Grace: I hadn't seen the Berroco site. There are some interesting things on there; I'll have to take some time to explore it.
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Ah - so Boom-de-yah-dah IS a real song!
I guess it just uses a similar chord progression (I've seen it called the "1950s progression" as it was so commonly used in doo-wop songs) that Heart and Soul uses.
I was in Brownies and then Girl Scouts for a year or two (I quit Girl Scouts when they introduced the heavy guilt tactics to get us to sell cookies; I remain firm in my conviction that children should not be turned into salespeople, especially if they do not want to be, and I was temperamentally ill-suited to walking up to the houses of strangers [or even people I knew] and asking them to buy cookies. I would have rather had small pieces of bamboo inserted under my fingernails. I would even have rather gone to the dentist).
We didn't sing much in Brownies/Girl Scouts; didn't camp much either. Now that I look back on it, a lot of the stuff that WAS done was kind of junior Junior League. (I grew up in a fairly wealthy bedroom community; in a lot of ways my family really didn't fit in there.)
My mom used to talk about being in Campfire Girls; similar thing but it sounded like they had more fun than my Girl Scout troop did because they actually did "daring things for girls" (like the book) such as building actual campfires and learning basic woodworking. I think the Girl Scout leaders I got must have been ahead of their time; they seemed so bent on protecting us from anything vaguely dangerous that it actually made the whole experience kind of bland. (Luckily, my mom let me climb trees and sort-of dangerous stuff like that. And I'm still alive. And the only time I ever broke a limb was when I was in graduate school and slipped on a wet floor...and there's some kind of moral in that somewhere - kid runs around largely unsupervised a lot of her childhood, climbs trees, pokes mud with sticks, throws rocks at bees' nests, clambers around streambanks trying to catch frogs...and winds up getting biggest injury running to answer her graduate advisor's phone.)
(I will hasten to add that I broke my nose while sledding when I was 13. Which was actually a worse injury than the broken arm because the nose had to be surgically set and the arm wasn't out of alignment or whatever you say...they just slapped a cast on it and let me go. But then again: life is for learning and because I had the nose-surgery as an early teen I've never been able to look at those extreme-makeover shows with an unjaded eye. Any kind of "cosmetic" surgery [and arguably this one WAS] hurts like the dickens and the recovery from it is not as fast and easy as the television shows would depict. I threw up for three days from the sodium pentothal alone. And that was even before the bruising started.)
But back to the childhood things. Maybe someone needs to start a co-ed group called "Danger Scout" or somesuch. Where the stuff done wouldn't really be all THAT dangerous, but it would be the kind of thing that most schoolyards wouldn't permit because of liability issues (parents would have to sign waivers). That way, parents who wanted their kids to, I don't know, get to try hang-gliding or something but didn't have the wherewithal to go and do it themselves would have a chance.
Because really, a lot of the happy (and memorable) memories I have from childhood are of doing things that some of today's "helicopter parents" would disallow - wading in strange creeks (that might have leeches or bacteria!), climbing trees, building rings-of-fire for the kid-across-the-street's Evil Knievel mini-motorcycle to jump through....
2 comments:
Guilty as charged. Luckily my husband balances me out, so hopefully the kids will turn out OK :-)
-- Grace in MA
i try not to be a helicopter mom, and wasn't until my youngest started moving around on his own. he has no real sense of danger, or fear. he snuck out of the house at the age of three, and rode his trike 5 blocks to the local casey's, because he remembere walking there with me the week before. to include crossing streets. it's only been in the last year or so that i've been comfortable with him crossing streets on his own, because he's so much in his own world that he doens't always pay attention to the dangers.
that being said, my younger daughter (who is now 22) and he had us at the emergency room on a regular basis (they knew me by name!). however, i wouldn't change either child's attitude. they are both daring, get-out-there children, who will try a lot. my daughter, in fact, has taken a step that is kinda scary, professionally, and is branching into a job that no one i've ever known to do. it's scary financially, but if she gets it, and does well, she'll do WELL. it scares me, but i'm not going to tell her that. she's 22, and is blossoming nicely.
as for childhood injuries? none of my children had broken bones with their "messing around." my daughter (the dare-doer, lol) broke her finger when she was 15, playing soccer in a sanctioned league. that's it.
me? i ran all over my parents' farm, with little to no supervision, and the only broken bone i had was a finger (same as my daughter, lol) which was broken at a school volleyball game when i was 14! a few small scars here and there, but nothing more than that!
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