Ahhh Childhood...

As a parent, hearing your children laugh is one of the most wonderful and joyous sounds you can ever hear.  Even if it's past 11pm and you are at the end of your rope trying to get them to sleep.  My son was laughing SO HARD in his room last night that I just had to go in there and see what all the fuss was about.  He tried to tell me what was so funny, but he was laughing so hard that he couldn't even get the words out.  My heart swells at these moments.  I know just how he is feeling, because to this very day I do that same thing.  I laugh until I can't breath.  It's awesome, and I'm so happy that I've passed that on to my children.

In case you are wondering what he was laughing about, here is the YouTube video of the episode of Pocoyo that had him dying  I just watched it myself and at about the 1:50 mark, I lost it too.  That kid knows funny when he sees it!  *note: I think it might be even funnier if you watch with the sound turned off, but I'm still undecided.

When we were kids we did a lot of laughing too.  The difference with my kids and us as kids is that we had zero interest whatsoever in what our parents were doing.  My kids want to be up my ass and under each step.  We would make our own fun and used to have a blast with each other no matter what the situation.  Whether it be with the unsupervised antics at my father's with my extremely hyper-active younger brother or the pure and wholesome good times we had at home just being imaginative kids.  

The best thing that ever happened to our family was when my step-brother got a camcorder as a gift.  That was a pivotal moment in all of our lives.  We went from making our own fun with common household things to essentially having the first known reality show.  My step-brother filmed everything.  EVERYTHING.  From fully-planned movies that we all had a role in to just riding in the car to the food store.  Sometimes we found it annoying, but today we really cherish it - no matter how embarassing.  Actually, I would never let anyone watch these videos, we prefer to cherish them when it's just us watching.

Him getting that camcorder must have been the best thing in our parents lives too.  They went from having four crazy kids (plus the baby) tearing the place up and fighting, to four crazy kids (plus the baby) tearing the place up and fighting but on camera.  How is this any different?  I'll tell you.  Later on in the day after hours of footage, we would all sit in the living room and watch our videos.  At first they would resist turning off Cheech & Chong but then they would reluctantly allow us to show the movies as they opened all the windows so we wouldn't get contact highs. (hey! it was the early 80s!  don't judge!!)  Our movies always seemed to prove way funnier to them than even the movie they turned off.  We were some funny bastards, I have to admit.

Our favorite was to record recurring episodes of "The Tower News". As the name would imply, it was a full newscast that we would do.  We would either make up stories or pull them from Mad Magazines and then we would report from the news desk and conduct interviews on the street.  (literally)  We would dress up as characters and do voices as the people being interviewed.  We even had a weather man.  Those old bell bottoms and disco wear from my Uncle's closet sure came in handy.  

In addition to our countless news episodes, we must have done 50 versions of "twins" movies; the clever camera tricks making it appear we all had a twin in the house.  Another one was filming the TV as a show was running and my step-brother doing his own voice overs.  Though there was always that one jerk that would have to cry or walk in talking loud and ruin the scene.  

Times were good.  Sure we grew up poor, but he had a blast.  We didn't have a ton of toys, but what we had we loved.  Of our modest collection, our top seven favorite things were as follows: 

1. A puppet show stand with various puppets from Mr. Rogers.  

King Friday XIII

and this Creep (aka Lady Elaine Fairchild)

2. We had the Muppets Stick Puppets - without the sticks of course.  

I think we only really had Fozzie and Rowlf

3. We had the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine (naturally - everyone had this)

Good for one intended use...
then used for grinding down rocks outside

4. We didn't need nice bikes; we had a Krazy Kar - this was our absolute favorite next to #5 on this list

best thing ever invented

5. We for darn sure didn't need a fancy club house - we used a pile of bricks in the yard to outline where the walls in our fake house was when we played house.

Pile o' bricks

6.  We even derived great happiness from these common household items:

(file photo - we didn't display ours on the mantle)

<3 feet bowl <3

The Moo Cow Creamer
- that I only just now found out once had a head

7. And of course the legendary camcorder:

pretty sure this is the exact model
you had to carry around an entire full size VCR in a shoulder bag

We didn't need anything but each other (and the above items) to have a great childhood.  In hearing my own children laugh together, even if its amid a sea of fancy new toys, I am still very happy to see them having fun in it's simplest form.  They seem to be following in our footsteps in finding the joys of childhood in each other.  If they have even half the fun memories we do from our childhood, then I've succeeded as a parent.