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.

The question for this week is:

What were meals like when you were growing up? Did your mom (or dad) cook (and was it from scratch or from a box?) or did your family eat out much of the time? Did you eat together as a family or was everyone on a different schedule? What did you call meals? (Dinner vs. supper, lunch, etc.) What were some of your favorite things that your parent fixed? What did you dislike and vow never to fix once you grew up? Did your family have any food traditions, things that were a must on certain occasions (such as Sunday dinners or holiday meals)? Did your parent teach you to cook or did you wing it once you were grown? How similar or different are your family’s eating habits today than when you grew up?

When I was younger, my mom was home sometimes and worked sometimes, so meals varied. My mom was never very domestic and didn’t really like to cook, so most meals were pretty basic. There wasn’t quite as much available in prepared form, so most cooking was from scratch, though I do remember boxed macaroni and cheese and occasional “TV dinners” (with TV trays to set the meal on while we ate and watched TV, but, as I said, that was occasional.) My dad was the traditional “meat and potatoes” lover, so most dinners were a meat, a starch, and a vegetable. If he wasn’t home, Mom had a few easy recipes that I think of as “comfort food” now — spam casserole (yes, really — cut up the spam [though I use Treet, actually, I still call it spam] into cubes, brown it with onion in some margarine, add cooked noodles, a can of cream of chicken soup, and a can of cheddar cheese soup. Not healthy — but good!) or hot dogs cut up into tomato sauce, served with macaroni and cheese.

One dish we had often was beans and rice and cornbread, mainly because it was cheap. Mostly they were pinto beans, sometimes navy beans, often with sausage or ham in them. It would smell so good simmering through the afternoon. My family now isn’t crazy about beans, though they tolerate them in chili, so I haven’t made them myself in years. I can almost smell them now….

Another favorite was what she called “SOS” — ground beef in gravy over rice, usually made on the last day or so before grocery shopping when staples were low.

She also made “drop biscuits” — biscuit dough dropped by the spoonful onto a cookie sheet rather than rolled out and cut. Years later in college one restaurant nearby served them but called them “ugly biscuits.”

We didn’t have as many fresh vegetables as we should have — I think my mom just got tired of fussing with kids over them. I was a teen-ager on a date in a nice restaurant when I had the first salad I can remember.

We didn’t eat out much — it was just too expensive with so many kids. But sometimes after grocery shopping we’d go to a drive-in restaurant called Pick’s, I think, in Corpus Christi. I always got a steakfinger basket and the best chocolate shakes I can remember ever having in my life.

Living so near the coast, often get-togethers involved a big fish fry — someone would do up all the fish and other people would bring side items. They always used a cornmeal coating, which I much prefer to the heavy breaded stuff many restaurants seem to use. The only fish I’ve found in a restaurant that reminded me of what I had in childhood was at a place originally called Po’ Folks, then later just Folks, but sadly they’ve gone out of business.

We did eat all together. Lunch was “lunch,” and we used “dinner” and “supper” interchangeably for the evening meal.

Lunch was usually some type of sandwich. I liked to fry spam for sandwiches or bologna — it kind of forms into a cup when you fry it — but often it was just ham and cheese or peanut butter. If we were running low on groceries, my mom would put margarine on sandwiches instead of Miracle Whip — I always hated that!

My mom would sometimes make a snack of crackers and a mixture which I think was peanut butter and honey … maybe peanut butter and syrup … but something like that that we’d dip crackers in.

I don’t remember any certain traditional foods except the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas menu, and my dad always wanted corned beef and cabbage for his birthday dinner.

After we moved to Houston the summer I turned 16, my mom started working full time and commuting through Houston. I baby-sat the younger kids and would call my mom after school to find out what to start for dinner. She’d give me instructions on what to get started, and she’d finish up anything if needed when she got home, so I guess that’s basically how I learned to cook. I do remember some early cooking experiences with a friend when I was younger than that. One involved not having brown sugar to make cookies and thinking regular sugar would work ok, only to discover our cookies melted into each other. That was before the giant pan cookie came out that you can order and have decorated now — we should have marketed our invention! Another involved trying to make fried chicken — we’d drop the chicken into the hot oil and then run to the other side while it sizzled — I don’t know if we were afraid of getting burnt or starting a fire or what. We were probably too young to be making fried chicken unsupervised!

My step-father would often cook on weekends and was very good at it, but the only dish I can specifically remember was pepper steak.

The only thing I had as a child that I vowed never to cook was spinach or turnip greens. I had a bad experience at an aunt’s house when she made me stay at the dinner table until I ate a certain amount of whatever green stuff she served, and I think I was there all evening. However, I’ve discovered as an adult that I do like fresh spinach in salads and wraps.

And I think that’s about all I remember about my childhood food experiences, though I am sure more memories will filter in over the next few days. Visit Linda‘s to read more or share your own.

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.

The question for this week is:

Were you prone to accidents and injuries when you were growing up? Did you ever break a bone? Knock out any teeth? Get stitches? Have you ever ridden in the back of an ambulance? Did you ever have surgery or spend any time in a hospital? How did your folks treat injuries and illnesses? With lots of TLC or by telling you to get a stiff upper lip? Was there a particular home remedy that your mom (or dad or whoever!) used or any “traditions” involving injuries or illnesses? What’s the worst injury (or illness) you had when you were growing up?

Thankfully I was fairly healthy as a child. I had the usual non-major illnesses and injuries: chicken pox, strep throat, skinned knees, etc., but thankfully no major illnesses or accidents, no broken bones. I had my tonsils removed when I was about six, but that was fairly common then. That was my only childhood hospitalization. I remember my beloved doctor carrying me to the operating room, being asleep but then waking up IN the operating room, but thankfully before they started doing anything, feeling uncomfortable afterward but enjoying staying in bed, reading comic books, and eating jello and ice cream.

I did have a few relatively minor injuries along the way. In first or second grade, a group of us were throwing rocks at each other — not maliciously — it was all in fun. I don’t know why we thought that would be fun. But I got hit in the head and started bleeding profusely. I do remember my mom coming and I remember going to the doctor — I don’t remember an ambulance or stitches. When I got back to school the teacher made us all write 100 times or so, “I will not throw rocks,” and I was indignant that I, as the injured party, had to suffer punishment, too. 🙂

I don’t remember how old I was when my mom asked me to help take the side down on her friend’s playpen, and somehow my finger got stuck and cut into just below the nail. It must have gotten infected, because some time later we had to go to the doctor about it. While he was working on my finger, removing the nail, his nurse was between me and my hand  (which was stretched out on a board) asking me about my birthday. I was so aggravated with her! Who wants to talk about their birthday at a time like that! I realized later she was just trying to distract me from what the doctor was doing. Then another time, my brother dropped his toy gun on my foot — toy guns were made of heavy metal, not the lightweight stuff they use today — and I ended up having to get a toenail removed. Not fun.

Vicks VapoRub on forehead, cheeks, and chest was the remedy for a really bad cold. We lived in houses that had boxy gas stoves in the living room as the main source of heat, and my parents would put a coffee can full of water and a dollop of Vicks in it on the stove as kind of a room humidifier. Iodine was put on cuts, causing a burning sensation and leaving a red stain for a while. Calomine lotion was used for anything itchy, from bug bites to chicken pox, leaving us with pink spots from the medicine. The only really weird home remedy I remember was that if we had an earache, my dad would blow cigar smoke in our ears and then stuff them with cotton. I have no idea why — it sounds so bizarre. Maybe the warmth was supposed to be soothing? As an adult I was concerned that the smoke did long term damage and I was going to get cancer in my ears or head, but figured since I couldn’t do anything about it after the fact, I wouldn’t worry about until I needed to.

We never went for regular dentist checkups — my parents had neither the money for that nor the dental insurance. When I was in junior high, I had two abscessed teeth, on one either side of my head, and the dentist pulled one of them one week and the other one the next week. He said that when my wisdom teeth came in, the other teeth would move down into the empty space — and they did. That was my only dental experience until after I was married — and, of course, there was a LOT of dental work to be done then! I only had to have my bottom two wisdom teeth taken out when I was in my 30s. The oral surgeon keopt saying, “This is so much easier to do when you’re 16,” and I kept thinking, “Maybe, but I can’t help that now!”

Because my parents had several children and not much money, we only went to the doctor if something was really bad or had lasted a long time. Probably because of that, and the fact that sometimes waiting made the situation worse, I was prone to go to the doctor myself and take the kids to the doctor a little too often for several years, but I think I have evened out now.

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.

The question for this week is about the home we grew up in:

Where did you live when you were growing up? In a house or an apartment? A mobile home or a duplex? Did your parents rent or own? Was it big or small? In a city, small town, or rural area? In the USA or another country? Did you have your own room or share with siblings? Did you have a say in how your room was painted/decorated? Did your folks update/redecorate periodically or was your house “stuck” in a certain decade? Did you have a yard? A swingset or other play areas? What was your neighborhood like? Were there lots of kids to play with? Did your family stay in one place or did you move? If so, how many times did you move by the time you graduated from high school? Did you like moving or long to stay in one place? Are your parents still in the home you grew up in (or at least the one you lived in when you graduated from high school) or did they move and you haven’t lived with them in their latest house? Does it feel like home? What were your favorite and least favorite things about your physical home? How similar or different is it to where you live now?

I’ve always loved the idea of the old family homestead, large enough for the whole brood, passed down through the generations, the house everyone comes home to.

We didn’t have that, however. We moved around quite a lot — every two years for a while. The only house I have any memory from my early childhood is my grandfather’s house. We lived with him for a while, then it seems we lived there by ourselves for a time, but I can’t remember the order of it all. I don’t remember how long we lived there. I don’t know if it was the house he shared with my grandmother or if he moved there after she passed away. I don’t really remember anything distinctive about the house itself except that it seems like it was a peachy color, and the bathroom connected my parent’s bedroom and my room. I do remember the address: if I am ever back in Corpus Christi, TX, I may drive by and see if it is still there.

But I do have some distinct memories from that house. Here are a few:

• My brother was born there. My mom had visited the doctor that day and had been told she was not ready to deliver yet. She didn’t have contractions in front, but had horrible back pain. I was four, and I remember being in my bedroom while she was in the bathroom when she shrieked for my father to come. He came and picked her up and carried her into their room — and they wouldn’t let me in! (Probably a good thing!) I remember lying on my bed wondering what was going on when my grandfather came in to check on me. Everything happened too fast for them to get to a hospital, but they did go after everything settled down. I did get to go in and see my mom and new little brother before they left.

• A couple of years later, my brother and I shared a bedroom with bunk beds. I had the top bunk, and the bottom of my bed wasn’t covered over, so my brother’s view from the lower bunk was of all the coils from the box springs of my bed (It’s amazing he didn’t get a finger stuck in there or something.) He often had very vivid dreams involving wild animals, so one night when he went to tell my parents that there was a snake in the box springs, they thought he was just dreaming. But he insisted, and they came to check — and there was a snake, by that time on my mattress near my head!!! Somehow they got our neighbor, Mrs. Beeson, over there to kill it: I remember her chopping its head off with an axe (after they somehow got it off the bed) and watching its mouth opening and closing and its body still slithering while disconnected from each other. Creepy! She said it was an egg snake (?) after eggs in the nest in my window (which I hadn’t noticed before) and it wouldn’t have hurt me. But it was still creepy.

• I don’t remember Mrs. Beeson’s face at all. She looked like she could have come from the Little House on the Prairie TV show set: she always wore a long skirt, blouse, and bonnet when she worked outside, which was a lot. I stayed with her for a few days while my mom was in the hospital after my brother’s birth. I don’t think she had a family of her own (at least not that lived with or near her), but there always seemed to be children at her house. She had a woody area behind her house where there was an old cabinet with various utensils and pans and pans, etc., and we all played back there making mud pies and such.

• I must have had an active imagination of my own, because I remember one night on my top bunk waking up and seeing a rounded shape right in front of me. Somehow I was convinced it was a headhunter, and if I just kept my eyes closed and pretended I was asleep, he wouldn’t bother me. So I tried, peeking every now and then to see if it was still there. I finally fell back asleep, and when I woke up, I saw that that rounded shape was the head of my teddy bear. 😳

So, even though I don’t remember the house itself, I have fond memories of our time there.

When I was in 9th or 10th grade, we lived in a small town with less than 200 people. There was no high school — we were bussed to the next town 10 miles away. I think there was one traffic light. Our house was “the house on the second hill.” The thing I loved about that house was that you could open windows on opposite sides of the house and get a lovely breeze through there.

When my mother left my father and we moved to Houston, we lived in a trailer for a few years. Then my mom and step-father had a house built in a new sub-division where they moved when I was in college and lived there ever since. My mom passed away almost five years ago, but my step-father still lives there. It is paid for now, and he wants to stay there until he passes on. Since I only lived there during breaks from college, I don’t have the feelings associated with the family home except that it was my mom’s house for so many years. I have fond memories from visits back there as well. What’s funny is that my three youngest sisters were very little when we moved there, so for them that is the old family homestead. Funny the different perspectives from the different age groups!

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.

The prompt for today is:

Who was your first friend? Did you have lots of friends when you were growing up or just one or two close friends? Share memories from your childhood friends. For women, were “mean girls” an issue when you were growing up? Or were you a “mean girl”?! How did your friends shape who you are today, for good or not-so-good? Do you still keep up with your childhood friends today?

As I was growing up, I usually had one close friend rather than a whole gang. I had a good-sized circle of people I was friends with, but I didn’t hang around with a group.

My earliest friends and playmates were my cousins. I have hazy memories of playing with my parents’ friends’ children when they all came over, but my earliest memory of a close personal friend was in third grade. I had gone to a Lutheran parochial school in first and second grade and transferred to a public school for third grade. Cindy was one of those girls who was popular, but not in a snobby way and not with the negative connotations popularity can have today. Everyone liked her because she was genuinely sweet and interested in other people, and as such, she introduced herself to me, and we became fast friends. I still have a bracelet she gave me for Christmas one year. For a few months my siblings and I stayed with my aunt and uncle in another state when my parents were having problems, and Cindy’s letters were the highlight of my time there. She invited me to revival services at her church, where for the first time I understood I needed to trust Christ personally as my Savior rather than just having a nebulous general belief in God. I made a profession of salvation then, though I struggled with assurance for years before finally being settled in my faith. But whether I actually believed at that point or later on, those years at that church did much to set me in the right direction. Unfortunately I ruined that friendship with jealousy: Cindy’s pastor’s daughter, with whom she was also close, transferred to our school, and instead of welcoming and befriending her, I was jealous of Cindy’s attention and sad that things were not the same. 😦 So they pretty much dropped me, understandably, and I learned a hard, painful, but valuable lesson.

My closest friend for the next several years was Laura. I don’t remember how we met or got to know one another — we attended the same school for years and somehow must’ve crossed paths and continued on from there. We moved to another town when I was in 8th grade, and one of my best surprises was when Laura and her family showed up unexpectedly on our doorstep one day. They were on a trip and surprised both Laura and me by stopping in to see us for a few hours. We wrote, sent pictures, and kept up with each other through high school, but eventually the relationship just faded out over time.

The school system I went to in 8th through 10th grade was the one I’ve mentioned that was extremely cliquish. I had always been shy but had never had any problems making friends until that school. There were very distinct groups that rarely interacted with each other. I spent what seemed like months walking around at lunch time all alone and miserable. My mom had to practically push me out of the car in the mornings. Then one day Dawn and a neighbor of hers introduced themselves to me, and Dawn and I just clicked. Dawn’s parents ran a little convenience store that was close to my house, and they’d let me “hang out” with Dawn at the store and help her stock shelves. Her mom was one of those people who is so cheerful, she’s annoying. 🙂 It was awful to be awakened after staying up late talking on a sleepover by her cheery, “Good morning, girls!” and whisking open the curtains to flood us with sunlight when she thought it was time for us to be up. Dawn and I were fast friends throughout the rest of high school and kept up with each other for a few years in college, but then our lives went different directions and the friendship faded away.

That high school was the only school I attended with “mean girls.” One of the groups was probably the closest thing that town had to a gang, and the leader was a seemingly always angry girl named Nadine. You never wanted to be caught alone in a hallway with her. I don’t think she ever hurt anyone physically, but she was very intimidating verbally and in the way she carried herself.

Between 10th and 11th grade we once again moved to another town, and the Lord provided miraculously for me to attend a Christian school. It was small enough that we were all general friends with everybody, but I didn’t have one really close girl friend there. That may have been because I started dating a guy. There are many reasons not to date exclusively in high school, and one of them is that, depending on the relationship, it can hinder developing friendships with other people and put you into an unnaturally close relationship sooner than you’re ready for it. That was the case with me, anyway.

Then in college, again, though I had a wide variety of friends and could usually easily find someone to attend things with, talk with, or pray with, I didn’t have any seriously close friends. Somehow the people I felt closest to didn’t really “need” me as a friend — they had all kinds of friends, many closer than I was. But I eventually met my life-long best friend, my husband. 🙂

I think each of my friendships shaped me for the better. I hadn’t received instruction as a child in looking for the right kind of friends, but thankfully the Lord over-ruled and brought my way friends who generally wanted to do right, and generally we encouraged each other along the way. As I write that, though, I do remember being friends for a while with one girl in 11th grade who tended to be deceptive, and there was an instance or two of climbing out her bedroom window to go see people, but thankfully, for whatever reason, that friendship didn’t last long and nothing serious happened during it, so I am thankful the Lord nipped that in the bud.