layla | Good morning, neighbor!

Good morning, neighbor!

Check out what was in the yard this morning:

Actually there were two of them, both very small (for moose). Maybe two mostly-grown calves, or a young one and his mama. I watched them rendesvous in the driveway and nuzzle against each other before heading down into the willows on the other side of the driveway and vanishing.

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Luckily we three kids got along well, with one exception -- if my younger brother and sister were left alone together, they'd go at it like cats and dogs. So I usually had to play "mommy" and keep them from killing each other. At least that's how I remember it through the rose-colored glasses of youth -- I was a perfect angel of course. :D But seriously, even when we weren't getting along, there wasn't ever the sort of seriously vindictive stuff that I've seen other siblings do, like destroying each other's stuff or playing practical jokes that could result in one of them getting seriously hurt. No "Here, lick the frozen flagpole, kid" kind of maliciousness. My parents could (and did) leave us all alone on the homestead for days at a time without worrying that someone was going to end up stripped naked and tied to the roof or something like that.

We all three had an incredibly active inner-life when we were young. It's always nice to find out that someone else did too, and we weren't some kind of freaks! I was very surprised to grow up and find out that most people didn't play the kind of story and imagination games that we took for granted.

You wanna know what's funniest about that? Even though I played "talk out loud with inanimate objects" pretend games far, far more than my brothers did, we all had a very active childhood full of unorganized play and exploration. To this day, my brothers and I largely detest organized fun. Fun with too many rules sucks. We will often play "Trivial Pursuit" for hours with no board or pieces or even turns... just asking questions to see who can guess the answers.

None of us like video games any more, nor things that take too much preparation to enjoy. My brother was just complaining to me the other day about how golfing sucked, because you need special pants, shoes, jacket, clubs, balls, and a cart... just to get on the course.

Yuck

Gimme unplanned fun any day. Preferably full of trees and rocks and mud.

A friend of mine in college coached little kids in soccer a few years ago -- I mean REALLY little kids, 4- and 5-year-olds. She felt that they were too young to try to rank them up in teams and get them to play soccer, so instead she'd spend their phys-ed time building their strength and endurance by playing games with them, running around on the field and so forth. To her amazement, these kids already led such regimented lives that they really didn't seem to understand the concept of disorganized play when it was introduced to them. If an adult wasn't telling them the rules, they didn't know what to do.

I weep for the future.

Oh, I really don't think it's that bad. Somebody pointed out on Tartsville recently that every generation thinks its youth are going to the dogs. And yet somehow every generation seems to produce a reasonable number of smart, introspective, socially responsible people (mixed in with a peppering of jerks and idiots, of course). '50s youth were glued to the TV and weighed down with a mess of sexual and cultural neuroses, yet not only did they turn out OK, but now everybody in that generation looks back on the 1950s in a rose-colored haze of nostalgia. Everybody predicted doom and gloom for "latchkey kids", but I have plenty of friends whose mothers worked and who weren't scarred for life by it.

What happens to you as a young child probably colors your later life in all kinds of weird and unpredictable ways, but it's surely not a direct cause-and-effect: as in, this child has a severely regimented schedule at age 5, so he or she is going to be a dull and colorless adult ... I don't think it's that simple.

But it's still sad to see kids fenced in with adult rules, and I'm sure it does them no favors.

... but I just have horriffic visions of kindergarteners looking -- mystified -- at a pile of blocks.

I suppose they'll be much more wont to live orderly lives than I. Which is, in fact, a good thing. :)

Janer

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Good morning, neighbor!

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This is true...