Journal Jar

“List the toys you loved as a child.”

Wow! I love walking down memory lane. I had a great, happy childhood and I love thinking back to those carefree days of my youth.

I can’t put this list in any particular order because I loved ALL these things equally.

Velvet.
Do you remember Chrissy and Velvet? The beautiful dolls that had hair that grew long when you pushed their “belly button” and got shorter when you twisted the knob on their backs? My older sister, Wees, had Chrissy and I had Velvet. Isn’t her name beautiful? Her gorgeous dress was made out of purple velvet and her shoes came off and on. I remember that, somehow, I never lost them!
I loved putting her hair in pony tails and pretending we were going to the beauty salon where
they cut her long tresses off.
It was just like real life when I sat in the salon chair of a hair dresser who spent too much time on the phone and not enough time paying attention to her scissors and let me walk out the doors looking like a boy.
One day a random stranger said to my mom,
”Oh! You have such a cute little boy!”
and I remember pushing on my belly button, hoping and praying that somehow/someway my hair would grow back too!
I wish I still had her.

Baby Alive
I don’t remember how old I was when I got Baby Alive, but I remember the Christmas morning
she arrived as a gift from Santa Clause.
That year I wanted a Baby Tender Love like my older sister had, but Santa was wiser
and knew that we needed to have different dolls.
And Baby Alive was cooler. Much cooler.
Don’t get me wrong, Baby Tender Love was cool!
She would drink a bottle of water and would wet her (cloth) diaper!
Baby Alive would do that too!
But, she existed on more than just water.
Oh yes.
She had BABY FOOD
that you mixed up in her own pink bowl and fed to her
using her own pink spoon.
You’d press on her chin and her mouth would start moving up and down in a chewing motion
and you’d spoon that delicious orange pasty food (that looked like apricot baby food)
into her mouth. Why didn’t the food taste better?
(side note: In searching for images, I found a Baby Alive on eBay that is selling for $150!
Now I really wish I still had mine!)

Hippity Hop
All these favorite toys date to pre-1979 because I remember playing with them in the first house we lived in.

The Hippity Hop was a birthday present.
It was red.
And I LOVED it!
I remember bouncing up and down the driveway
and up and down the sidewalk
and up and down the patio on it
I bounced and bounced until I got careless and left it behind the car.
No more Hippity Hop.

Roller Skates
These may make me seem very old
and I guess I am,
but I LOVED my old roller skates.
These skates were perfect because they were always the right size!
They were adjustable, so as your feet grew, the skates grew too!
You wore your own shoes with them, so you could put them on at a moments notice,
skate down to your best friend’s house
and when you got there you could leave them on the front porch and be comfortable
wearing your shoes into her house.
The width of the skates was adjustable as well.
You wore your handy dandy key around your neck and if you wore clompy, larger shoes,
you’d use the key and adjust the part that went around your toes to fit the larger shoes.
If they were smaller, like a pair of sneakers, then you could adjust that too!
If my memory is correct, this picture is EXACTLY what my skates looked like!

Bike
You know what I miss the most on bikes of today?
BANANA SEATS!
And tall HANDLE BARS
Bikes these days just don’t have the same pizzazz that bikes of yesterday had.

My bike was my transportation.
My freedom.
The means to many fun adventures around our neighborhood.
Back in the day it was safe to ride your bike everywhere.
We rode bikes around the block.
We rode them over to the local Dairy Queen, or the penny candy store.
We rode them to the neighborhood swimming pool.
WITHOUT helmets. WITHOUT parental supervision.
We always had our little silver thumb bells on the handlebars
and the colorful plastic thingys that we put on the spokes in the tires.
(Did those come in cereal boxes?)
My bike was like this… only blue. Notice the flower seat? Oh yeah. Stylin’!

I upgraded from my banana seat bike to a 10 speed when I was in 4th grade.
I worked and saved my money for months and months.
My parents paid for 1/2.
I vaguely remember saving around $40, which was a LOT of money.
We bought it at Bill’s Cycle Shop.
It was blue and had blue tape around the handlebars.
If I rode long distances on my banana seat, I rode farther on this.
We moved out to the country and a ride “around the block” was
a 4 mile square. We did it. No hesitation.

Crochet Doll Purse/Bed
So many of my memories are tied up with my best friend, Joni.
Did I own this purse, or did she?
Who knows?
Our toys were loved and played with by both.
But I bet we both owned one.

It would start out looking like any ordinary crochet purse.

But when you opened it up,
it was actually a miniature doll’s cradle!

Crochet Hook
Speaking of crocheting, believe it or not, one of the best things I had as a young girl was a crochet hook.
I was around 10 years old and I learned how to crochet a chain.
I became obsessed.
Crochet a long chain and pull it out.
Start over.
Crochet a long chain and pull it out.
I didn’t learn how to do anything else.
Crochet a long chain and pull it out.
Start over.
I remember sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, crocheting a long chain,
using white yarn.
All of a sudden the idea came to me,
”I wonder if I can crochet a chain as long as the street?”
And so I did!
I’m sure my memory is a little skewed, but I remember sitting on that curb
and making chain after chain after chain.
Finally we measured (Joni and I) and if I remember right,
that chain was almost as long as our street.
I’m sure it was as long as the “important” part of our street.
It went from Brett’s house, past our house, past Jeff’s house and to Joni’s house.
That was the sum of my existence anyway.
It was long enough.

Sunshine Family
Please tell me you remember the Sunshine family!
I loved these guys as much as Barbie and Ken (who should be on this list, but will just be mentioned here).
You had the cute husband with a stylish turtle neck sweater and full head of thick hair,
the beautiful mama and her darling baby who also had a full head of thick hair.
The baby was decked out with all equipment needed:
yellow pajamas, cradle, high chair.
Oh, and if you were lucky, you’d get the set that had TWINS!
My dolls only had one baby.

My Sunshine Family loved each other.
Daddy really loved Mommy.
I took the family, house and all the furniture out to play in the backyard.
Daddy was kissing mommy
and as I squeezed his head to make his lips pucker, his plastic eye popped out.
I searched high and low through the grass, trying to find that brown eye, but I couldn’t.
I hid him from everyone after that because I was so embarrassed.
I didn’t want to have to explain to my mom why he was missing his eye.
It would have been MORTIFYING!
(I cringe writing about it now. But I can’t hide it anymore. I need to tell the truth!)

I always thought Daddy Sunshine looked like
Parker Stevenson whom we loved and adored from the TV Show
The Hardy Boys.
What do you think?

But I always loved Shaun Cassidy more.

Or was it Starsky and Hutch?

Wait! That will have to be a different post:
My favorite TV shows from my growing up years.