I had what was pretty much the perfect childhood. My parents both farm, so they were always around. I had my sister there 24/7 as the (almost) ideal playtime partner. There were animals, outside toys, and adventures galore. Make a zip line out of a lead rope and bucket for your cats that they actually rode on? Yep. Playing tennis off the side of the shed? Of course. Sticking your arm down in a 5 gallon tub of discarded tractor oil for fun? Yeah, that happened too.Growing up on a farm was the best!
Nothing can be perfect, however, and there was one major flaw to my childhood: I was limited to network and public access television. You can’t get cable out in the country and satellite TV was too expensive, so I was limited to the lovely Iowa Public Television and cartoons when ABC still played good shows on Saturday mornings. And while I loved Arthur and Clifford the Big Red Dog, the only time I watched Disney channel shows was when our neighbor recorded a few hours on a VHS TAPE and brought them over as a ‘special surprise’ for us and I didn't see an episode of Spongebob until I was in middle school. (Yes, I’m serious…)
You’re probably asking “Gee, Emily, complaining about not growing up with cable is a pretty dumb blog post,” and to that I say you’re right. Luckily, that’s not what today’s blog is about. No, no, no friends, I was to take this opportunity to draw your attention to some of the ways my sister and I entertained ourselves growing up the ‘old fashioned’ way.
I was basically a professional chef. Just because we only had 6 TV channels doesn’t mean we didn’t have the coolest toys. My mom was probably the biggest Little Tikes fangirl, and when one of my dad’s friends got rid of his grown daughter’s old playsets you can bet Momma Deb swoop them up like college kids when they see free food on campus. We had the kitchen set like every basic kid, but we also had the fridge which was a HUGE toddler flex. I also have to give a huge shout out to Mom for saving all the crappiest pots and pans for our ‘restaurant’, and even keeping empty cereal and macaroni boxes and taping them back closed for our ‘grocery store’.
This isn’t where it ends though, folks. One of the staples in our ‘restaurant’ (which I know for a fact was named Food Ala Mode at one point in time. Fancy, I know) was Subway sandwiches. Now, I don’t know what type of crazy places my parents shopped at, but we had this cute little set of Subway buns and meat and cheeses, complete with two little Subway cups and branded water bottles. While other kids were binging on The Wiggles, Anna and I were whipping up unlimited ‘Clubs on wheat bread, heated not toasted’. The little bottles in the photo? Those were mustard and vinaigrette, which caused some problems. Anna didn’t (and still doesn’t) like either, so when I would put pretend vinaigrette on her pretend sandwiches, you can best believe she had a not-so-pretend meltdown.
I learned to be a happy little homemaker. Anna and I disagreed in another playtime division as well: how to play house. We also had the Little Tykes washing and dryer plus the vacuum. I’m not sure why I enjoyed playing house so much because we pretty much went through the same routine every time: ‘wake up’ all the stuffed animals, take all their blankies and throw them in the washing machine, stare at them for a few seconds, take them back out, toss them back on the beds, ‘vacuum’ a little, and put them all back in their beds. Then Anna and I would each lie in our own beds for a few seconds, then start all over again with a ‘new day’.
It’s interesting how your play habits as a kid can influence who you are now. I was the big sister so of course, I was in charge and to this day I still enjoy doing laundry. Had Anna been allowed to be in charge of how we played, I think it would have been more like playing a mixture between being hoarders and being homeless. (And if you’re wondering, she still can’t fold laundry or vacuum very well…)
We discovered how to be dramatic. I will be the first to admit that I was pretty dramatic until I was in about 3rd grade. I have one distinct memory from Kindergarten where I wanted to play with a group of girls and they said no. Seeing as how The Lion King was (and still is) my favorite movie, I responded totally appropriately for the situation by yelling “YoU DoN’T eVEn kNOw wHAt I’vE BeEN tHRoUgH!” and running to the other end of the playground. Don't know what I'm talking about? Here's the clip:
I shake my head at my younger self and laugh every time I think about this, because I would really like to ask 5 year old me exactly what I had “been through”, but I digress.
The reason I’m including this is because I developed those ‘skills’ without the outside influence of non-educational kids programming to encourage those behaviors. Basically, Anna and I are living proof that kids are just born dramatic. I can remember a couple different times where we would get so mad at each other that we’d go into our rooms and slam our doors as hard as we possibly could, which means I also remember a couple times where Dad took our doors off the hinges for a few days at a time. Elite move, Dad…
This little dose of drama also helped us in a more positive way. We were the ultimate playwrights. When cleaning my room over Christmas break this year, I found an old notebook full of embarrassing drawings and poems. It also contained a musical written by Anna and I about a pair of sisters who go to Broadway. The music and script were a whopping four pages long, and I can tell you that the Tony Awards are definitely sleeping on it. To reiterate the comment about our adult lives mirroring our youth, I find it ironic that Anna is actually very serious about pursuing a career in performing arts, and I think her dream job would probably involve Broadway...
We were also famous for our radio shows, karaoke sessions, and songwriting. We had this little Barbie cassette player with two microphone jacks. Among the two of us we had about three different 90 minute cassette tapes we would fill and then record over endlessly. We would write and perform songs, sing along loudly to the soundtrack from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and we even had ‘podcasts’ where we would interview each other as singers or Disney princesses before podcasts were a thing. Trendsetters? Yeah, we know.
Filmmaking became a lifestyle. The best part of Christmas break was always getting all of the Barbies. We probably had at least 50 dolls between Barbies, Kens, Kellys, and other assorted characters, plus a massive tub of clothes and furniture and accessories. Our Barbies’ lives were even pimped-out with the dream house (with working elevator!), a jeep, an RV, jet skis, a pink Corvette, a Slug Bug, an airplane?! We were definitely dealing with some upper class dolls in this household.
Was just playing with our dolls like regular kids enough? No, duh. Making at least one movie with the Barbies was an annual Christmas break tradition for many years. In fact, we probably spent more time writing, shooting, and editing movies of the Barbies than we did actually playing with them. It all started when I got the High School Musical Barbies for Christmas one year. We borrowed our parent’s piece of junk camcorder and filmed a little short called “A Barken Disaster,” where the Barken Family went on a messy vacation to the beach with their grandma in the RV. The movie was shot in one take and was a very hi-tech set up. We even had pieces of paper that said ‘WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK’ that we could lay in front of the camera while we changed scenes. It was next level...
The next year, we upped the ante with a new computer that had Windows Movie Maker on it. In all seriousness, that was probably where I realized I enjoyed digital media because I loved learning how to work around the program to create effects that weren’t actually available at the time. The next film was “A Barken Disaster 2”, where the same family went to see Niagara Falls. I specifically remember Anna taking ‘directing’ this film and only this film, mostly because her big ending scene was pushing the dolls down the ‘waterfall’ (stairs) in The Maid of the Mist (a box) because Cruise Ship Barbie wanted to take them on the more exciting version of the boat ride.
After that, the films only got better and funnier (relatively, of course). There was ‘A Barken Disaster 3’ (but I have no idea what happened in it), ‘Very Barken Christmas’ (which created some pretty memorable inside jokes between Anna and I that we still talk about today), ‘Barbieville Idol’ where Hannah Montana goes crazy and eliminates all the contestants (we totally called Miley Cyrus’s crazy phase before it happened), and tens of other films I can’t even remember. Probably my ‘proudest’ (I’m not sure if that’s the right term for this context as a 20 year old?) Barbie movie was when Anna and I completely remade The Goonies. I was at that awkward age where I was almost too old to want to play with toys but was still young enough that I kind of wanted to (don’t say you were never there because you were, too), and our family had just gotten a Mac laptop with iMovie so we were excited to take our production to the next level. It ended up being about 50 minutes long and we even downloaded the entire soundtrack from the real movie to edit into the final film. And if you’re wondering, yes, we made our parents sit through and watch the entire thing (I’m sorry, Mom and Dad).
So that’s a condensed version of my crazy, Nickelodeon-free childhood. Was it better? Meh. More interesting? Most definitely. Who knows- maybe someday we’ll release our Barbie movies! No...no, okay probably not. If anything, this should definitely help you make sense of why I am the way I am...
What are some dumb stories from your childhood?
