Chaotic! I grew up with five siblings and 4 foster siblings. There was always something going on, and I always shared a room until I became 17, sometimes with more than one sibling. We would eat dinner at two tables, (one old formica one in the kitchen and the other "real" wood out in the living room) and sometimes had to eat in "shifts", because sometimes there would be one or two extra foster siblings, also. (Mom and Dad would be present always thorughout both "shifts"!) Lots of conversation at the table always. Kitchen clean up meant 5 women in the kitchen acting silly and carrying on. Sometimes we would burst into opera voices over requests for a dish-rag or a broom, or a towel. .. (Also, we grew up calling a refrigerator an icebox, because my parents were both born around 1920.) That brought a laugh in school, but was normal stuff around home. Anyway, Mom never stopped doing laundry, and we never stopped folding and ironing and cleaning, it seemed. We were poor I think, by today's standards. But I was always very happy overall and my mom loved us so much. She was amazing. We used to picnic once in awhile as a family--what an affair!!-- but didn't do much travelling (you might guess why!!).
Also, being part of the baby boomer generation, my neighborhood was filled with kids our age, and on any given summer evening, there were usually 25 kids within 5 years of age of each other out playing on the dead-end (culdesac) street where we lived, playing freeze tag or Red Rover or what have you until well after dark, with the cottonwood trees floating their little blasted things in the air, and the locusts or cichadeas or whatever they are called buzzing in the background until the conductor decided they should suddenly stop. On days when it was hot, we went to the pool at the junior high school and spent all day there. Also, block parties were an annual event, and in the winter, snow forts and sledding down nearby hills were common on really well-used sleds. We went ice skating daily on a nearby pond on hand-me-down skates and put socks in the toes when they didn't fit quite yet, armed with thermoses of hot chocolate and paper bags of sandwiches that turned ice cold by the time we ate them. We would be there from early morning until five at night and walk home, exhausted. We had pogo sticks (anyone remember those?) and hoola hoops, bicycles and jumpropes and cards, homework, and parcheesi, candyland, scrabble,monopoly (blech!) and our imaginations and each other, trying to figure out how to grow up. We had dates and heartbreaks and first loves, and squabbles that dissolved over shared suppers... Those were the days... :) Today when I get together with my family, there are over 40 people at dinner if all spouses and nephews and nieces attend. That just rarely happens anymore, as everyone seems to have their own lives and their kids are also growing up.
I didn't mean to make this a whole expose' aorund my childhood; it all just flowed so easily! Thanks for your patient reading :)
Also, being part of the baby boomer generation, my neighborhood was filled with kids our age, and on any given summer evening, there were usually 25 kids within 5 years of age of each other out playing on the dead-end (culdesac) street where we lived, playing freeze tag or Red Rover or what have you until well after dark, with the cottonwood trees floating their little blasted things in the air, and the locusts or cichadeas or whatever they are called buzzing in the background until the conductor decided they should suddenly stop. On days when it was hot, we went to the pool at the junior high school and spent all day there. Also, block parties were an annual event, and in the winter, snow forts and sledding down nearby hills were common on really well-used sleds. We went ice skating daily on a nearby pond on hand-me-down skates and put socks in the toes when they didn't fit quite yet, armed with thermoses of hot chocolate and paper bags of sandwiches that turned ice cold by the time we ate them. We would be there from early morning until five at night and walk home, exhausted. We had pogo sticks (anyone remember those?) and hoola hoops, bicycles and jumpropes and cards, homework, and parcheesi, candyland, scrabble,monopoly (blech!) and our imaginations and each other, trying to figure out how to grow up. We had dates and heartbreaks and first loves, and squabbles that dissolved over shared suppers... Those were the days... :) Today when I get together with my family, there are over 40 people at dinner if all spouses and nephews and nieces attend. That just rarely happens anymore, as everyone seems to have their own lives and their kids are also growing up.
I didn't mean to make this a whole expose' aorund my childhood; it all just flowed so easily! Thanks for your patient reading :)
