I would love to go back to being a kid. I had a great childhood, with a lot of good memories. Yes there were the rough times but overall I can't say that I had it bad growing up. I lived in a town where there were lots of kids in the same age bracket and all were outside kids. I remember using the whole town to play tag on bikes, or flash light tag at night time. The countless experiences at the park, from playing baseball, football, basketball, etc but mostly using the park equipment not really in the way you're supposed to such as: Having contests on how high you can swing on the swing to how far you can flip/jump off the swing, or climbing up a big twist slide to pull down whoever was hanging from the top of the slide and to win, you would have to make them slide all the way off the slide. just silly stuff like that.

I remember me and my friends made use of this small patch of woods behind his house and would build some pretty good tree houses. We would spend the whole summer building/rebuilding and improving it. We would have more than a couple of floors, a rope to climb, swing, etc a slide, swing. we even made sure to set up a station to put a big sling shot (it was typically on the roof, but we liked to change things alot) and fire off rocks, water balloons, toys, you name it. I remember many times the older kids would come shoot their paintball guns at us, so we always keep water balloons, jelly balloons, as many squirt guns as we could get and the lone paintball gun we had to fight them off. (eventually as we got older we all saved our allowances to get paintball guns). We also used to bring our toys, mostly G.I Joes (we actually did do this till we were 13 or 14 and were laughed at but those laughing would always join) We'd build a ton of mini fortresses, armed with with countless twigs, water balloons, sling shots and have a battle.

Building ramps with my friends and having little competitions with our bikes, as well as races were a lot of fun. We had this building and parking lot right by where our tree house was that was a dump truck company and were always expanding by tearing down parts of our "little forest" to expand their parking lot. So we would get them made by playing baseball there, and we would play ninja or commando by dressing the parts and "infiltrating" the building looking for ways to bring them down. It always resulted in us running from employees. They did eventually suceed in wiping our our little forest and built a fence around where the perimeter of the woods used to be. We also used to take turns using someones dirt bike on a course a lot of the older neighborhood kids built in an open area. They did a good job with it. We even used regular bikes on that course and it was just as fun. I used to wipe out all the time, dirt bike or regular bike.

There's also another area that was wasn't officially a forest preserve, but big enough to be one. The kids were forbidden to go there, so natually we made many "treks" through it. There's a river that runs through it, a bridge for a train, hills, old burnt up abandaned cars. Making a "boat" or raft to paddle on the river. Also, I don't know about anyone else here, but me and my friends used to love "ally treasure", you find find bikes, wagons, wood for the tree house, thrown away TVs to break, any useless electronic equipment was always a favorite to smash up.We mostly took this stuff to our treehouse, cause we did get in trouble for doing it in the ally. Lot of times people would throw away pieces and parts for bicycles and we would always collect and build a bike with those parts, but one time we found one perfectly intact, except the wheel was bent, so we took it, replaced the wheel and I rode for a test ride. My friends came along on their bikes, all was good one moment and the next I fell straight to the ground while in motion. The frame was weak I guess from the whatever caused the bent wheel. We had a pretty good laugh. Good times!

When I was younger... between the ages of 10-15 we used to play this game called spotlight after dark. Which was basically hide and seek around the neighbourhood using torches to find the other kids. Didn't even have any parents supervising or anything like that.

My parents never bought us a video game console, and computer time was kinda rationed out and we had to ask permission to use it. Spent way more time outside because of that. More often that not I'd have to get hosed down before I could come inside for dinner after playing in our huge sandpit all day long

Originally posted by shane84

More often that not I'd have to get hosed down before I could come inside for dinner after playing in our huge sandpit all day long

Me and my brothers were diggers. My sister would even grab a shovel and tunnel with the boys. Oh man, did we get dirty.

But mom would have us boys strip off at the back door and take a hose to us. We'd all be screaming because the water was so cold.

Our downstairs bathroom had 3 shower heads, so she'd shove all the boys in at once and let my sister have the upstairs bathtub.
The worst thing was that she'd take the soap and a cloth, then you got scrubbed down.
The whole time you'd be getting a lecture on how dangerous it is to tunnel underground and to support our tunnels with strong beams and good wood, plus, bloody well arch any long sections between rooms.

Mom knew how to tunnel too.

When I am not at school, working or relaxing I go out and do a little parkour or ride my bike when the weather is good enough. Also I used to go out into the woods with nothing but my bow, knives and some basic survival stuff and spend days with just mother nature. I don't have that time anymore though...

When I was a boy I was a revolutionary on the anti-outdoors front. I preferred spending my time inside playing sega or watching cartoons. Looking back, however, some of my fondest memories were playing in my backyard with my sister and my cousins. We used to play some hybrid of hide-and-seek and war, or just grab random junk from our garage and make up some sort of relay race using whatever we found.

Over the years I became more and more anti-going-outside, and our family bought another TV, and we bought a computer. These two things isolated our family. Whenever all four members of my family are home, my parents watch TV downstairs...mostly in silence, I play video games upstairs, and my sister goes on the computer downstairs. I've grown mostly resentful of technology during the past year as a result and whenever I'm home I attempt to talk to my family as much as I can tolerate.

I watched part of a good hockey game tonight. Only six participants and one net, but it was good.

It was just getting dark tonight when I stopped to watch the kids in the next block having a street game. It warmed my heart when one of the kids yelled "CAR", then the net was dragged to the side and the kids waited for the car to pass.

It was like the old days, but:

It was roller blades instead of ice skates.
It was a ball instead of a puck.
It was the road, not ice.

I'm not even sure anyone was keeping score, though every kid shouted like crazy when that ball hit the net.
(the goalie wasn't that good)

It was nice to see them out at dusk just to have some fun.


That 10 or 15 minutes of a street game I watched was worth more than box seats to any NHL game, and worth more than any hours one could spend playing a video game.

GO OUT AND PLAY..................