QotD: When I Was a Kid

What did you do for fun when you were a kid? How is it different from what you see kids doing now?
Submitted by jaklumen.

For most of my childhood (in 1970s Melbourne), I had a really good friend, Karen*, who lived about three blocks from me.  We used to spend most of the weekend wandering or riding our back and forth between one another's house at whim and getting up to all sorts of unsupervised shenanigans.  A few in particular that I remember:

• making a "mud bath" in her father's vegetable patch;
• making our own "swimming pool" by pegging garbage bags into large cardboard boxes;
• constructing a "house of horror" in her parents back shed for the other neighbourhood kids to walk through blind-folded.  This included things like rubber gloves full of water which would brush clammily over the blindfolded one's face, lots of wooo wooo type sound effects etc;
• doing Mythbusters type experiments with all the hazardous chemicals in the garage;
• building cubby houses;
• thinking of new and original ways to torment our respective younger brothers;
• roller skating on the bathroom tiled floor; and
• playing Pong on the TV (this was later on in the early 80s I think - thought Pong pretty boring even then). 

My kids are much more closely supervised than we were and aren't allowed to just roam the streets.  Apart from the increased traffic danger, we just don't know the people in our neighbourhood like people did when we were kids.  My kids are still pretty imaginative and creative and we limit their access to technology so they don't become completely reliant on it.  They don't however have the same access to wide open spaces that we did so a lot of their activities more indoor focussed, eg, cubby houses in the lounge room rather than up a tree etc.

One thing that I remember doing that my kids still do was making up dances to pop songs.  The music has changed but the dances are just as terrible!  

Future Rock Star

*As for Karen, she went on to have (and is still having) a very creative and adventurous life.  She has illustrated children's picture books and well-known wacky science books (hopefully inspired by some of our garage "experiments"), travelled the world and has just returned from a stint working as an aid worker in Cambodia.