Essential childhood experiences
 

This is a thread for those wonderful, innocent (but sometimes embarrassing) experiences without which no childhood would be complete. Things we've all done. Things we want our children to do someday, because they wouldn't be Normal Children otherwise. Things that make us smile just remembering them. For example...

Every boy (and probably most girls) in the developed world has picked up his father's drill or his mother's hairdryer and pretended to be James Bond. Don't you dare pretend you've never done this, because statistically speaking, you definitely have. I had to spend my childhood summers helping my dad in the shed, and his drill was the only thing that made it bearable. If I had a drill I'd do it to this day.

So, does anyone else have any Quintessential Childhood Experiences to share?

I tried to pull my mum's trousers down in the supermarket. Though I suppose that was more embarrassing for her.
I also pood in the bath when my mum was in it.

Edit: I also remember pouring oats all over the back garden. It was a bugger for my Grandma to clean afterwards because it started raining and suddenly we had a garden full of porridge.

Climbing a tree and fallling out into nettles
Riding down a huge hill on your bike, and then breaking my arm...on the first day of summer holidays.
Then breaking it again just as it nearly healed.

I was an accident prone child.

- Embarrassing your parents:

I was about 4 and was on a bus with my mother and this really old black man got on. I'd never seen a person with dark skin before, so I turned to my mother and asked, 'Why is that man so dirty?' really loudly on the packed bus.

I have never seen a person get so flustered and embarrassed. Luckily the guy thought it was funny, and I learned about melanin!! Good times.

- Grass sledging!!! Who says you need snow to get on a sleigh!

This is a practise which has died out (and I can't decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing): taping late-night TV shows. F*ck Sky+ and TiVo, I mean literally taping something with a VCR.

I used to tape wrestling shows every single week. I had two Wrestling Tapes, one for weekly shows and one for monthly pay-per-views (which were occasionally on Channel 4 for free), and I used them so much I destroyed them and moved on to taping over my mother's soap operas. I still have a WWF tape (watched so many times that the sound is gone), but nothing to watch it on. I know Sky+ is more convenient, but there was something special about recordable VHS tapes. It's sad that today's kids will never experience it.

That reminded me of the joys of recording stuff on good old Betamax tapes. I haven't got a clue how to sky+ record stuff or anything like that.


Another thing that kids nowadays will most likely never experience is listening to music on walkman's. Can you still buy tapes or is it all CD's/downloads nowadays?

I have no idea. You can still buy vinyl if you know where to look, but I haven't seen a tape in years.

Okay guys this thread is making me feel old.

Vinyl does seem to have come back into fashion in recent years. I must get round to getting my record player fixed :-)

I reckon the 40's thread in vets gen should soon change that :-)

To this very day I miss video recordings on a VCR

The soaps every night
Kids cartoons

Not sure at memory what I got up to as a kid but i'll come back to this lol

Bazinga. I'm off to feel like a young whipper snapper again! :jumpin:

The Gameboy. Not the 3DS, not the DS, not even the Gameboy Advance. The Gameboy.

I love my DS very dearly, but it's not nearly as dear to me as my Gameboy was from 1999 to about 2005. Hours and hours of my life went into the first generation of Pokémon games on the old black-and-white brick (which I lost, though I still have a Gameboy Colour), hundreds of hours that could have been spent outside having a social life... and I don't regret it at all.

The joys of growing up in the 80's/90's when mobiles were nowhere near as common as they are nowadays and social networking didn't exist; I don't think many families had PC's, let alone dialup internet connection.

I couldn't contact my school mates via text or social networking. If I suddenly decided I wanted to meet up and go down the park with a mate I had to walk/cycle round their house and see if they were home. If they weren't I'd go round another mates house. If all my mates were out I had to choose between either going home or going down the park on the off chance I might bump into some of them in town.

My first games consol was a Spectrum; if I remember rightly I had a 48k, a 128k and Sinclair ZK in all before progressing to a SNES. None of these modern things that can also play DVD's and connect to the internet or whatever else it is that they can do :-)

Advances in technology have had as many negative effects on games as positive. Too many games are being built with graphics in mind, with gameplay falling by the wayside (eg. Need For Speed and Final Fantasy XIII), whereas Back In The Day, the SNES gave us Super Mario Kart and Final Fantasy VI. But maybe I'm just being overly-nostalgic, which is at least appropriate to the thread...

I remember when mario was a bunch of black dots barley desernable as anything at all...

My first console was an Atari, with a joystick. I had Space Invaders, Pacman and some others that I can't remember.

I also remember the joys of VHS (Dave, really, who had Betamax?!) and everyone in the family having their own blank tape to record stuff on.

As for generic experiences, I once tried to cut my own hair with a pair of nail scissors. I got my brother to help me (he was only about 3) and my parents didn't realise what was going on until they saw him running out to the kitchen with handfuls of my hair to throw in the bin.

Oh, and lots of times with my best mate we'd make either 'magic potion' or 'perfume' which were the same thing - water with lots of leaves, petals and twigs stirred into it.

And I remember going bivouacking in the forrest...
... I should stop now.

<feels old>

All the smart people had betamax :-D lol. Our first video machine was a betamax and up until recently I had a good old Sanyo VTC 5000. I even had the Karate Kid on 3 different formats lol.

You really don't have much luck with this do you? Remember the Chinese incident!

Your poor mother!!

I know, I had my own tapes, things like 'X-men-keep off' 'Thumbelina/Free Willy'

That's 'cos you are :hehe:

And being soooo excited when the Gameboy colour came out. Oh those were the days. Endless rounds of Pokemon, in which effectively you just wandered around a bit.