baby dolls. Lived in a coal camp so there were a few girls here and there to play with. I had a close cousin but she didn't like the domestic calm stuff, she was a tom boy, bicycles and tag and ball. I was always clutzy. you don't have to atheletic to show love and comfort. That's me!

At gatherings we did recitations! We would tell stories, local legends and old family tales. But my favorite were reciting poems. My dad did his 'Village Blacksmith' and mom did her, 'Somebody's Mother'. We would hear them over and over each year but still they were an important part of sharing. I found the longest poem I could find and memorized it. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe !

I was an only child, too, and I spent a lot of time on my own, too.

I wasn't very coordinated, so although I loved to run around, my knees usually had cuts & bruises on top of cuts & bruises.

Often I had my nose in a book. I was and am a huge reader.

I loved arts & crafts, and I'd spend hours drawing, coloring, making dollhouses out of scrap materials, putting together things from kiddie kits, like beaded jewelry or whatever.

I also loved using my brain, meaning crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, logics, and brainteasers.

Now and then I'd write a story or an essay, but more often I played out my stories with my dolls. Skipper ran away from home endlessly and across the country to find her dad (my parents had separated), and my Little Kiddle paper dolls were stranded on an island numerous times. I was into adventure!

I also watched a ton of TV, and I really don't think it was bad for me at all. In fact, I learned an awful lot that I wouldn't have known otherwise, just from cartoons, sitcoms and police shows, not to mention the educational kiddie shows.

When we lived in the city, we lived near a roller rink, so I spent countless weekend afternoons there. Once we moved to the 'burbs, there were more kids around and I was a bit older and allowed to roam the neighborhood. I spent hours riding my bike around. There was a good park a few blocks away, with playgrounds, woods, a pool, tennis courts, etc. Naturally, I spent a fair amount of time there.

My mother sent me off to day camp every summer, and I went to overnight camp a bit, too. At camp, we swam almost every day, either in the pool or at one of Michigan's Great Lakes or a smaller lake's beach. Camp gave me my love of hiking in the woods.

And then there were board games, an essential part of childhood for me! Monopoly, Aggravation, Clue, and my favorite, Careers.

Now that sounds like fun, Mrs. Pete!

You reminded me, speaking of telling old family stories, one of my favorite things to do was to look through a huge box of old photos my mother had and ask her about the people in them. I could do this endlessly.

I loved to play jacks with my Mom and sisters (six older and one younger) . We all sat on the floor and what fun we had! :) We lived only about one block off of the bay (Puget Sound) across from Seattle. We would watch the lights twinkle at night from the bedroom window. I also spent a lot of time walking on the beach. One of my favorite games there was to climb up on the driftwood logs and then run as fast as I could jumping from log to log without having jump off onto the beach. What a beautiful place for a child to grow up! We lived in Suquamish, WA; the little town where Chief Seattle lived and was buried!
Thanks for bringing these great memories to mind. :)

My parents had a closet in their bedroom that when you opened the door to the closet it would swing back and mee the door to the bathroom. Behind those two doors created a hidey hole. I played there alot when I was in grade school.

I also remember having barbies and skipper and ken dolls and I would fashion houses out of cardboard boxes and play for hours on the back porch.

I remember a book of old time stories my grandma had, One of the stories was about these two girls who cut out paper dolls from wallpaper and attached them to sticks for their paper doll house. They would fashion furniture and make play food for the doll house, Til the day when a mouse was found in the house and it has eaten part of the kitchen wall and the paper dolls were scared to go into the house. So Tom Thumb came to call and he helped them chase the mouse away and fix their house.

I have often thought of that story and I can see little girls in the early 1900s playing this way with make believe paper dolls!!

What memories. When I was small, I would sit in my favorite red leather child's recliner and read books, comics, loved to collect and play with marbles, I had Chatty Cathy and she talked wtih her plastic records and I would play dressup with her, Listened to records with stories like Peter Pan, Hansel and Gretal. My favorite thing to do was get up early and put on my silver skates and skate around the sidewalk for hours. My next favorite thing was going to the craft room with my mom and learning how to do ceramics, paint, etc. My mom was always teaching us how to do some kind of crafty things. I was always giving away my toys too. Thanks for starting this post. I can remember doing things the others have too. Sweet, dear memories.

One of my childhood nightmares happened in broad daylight. A cousin came to call. He lived on another mountain and we didn't visit very often so when the visit came about, it would usually be for a week. He had access to a neighbor's tv on Saturdays. My parents were strick holiness so we didn't see movies nor watch tv. He wanted to play cowboy and indians. He would call us Gabby or Gene or Frog. And we took a break for lunch one day and I hurried out the door after eating, yelling I get to be Roy Autridge! I didn't have enough knowledge about it to know what their names were. TV brought about lots of knowledge. Good, bad and indifferent.......knowledge.

Some times we girls from church would visit each other and we'd pretend we were sister somebody or brother somebody else....names withheld, of course. But we told ALL. No Tonkas, Barbies, Fisher Price or NBC, just imagination. One of my favorites was an old tomato basket that mom had without the handle. I would take it and run around under a tree to catch leaves. Sometimes we would do that and see who could catch the most. And no one told us it wasn't fun, because we believed it was. At least, I did. teeheeheee

I'm a kid at heart, blessings y'all
Ruth

Some friends and I used to get a jar with a lid and see how many bumblebees we could catch in that jar without letting any of them out. We put holes in the lid. When we were done we always let them go.

Living in Iowa we played in the corn fields. We played hide and seek in the corn field. My grandparents owned alot of farmland with timber on it. My cousin and I would walk all through the timber and played in there. Waded in the little creek played indians and rode bikes. Jim my cousin younger than me by 6 yrs and I used to play in the shelled corn in the top of the corn bin. Noone ever told us it was dangerous. Corn dust can be combustible. But we didn't know that.

Only child here too, until I turned 55 and found out i had 4 half brothers out west!! Surprise, surprise!!
I was additcted to paper dolls,,,I had boxes of them under my bed. Only children really had to learn to entertain themselves a lot more back then .

We played hopscotch both at school and at home.
We swept the dirt clean and cut the outline out deep with a stick. Everyday at recess we ran out and reswept and freshened the outline up with a stick and hopped away. At home we had a sidewalk so we played jacks. We loved to use a golf ball because it bounced so high and we could do all kinds of fancy things with the jacks. It was before tv so we put on plays and dressed up in old clothes. We had a house not too far that had a doorman and an elevator. I think it was the only one in the area so we would go ring the doorbell just to see the doorman answer and peek at the elevator.

My sister and I played house and we played Queen. I was oldest so I got to be the Queen which meant I got to wear my Mom's old formal dress. It was white velvet and I can still remember how it felt. My Dad was a cabinet maker and made us a table and chairs and little kitchen cabinet. He also installed Hotpoint Stoves and at one time got a bunch of pretend food as selling props to put in the model stoves. We had so much fun with that pretend food, it was the best toy we probably ever had!

We also played Vet and our Springer Spainel, Pansy, was a willing patient. (the worst ailment she seemed to get repeatedly was "Tail Cold" and she always recovered)

My Mom was very tolerant. All of the other neighborhood Moms didn't allow the "kids" to play inside and mess up their houses. My Mom welcomed the kids.

And, talk about mess!!!! My sister and I loved arts and crafts projects that always seem to include paint, glue, paper and whatever else we could incorporate.

I played with Barbie, Ken, Midge, Skipper and the rest of the Mattel gang. Saved my dolls and now have introduced them to my 3-year-old granddaughter who is following in her Nana's footsteps. We have so much fun together!

Before we moved to the farm, we had neighborhood kids to play with. We loved to play dress-up. My mom found a picture she had taken way back when. I guess we were playing brides.

I remember climbing trees alot as a kid. I was the 2nd youngest and would climb higher in the trees than my older siblings. We also used to love to go walking across the ice on puddles in the fields in the spring, trying to see how far we could get before the soft ice gave way. Lots of soakers. LOL

boy that takes me back what did I do, well I played 1 man tennis against the wall. cowboys and indians, Drs and nurses, climbed rocks (my uncle had a property where they had huge rocks) my cousin used to tease me because i couldn't climb some of them as i was to small, then I grew up and out climbed him, went absailing, swimming, riding all around England youth hosteling with my mum and dad & brother, toured the south coast of france on our bikes, and that is to name a few, we were never bored always to much fun to be had, now kids sit at the computer and play games and say I am bored.
well WE had a good life.

I was a city kid, we played patsy (hopscotch) on the sidewalk, played marbles, stickball and roller skated in the street and on our front stoop (steps) played cards and stoop ball (we hit the edge of the steps with a spauldin and each hit had a score like baseball. We went to playgrounds to run around, climb the monkey bars and swing on the swings. Prospect Park was nearby and we went over to the lake, climbed hills, picked dandiloins, crossed streams and one time made it all the way up to the zoo. I can't imagine anyone in these days letting their children go to the park and do things like that by themselves.

Indoors we played Monopoly until we grew tired of it, used Monopoly money to play store with items in the pantry, used a small kids desk to play school, I was the oldest so I was always the teacher. We also did radio shows using a soap suds box on the end of the broom handle as our microphone. One time we bobbled for apples for Halloween, what a mess! We didn't dress up for Halloween, boys pounded colored chalk inside of socks and hit every kid they could, mostly girls. We dressed up as ragamuffins on Thanksgiving and went begging at neighbors, sometimes they threw some nuts to us. One thing I loved to do was listen to the Long Ranger on the radio with my grandfather. May in Jersey

I grew up on a farm. There was a gully in the pasture that dad was trying to fill in so he allowed people to dump unwanted things there---not garbage but "things". We used to love to scavange the junk pile. Or we'd play in the woods and pretend to be indians. We got pretty good at sneaking undetected and unheard through those woods. We built our own play house in the back yard after someone discarded pieces of an old shed they'd torn down. We climbed trees, rode our bikes, camped out in the yard under blankets pinned to the clothesline, climbed the corn dump or the side of the corn crib, went swimming in the river, or played Tarzan. We were always the tribesmen. We'd sharpen sticks into spears and hide from the Great White Hunters (cars and trucks coming down the road) Sometimes we'd pretend to attack them until the time my little brother(about 4 at the time) actually threw his "spear". It went in the window of the truck and stabbed the man in the arm. Needless to say he stopped, backed up and had a talk with mom. She cleaned and bandaged his arm to stop the blood flow. When he found out what we were doing he thought it was hilarious. Mom didn't. We all got spankings after he left and were told not to ever do that again.

Your ice puddles in the field reminded me of our "Carnival Rides" when I was a child. We had a field just North of our house that would flood. If we were fortunate enough to have a rain and then a hard freeze daddy would say, "Come on, kids, we're going to the carnival." We'd load up in the car and he'd set off across the field, hit the ice, turn the wheel and hit the gas. We'd spin and spin. We loved it. Mom never went though, and she hated for dad to take us. She'd sit on their bed watching out the window and crying for fear he'd get one of her babies hurt.
I was grown before I ever had a real carnival ride but those rides in the car with daddy were far better and far more exciting.

I was raised by my maternal Grandma, almost as an only child in the hills of WV, even though I was oldest of 8.
I played mostly alone but sometimes with a same age cousin, in creeks where we caught crawdads for eating, caught rabbits with the help of dear old Brownie, a short tailed mixed breed of some kind who saved us from copperheads more than once. And one thing still sticks with me...our job was to look for strangers wondering through the hills. We could tell them immediately by how they dressed, in 3 piece suits and hats that matched the suits. We were to run and let the dogs loose and tell our uncles about this.
It took me until in my 20s before that well known light bulb went off over my head. (Okay, so I wasn't so smart, just a hillbilly) My uncles wore bib overalls with flannel shirts and big work boots. The only men in that day and time who wondered around the hills were that dreaded breed...Federal Revenuers~
I was married a long time before I stopped having a knee jerk reaction to my DH's wearing a business suit!!!