Growing Up and Growing Old

I stumbled upon this graphic the other day and it got me thinking of how much our culture has changed in the last few decades.

This got me thinking about my childhood- and how incredibly different things are for children today than they were when I was growing up in the 80’s. It’s funny… okay, maybe it’s sad… but I remember when I was younger and my parents would tell me stories about growing up in the 50’s and how “things were so different back then”. I would laugh it off thinking “Wow, they’re so old”, “1950? That’s prehistoric” and let's be serious- how different could things really have been? As a kid, you don’t know anything other than what you have- so the concept of a culture before yours wasn’t fathomable. But fast forward 30 years, here I am writing a blog about the very same things my parents once reminisced about. And there will be kids younger than me thinking just like I did back then… “Man, she’s old” and “wow- the 80’s? Did they have blue-ray back then?” So although my current state of nostalgia may prompt today’s youth to call me old- who cares? I’m taking a trip back to when things just seemed so much less complicated than they do today. I hope I’m around in the next 30 years so I can read what today's kids will write about. If today is tomorrow’s easy- I don’t pity them at all. So sit back and enjoy the ride down memory lane :)

My favorite things in the 80’s

1) The Cabbage Patch Doll

My mom told me the story of how bad I wanted a cabbage patch doll for Christmas. She said my dad was out past midnight Christmas Eve trying to hunt one down for me. He got into fights at stores, I was told, but he never gave up. He was in a store that was about close when he spotted a box on the floor that was torn to shreds… Where others passed it up because of the box, to my father it looked like a million bucks. He found his baby girl a Cabbage Patch Doll. I don’t remember the box- but I remember the doll, his birth certificate, and dragging him with me wherever I went. And the sentiment of my parents stopping at nothing to make my Christmas special- makes it my very favorite 80’s toy.

2) Atari and Nintendo.

If I sum up the number of hours spent playing Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers- I'm sure it would total a good year of my life

3) Girltalk, Candyland, Memory, Perfection, Trouble, Operation and Hungry Hippos

4) Big Wheels. Every kid had one

5)Alphie and Turbo Tomy

6)Aqua Play, Speak and Spell, and See and Say

7) Crossfire and Lite-brite

8) View Master (had ALL the disney inserts), and The Mini Piano

9) Skip-it

10) My art's and crafts consisited of the following: Fashion Plates, Clicky pens with lots of color choices, bracelet pens, tons of erasers you could buy in the candy store for pennies, scented markers (Grape!!), Pencils where you pushed to get the next tip out and put the old one back on the bottom, Scratch and Sniff Stickers, Paint with Color books, (Rainbow Brite!), and who can forget the Spriograph!

11) Trapper Keeper! ( I bet you're all remember the very one you had right this second :) )

12) Shoelace Barretts, Colorful Hairclips, and Pink Rollers

13) Baby Soft Perfume

14)Those Magnetic Drawing Toys

15) All the cool kids had these skatse

16) McDonald's Cookies

17) Clackers and Ice Cream Cones

18)Lunch Boxes

19) My high-tech gadgets were this Camera, Cassett Tapes (How cool were they compared to 45's!), a Boom Box and Walkman.

20)LA Gears

21) Berenstein Bears, Scholastic Book Sales at School, (how awesome it was to come back from lunch and have see your order on your desk), Clifford, Highlights, Scary Stories, The Choose Your Own Adventure books where you got to "Skip to page 43 if Sally skips school or Skip to page 91 if Sally broke her leg". And of course... saving the best for last- The Baby Sitters Club

22) Party Lines on a phone like this

23)Cheez Balls

24) Melt Beads, Candy Lipsticks, and Slap Braclets

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25)"MASH"- The game that told us who we were going to marry, where we'd live, how many kids we'd have, etc.

26)Sun in!

28)Glow Worms

29) Tube Socks and Stirrup Pants

30) Drawing S's like this on our notebooks and desks because it was cool

80's TV is in a leauge of it's own. Here were my favorites: 21 Jump Street, Alf, Alien Nation, Charles in Charge, The Cosby Show, Different World, Doogie Howser, Double Dare, Family Matters, Family Ties, Full House, Golden Girls, Growing Pains, Highway to Heaven, The Hogan Family, Married with Children, Mr Belevdere, Out of this World, Perfect Strangers, Punky Brewster, Reading Rainbow, Saved by the Bell, Small Wonder, Too Close for Comfort, You Can't Do that On TV, Webster, Who's the Boss, and The Wonder Years

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Favorite 80's Movies ET, Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Goonies, Rain Man, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I remember spending Saturday mornings with my father watching the Three Stooges and the WWF. He loved his wrestling! I did too- it's my favorite pasttime with my father. Here are my favorite wrestlers from back in the day: Andre the Giant, The British Bulldogs, The Bushwackers (ALL time favorite), Dusty Rhodes, Fabulous Moolah, Hacksaw, Hulk, Superfly Snuka, Macho Man, Rowdy Piper, The Harts, Undertaker, and Yokozuna

McDonald's Beach. Yes- there was such a place. And yes- it was in NJ. My mom took me and my brother there a lot in the summers. I really wish it was still around. Here's the latest picture of the place... Last I heard they were going to build some sort of Catering Hall on the property :(

This was the TV we watched TV on til the day my mom died in 2007. What TV nowadays can last that long?

My living room walls were paneled.

From a baby to my teenage years- i was driven around in an Oldsmobile. Kids today don't even know what that is :(

Gas was around 90 cents a gallon, milk around 1.50, loaf of bread was under a dollar- and because I used to run to the corner store for my mom- i remember when ciggarettes were just $2.00.

The Ground Round- Where the weight of kids totaled the amount of their bill. Sadly I was a ham, so my parents had to dig deep in their pockets:-)

And lastly, the very last thing that I remember from the 80's: The smell of hairspray and hairdryers each and every morning.