So I have been following Lola over at Lola's Diner and I decided to play along.. If you want to join in on the fun make sure and go see Lola's Diner and sign up..
So this week she did one on summer vacation.. WOW what a great series this could be..
I grew up in Southern California in the 60's and 70's what a veritable playground we had. I lived on a perfectly normal block with perfectly normal kids.. we would play until the streetlights came on and then come hell or high water we had better be checking in. Or the whistle.. my dad would stand on the front porch and whistle and we knew we had maybe 5 minutes to get home.. and it didn't matter where we were.. fortunately the kid network worked well and even if we were as far as three blocks away... we heard about the whistle and got ourselves home.
My mom worked nights so she spent much of her days sleeping.. in the summer she made sure we were busy.. back before the days of over scheduling your child. In the morning we had summer school. Now our program was no where near what they have now, we had this great program of drama, games, guitar, bike repair... whatever.. each class was for an hour and 15 minutes.. a 15 minute break and then a second class for an hour and 15 minutes.. My favorite year was the year I signed up for Bike Repair as an alternate choice.. I really wanted the drama program but it was full.. So I got into bike repair... oh my did the fur fly.. a girl in bike repair??? oh they did everything they could to force me to leave.. they tried to send me to all sorts of other programs but hey I had the best of parents.. they said this is what my daughter wants.. guess what this is what she gets.. of course the school did eventually win as there suddenly was an opening in the drama class.. looking back I never appreciated how great my parents were. It wasn't that they were trying to prove a point.. it was just they didn't see that there was one.
Summer school was for the first half of the summer the second half was for camp.. oh how I loved camp... I went to Camp Arbolado for 10 glorious summers.. but that my friends deserves a blog all it's own.. and when I wasn't at summer school or camp I was at the beach.. Fortunately my aunt was a school teacher (meant she had summers off) and lived at the beach so guess whose house we liked to visit?
Yes Lola summers were a fun and fantabulous time when we were children.. Was it the era? or maybe summer still holds that magic we just dont get to see it as we grew up..
Nice Post. I always looked forward to summers, Never attended a camp. went camping on occasion with the family, In a trailer, does that count as Camping? oh well, I did Post about One Of my Summer vacations, I remembered. I too was growing up in the 60's and early 70's. Hope you visit my blog and tell me what you think:-)
ReplyDeleteGreat post.
ReplyDeleteI think it was the era. I've spent quite a few summers home with my kids and it just doesn't even come close to the carefree feeling we had back then. I'm sad to see it go.
Summers for kids are just so different now, aren't they? Kids don't hang outside or "disappear" for hours on end anymore. We check on our kids, make sure they stick around the house, call if they go off on their bikes, etc. Isn't that sad?? We had so many adventures off on our own. And we amaze our parents with the tales of what we did now. I think our kids are really missing out.
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