Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The prompt for today is:

Did you play many games when you were growing up? What were they? (Include outside games as well as board & card games.) Who did you generally play with? Did your entire family play games or just the kids? Were there any traditional games your family always played? What were your favorites? Are they still around today? What about puzzles? Was that a popular pastime at your house? Were puzzles saved for holidays or did you do them any time? Were they set out for anyone to work or just one person?

I am glad we had a week’s heads up on this one, because at first I could hardly think of any games. But after a while a few came to mind.

We did have Candyland when I was a child, and something like Sorry, only it wasn’t called that. Chinese checkers and regular checkers, of course. I do remember playing Chutes and Ladders, but I think it was different from the version we played when my sons were small.We played Concentration, like the Memory games, with regular playing cards. We played Life, Monopoly, and Yahtzee as I got a little older. Friends and I played a game called something like Dream Date (just looked it up — it is called Mystery Date — and they still make it!) where the guy you didn’t want to get was “the dud.” Probably not the best of games for a young girl’s psyche!

As for outdoor games, it seems we had a number of variations of tag. Regular tag, freeze tag (where you have to freeze in whatever pose you are in when you’re tagged until someone unfreezes you) and one of my favorites, statue tag. In that one someone swung the person around and they struck a pose as they were let go of and landed. Then “it” had to guess what they were supposed to be posing as. Other neighborhood games were Mother May I and Hide and Seek. Red Rover was played on the school playground and  7-Up and Simon Says were often played in school at recess on rainy days.

My grandmother loved card games and Canasta was her favorite. I often played with her but I don’t remember how it is played now. She also played several variations of Solitaire. We played Double Solitaire together often, something like Dutch Blitz but with regular playing cards.

Scrabble has been one of my favorite board games, but I don’t remember playing it growing up. I don’t remember where and with whom I first played it. I also liked Boggle and a game called Crossword Cubes which I wish they still made.

I don’t remember playing many games with my family as I grew up, but as all the siblings got older, we enjoyed games when we gathered together. Scattergories and Balderdash are the only two I remember, though I know we played several others.

When my own kids were small we played many of the same board games I did growing up as well as newer ones like Uno. As they got older we enjoyed games like Settlers of Cataan and its variation, Ticket to Ride, and Apples to Apples. My oldest and youngest love lengthy strategy games that take a couple of hours or more and played each other as well as a regular group of friends they got together with.

And though we still occasionally play board games, they mostly play video games now. I can’t handle any but the Wii — for some reason other video games bother my eyes. And my older kids and I play Scrabble via Facebook.

I do usually really enjoy games when we play, but somehow we don’t play them that often! I generally prefer games that are more than just chance or continually being knocked back to the beginning, like Sorry, but sometimes I’ll play those if someone else wants to.

Sometimes at church fellowships we’ve played group games like Outburst, Pictionary, and Guesstures. I like those just occasionally, but can’t handle too much noise and commotion for very long.

I really don’t remember any puzzles from my childhood. I used them a lot with my own kids when they were little, but only once when they were older did we have a big puzzle out that everyone worked on over several weeks. We just never seemed to get much into them, and to do all that work just to take it apart and put it back in the box seemed a waste to me. I know you can get a type of glue to hold it all together and frame it, but that just never appealed much to me.

How about you — what games did you grow up with?

Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The question for this week is:

What toys do you remember from your childhood? What did you like to do to entertain yourself? Did you mostly play inside or outside? Did you ride a bike all over the neighborhood? Play baseball in the backyard? Basketball in the driveway? Did you have to “get permission” to play at a friend’s house, or were you and your friends back and forth between houses all the time? If you had siblings, was there a distinction between your toys and theirs? Did you “inherit” any toys from older siblings? What were the “fad” or “must-have” toys of your generation? Did you parents buy them? Was there a toy you always wanted and never got to have?

Just to help you plan, this week is Part 1 – Toys. Next week in Part 2, we’ll look back at Games and Puzzles. Because hopefully, our childhoods involved lots of playtime!

My favorite way to entretain myself was by reading. I preferred to play inside, but my mom sometimes shooed me outside. We did ride bikes around the neighborhood sometimes, but when I visited my cousins in Louisiana, we rode bikes everywhere. I think most of my friends lived too far away for a walk or bike ride, so our moms had to take us back and forth, so that obviously necessitated getting permission. But that was pretty standard in our house, anyway, to get permission to go somewhere. At my cousins’ house, where I spent a good deal of time as a child, most of their friends were within the sound of my aunt’s whistle–that was her signal to come home.

My all-time favorite toys were my Barbie and related dolls and their accessories. My nickname growing up was Barbie. The doll didn’t come out until I was around four, and I don’t know if my nickname came from her or if I was already called that. I did have one carrying case that, when opened, looked like a little closet, and I just loved the little clothes on little hangers and such. I made furniture out of matchboxes. There was a time when they sold kits to “make” Barbie clothes — the seams had some kind of glue stuff on them, so they stuck together rather than being sewed together. I don’t remember really loving those, but that is where I first learned how basic garment construction worked. Friends would bring over their Barbies. We also had Ken dolls and Barbie’s oldest friend, Madge, as well as some of her younger — cousins or something. I can’t remember their names. Francine was one, maybe.

There wasn’t quite all the Barbie paraphernalia there is now, but one toy I always wanted and never got was a Barbie Dream House. And, unrelated to Barbie, I always wanted an Easy Bake Oven and never got one. But one of my cousins got both. Sigh. (Not the cousins in La.)

As an aside, I know some moms don’t like Barbies now because of her…shapeliness and proportions and the supposed self-esteem issues she can cause girls, but, honestly, we never thought or talked about such things. It was just fun to try on the different clothes — and they were much more modest that what’s available these days.

I did have baby dolls before Barbie, but I don’t remember anything about them except that my favorite was named Susie after my cousin, Suzanne.

Another favorite, though not a toy exactly, was a little record player and several children’s records given to me by one aunt. I do remember a plastic tea set that looked like Corningware with the little blue emblem (chosen from the S&H Green Stamp store!), Etch-a-Sketch, Little People, Mr. Potato Head, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs. The last two may have been my brother’s or they may have belonged to all of us, I don’t remember. My brother was four years younger, so with different genders and ages we didn’t really play with the same toys often. He had a lot of plastic green army men and cowboys and Indians, Hot Wheels cars, Tonka trucks. My next sister was an additional four years younger, and then three more sisters followed. I think they probably shared (or fought over) toys, but I didn’t play with the same things then.

When I was a little older, I also loved my Spirograph and spent a lot of time making different designs. My La cousins and I were into paint-by-number kits for a spell.

I tended to be a “saver,” but in my late teens in a fit of cleaning out I gave all the Barbie stuff I had left to my sisters. If any of it survived — which I doubt — it is probably in my mom’s attic, not likely to be found until some day if and when the house is sold. I wish I had kept my first Barbie, because she was one of the first-edition ones in the black and white striped bathing suits.

Though we bought our own children current toys, I also loved to buy some of the classic toys I grew up with, too. They loved Little People, Hot Wheels, Tonka trucks and green army men and played with those for years — most of the others got played with briefly here and there but weren’t favorites. I think their favorites were Legos.

And that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about what I played with. 🙂 But I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. You can join it or see what others played with at Linda‘s.

Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The question for this week is:

Tell about TV when you were growing up. Did your family have a TV? Was it color or b&w? How many TVs did your family have? Did you have one in your room? Did your family leave the TV on most of the day or turn it on for specific programs? Was the TV on or off when you ate meals as a family? Were there rules about watching TV? What were your favorite shows? Are there any particular memories you have of TV in your younger years?

I can’t remember for sure, but I think we did have a black and white TV at first. I do remember that TV sets were either in monstrously big cabinets or they were little ones with “rabbit ears” — and I remember putting foil on the end of the rabbit ears to get better reception or having someone outside turning the big antennae while someone inside would give directions (“Turn it a little more. There, there! Oh, you missed it. Go back!” SO glad those days are gone!) I also remember there was some kind of tube in the back that my dad had to take out and replace from time to time.

When I was a young child we only had one TV. By the time I was a teen-ager my parents had an additional one in their room. There was never a TV in any of the kids’ bedrooms while I was home — I don’t know if that changed with my sisters over the years. We have three now: one in the family room, one in our bedroom, and one in the kitchen. Still none in the kids’ rooms. 🙂

My mom tended to let the TV just run on in the background all the time. I cannot stand that now. In my younger years it was not on during meal time, but I think in later years it was. I do remember that it was a big deal to occasionally have actual TV dinners on TV trays in the living room sometimes.

When we watched TV as a family when all the kids were little, my parents sat on the couch and my brother and sisters and I sat or lay on our stomachs on the floor on top of some kind of big flat stuffed animal. They may have been made for that purpose in that era, I don’t remember. My parents also let us turn on cartoons on Saturday mornings so they could sleep in. It seems like we had some system for taking turns if there was a cartoon different ones of us wanted to watch on different channels at the same time, but I do remember a lot of fussing about that. My brother always wanted to watch anything with superheroes. My favorite cartoon was Underdog.

There was also one about a little lamb and a big sheepdog and a wolf — the lamb would go “frolicking” in the meadow, and then cry “It’s the wolf,” only it said it in two syllables, like wool-uff, and the sheepdog would come and drive the wolf away in various ways. I have wondered what the name of this one was for years — does it ring a bell with anyone else?

Some of the earliest shows I remember watching were Captain Kangaroo, The Ed Sullivan Show, the Wonderful World of Disney, the Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy (in its original run!), The Dick Van Dyke Show, the Twilight Zone, Leave It To Beaver, Andy Griffith, My Three Sons (one of my favorites. Fred McMurray was my image of a dad, even though my dad was nothing like him). My dad liked westerns, so we watched The Rifleman and Gunsmoke and Bonanza (I had a big crush on Little Joe.) He also liked war movies, so we watched a lot of those. By school age years, we watched The Big Valley, Green Ares, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family, Dark Shadows, Here Come the Brides (had a humongous crush on Bobby Sherman!), Daniel Boone, Ben Casey, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (had a huge crush on David McCallum!), the Brady Bunch, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Family Affair (remember the doll Mrs. Beasley?), Rat Patrol, Lost In Space, Marcus Welby, the MOD Squad, Mr. Ed. It sounds like we watched a lot of TV, but I don’t remember that we did.

And then there were the commercials!

In my teen-age years we watched the Six Million Dollar Man, Barnaby Jones, the Flip Wilson show, the Partridge Family (I had a big crush on David Cassidy!), SWAT, the Waltons, Happy Days.

I remember that TV shows didn’t run all night — I think most programming must have gone off about midnight or so, and if you turned off the TV after that you’d see a test pattern with multiple vertical colored stripes. Actually I can’t remember if it was on all the time or just at the beginning or end of programming. And it seemed like some networks ended their broadcast day with the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer.

Though I agree that too much TV time can intrude on family communication and interaction, I have fond memories of watching TV with both my parents and then later my husband and children.