Talk about a time warp

My big sis emailed this to me and I thought it was too funny to not share with y'all, because just yesterday I was thinking to myself, as I gutted Bunter's room, "Man! These kids are spoiled. The only toys I had to play with were Barbies that my dad found on the side of the road." I still remember how thrilled I was when he brought them home. It was the Heart Family Barbie Mama and Daddy. The ones in red, not pink. Sure they were a little dirty, and they smelled like oil, but that was nothing a little Dawn dishsoap couldn't fix. Oh, and the Daddy may have been missing a hand. But, hey, he could still sweep Mama Heart off her feet, if you know what I mean.

When I was younger, all of my adults would tell me how tough they had it when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill... barefoot... BOTH ways. (My Dad even used to tell us that in Holland, the kids were so tough that in the winter time, they would all wear shorts and huge furry coats.)
Yadda, yadda, yadda. I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I would torture my own littles that way. But now that I'm a mama, I can't help looking around and noticing the youth of today. Talk about having it all at your fingertips! And I hate to say it, but our kids don't know how good they've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves. In the card catalogue. (And blogging was acutally something we did on paper. In a thing called a diary. And anyone who read it was asking for a death wish.)
There was no email, we had to actually write a letter. With a pen. Then we had to walk all the way to the curb and put it in the mailbox, not forgetting to flip up the flag or it would get left behind. And it would take like a week to get there!
Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents spanked us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to beat us as they saw fit. No where was safe! (Acutally, in my case, that's not quite true. How many times did CPS get called on us, Mom? Like 5 or 6? Thanks little bros, for all the yelling that the neighbors thought was Dad beating your butts. My favorite was when Dad would line us up and ask, "WHO DID IT?" and spank us all until we told who it was. Ahhh, good times.)
There were no MP3's or iPOD's. You wanted to buy music, you had to ride your bike to the record store and buy it yourself. On cassette. Or, better yet, a record. You know, those big black vinyl things? (Remember? A cassette single cost, like, 3 bucks?) And if you didn't have any money for that, you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning or ending and jack it up! (Remember Sir Mixx Alot? Mmmm Hmmm. I can still remember what the DJ said over the end of the song.)
There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone 'cuz that's how we rolled, dig?
We had no cell phones. No texting. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to wait until you saw them. Then you could pass them a note that read F.Y.E.O!!!!! (for your eyes only) Or at least wait until you got to a payphone to call them, but that was strictly for an emergency.
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting. If you wanted to call your friend to play and their mom was on the phone, you got a busy signal that sometimes lasted HOURS. And if it was super important, you actually had to go outside and walk to their house to tell them to get off the phone so you could call.
No Caller ID either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mom, your boss, a prank caller, you just didn't know. You had to pick it up and take your chances, bucko!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation or Xbox, or whateva, with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had Atari. And a joystick. With games like Space Invaders and Asteroids, and Pong, and Pac Man. Your guy was a little square. You actually had to use your imagination. No multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever. You could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died. Just like LIFE!
When it came to watching TV, channel surfing was not an option you wanted to use, because this meant that you had to get off your tooshy and walk over to the TV to change the channel. There was no Cartoon Network, either. We could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, brutha.

I think I'll add some to this list as well. On the flip side of the coin, we were also a bit free-er as children. We could play outside all day without our parents sitting 10 feet away watching every move we made. We could ride our bikes to 7-11, which was like 2 miles away! We walked to the mall alone. Our parents trusted us when we said we were going to sleepovers and only sleepovers, when in actuality we were going to dances at Classic Roller Skating Rink from 9 to midnight every Friday night.
Ohhhhhh.
I think I realize why we are the parents we are. Because we were the kids we were.
Now I get it.