Five things I miss from childhood meme

I got tagged by Janis at The Farmette Report (and newbie knitter) for a meme!  But before I get into childhood nostalgia, let me tag in turn.  Jenny, Beth, Joy, Noelle (also a newbie knitter), and Cathi, if you want to pick up the chain and pass it on, go for it!  If anyone has a strong meme aversion, forgive me.

If you want to participate the chain-letter part works like this: remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog’s name in the #5 spot; just check to make sure the links are still attached if you copy n' paste.

1. Verbatim
2. Kingfisher Cove
3. Ellen's Nest
4. The Farmette Report
5. Nepenthe's Misadventures

These are in no particular order:

1. Sci-fi and B-movies with dad.  Yup. My dad is a sci-fi fan.  While I was growing up he liked to watch 50s B-movies on tv (I haven't yet discovered if he was allowed to watch these movies when he was a kid) and for some reason I was always there too.  I love sci-fi (Dad took me to Star Wars when I was three years old) and for a while I wanted to be a sci-fi writer.  The most memorable of these early childhood movie experiences (besides the Invasion of the Body Snatchers) was Them!, which featured gigantic ants taking over the earth.  My memory is getting a little fuzzy, but I still distinctly remember a marine getting squeezed in half by a gigantic ant. (This trend of scary sci-fi movies culminated with the Wrath of Khan when I was 8 - that damn brain-eating-armadillo-bug creeped out me and my 6 year old sister to no end...it remains a defining moment of my childhood...and noticeably, some of my best friends were similarly traumatized by their fathers taking them to the same movie.)  This also might explain why I would freak out as a kid when I woke up in the middle of the night to see a strange distorted shape through the reinforced glass of the skylight in my bedroom.  It was the moon. I thought it was a space ship. Yeah.  When I moved to NYC I would sometimes meet up with my dad to watch a sci-fi film.  Now that I am 2,000 miles away I wish I could still do this.

2. Heidi, Hoodie and Franz.  My three imaginary friends who happened to be dragons.  Heidi was a girl, Franz was a boy, and Hoodie was neither.  They hid under my bed and ate my nightmares.  Yeah.  Everyone should still have imaginary friends....especially if they will make the bad things go away!

3.  My Big Wheels.  I loved that thing. I never did master the brake-and-fishtail-thing that I saw in the commercials.  I rode that thing until all the tread was worn down to nothing. Until holes appeared in the plastic. Until my legs were too long and I had to take the seat out so I could use it as a scooter.  This is pure nostalgia.

4. My mom's books on tape.  When I was little my mom made books on tape from my Beatrix Potter collection.  She read the book into a really crappy tape recorder, telling me when to turn the page, and what little details to look for in the illustrations.  When she wanted some quiet time or needed to get something done, I could pull out a tape and a book, and could listen to my mom 'read' to me while I turned the pages. One of my favorites was the Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. (you can see some illustrations here).  I wonder if those tapes are still hiding somewhere in the crawl space - I would love to have them for my own kids someday.

5. Playing with my sister.  Sometimes it was school (taught her how to read way before kindergarten), sometimes it was bringing Super Kitty home for dinner (let's pretend to the highest order), playing with the horse models, building the Indian village with Nora, our dog kennel club with Anouk, and playing 'dead' in the pool so that Widget, our long-suffering and dedicated yellow lab, would drag us to the shallow end by our bathing suits.  Also eating peanut butter on toasted English Muffins and playing animal guessing games.