Day 7 – Your favorite childhood toys.

How young is "child"? Is it like in the playskool era? Or after that? Its hard to say what constitutes as "childhood" so I am going to guess.

I used to love being outside, playing in the dirt. I remember playing with sidewalk chalk a ton! We, the three and four Musketeers would constantly be drawing in between the two apartment buildings. We lived for bubbles, too. It was with the Musketeers that I learned to love to explore, cause trouble and dig in the dirt. We learned early that our mom's could get all sorts of grass and dirt stains out. So we tested this. We wore few dresses, well because you can't play as well in dresses. Don't get me wrong we played a little dress-up but dress-up was a rainy day activity.

You may ask: what about baby dolls? Well my cousin and I had these Cabbage Patch dolls that we would carry around all the time. But, when we were about five or six we stayed at my grandma's house and my uncle was watching one of the Child's Play movies. We saw a bit of it, ran to the room where we were sleeping grabbed all our baby dolls and took them to the living room, afraid of what they'd do to us. Of course we eventually learned that the movie was fiction and they wouldn't do anything to us, but that was the end of our baby-doll era.

The other toy I remember loving was the xylophone. I thought it was amazing that all that sound could come from a little plate of metal. While we're on the subject, and my mother can attest to this, I was obsessed with keyboards too. I wanted a keyboard for years. Not like a year or two, no-- I'm talking every gift-giving holiday for six or eight years I asked for a keyboard. I wanted one so badly. I remember when my mom worked at U.S. Cellular and she went to some fair, where she had to man a booth for a few hours, and it was right across from this keyboard place. I spent hours over there. Playing this one keyboard that showed you which keys to push to play a song... I played Lean on Me... I love that memory. :)

I was also slightly obsessed with Barbies. My sister and I would spend hours upon hours setting up houses for them, play for twenty minutes and then be told we couldn't play anymore and it was time to clean up. It's okay though because that hobby helped me learn interior decorating skills... we would constantly set up these huge mansions, complete with all the accessories (stored in a 20+-gallon tub) and just create for hours. I wish there were pictures of us playing.