Alicornutopia

Alicorn wrote:I did farm summer camp and I loved the chickens. I used to chase them around and pick them up and hug them and they never antagonized me.

That sounds adorable. :D

teaching my classmates how to fly with I was six. They wanted to know why I was running down the hill flapping my arms and i told them i was flying and they didn't believe me that i was flying so i told them to try it themselves and they did and after that they believed me that they were flying.

climbing trees

hiding under the bed with several other children and playing a storytelling game with our eyes closed (ages 3-7)

some plastic dinosaurs are on an expedition to get some dinner for lunch (3 year old child)

a Bell's parents sign her up for dance lessons in hopes that this will improve her balance. It doesn't.

falling down while on some sort of nature hike and the adults not believing i was hurt and having to crawl the rest way while they assumed i was doing this for attention. That could happen to a child Bell I think. her pants legs will be shredded by the time she gets back.

preteen is getting old enough to babysit (11-12). they have fun playing dolls with the little kids for a few hours and getting paid for it. or the kid screams the whole time because they miss their parent and the preteen is overwhelmed.

dressing a pet up in doll clothes.

i was babysitting a 2 year old and a 3 month old once and while i was paying attention to the 3 month old and took my eyes off the 2 year old for like 15 seconds, she managed to go to the bathroom, open a bottle of adult shampoo (i.e. not the "no tears" kind) and pour the entire thing onto her head. she was okay, but there were a lot of tears.

getting a book of magic tricks for kids and trying to perform them.

writing and performing our own plays

playing atari with friends

clapping games and string games and chanting games

sidewalk chalk, hopscotch.

Hmm, childhood things.

• I would play in the playground with my friend and we would catch sand bees and use them to scare and impress the other kids (sand bees don't sting, but they look like real bees).
• This same friend and I would make flowers out of Starbursts for each other. They were pretty and also tasty.
• A friend of mine and I were assigned a creative writing task in school to write from the point of view of a historical figure. After class, we both excitedly went to tell the other about who we'd chosen, and got into an argument because we had both chosen the same obscure historical figure.
• Running on that idea, a bit later on in school our history class did a "statue garden" where we would all dress up as various historical and mythological figures and stand around like statues and deliver lines in character when approached. My friends all paired up to do associated figures who would have lines that interacted with each other (Artemis and Athena, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, etc) and got together to make matching costumes.
• My friends and I would also all meet at her house every year for Halloween parties and to go trick-or-treating, since she had the best neighborhood for it. We always tried to impress each other with our costumes.
• A friend of mine and I throughout elementary and middle school would regularly LARP our favorite characters from whatever our favorite fandom was at the time (starting with Diadem, then Catwings, then Animorphs, then moving on to various anime during middle school, iirc).
• A friend of mine liked to write stories, and I would help as a soundboard for her ideas and draw her characters.
• A friend of mine, when she was very young, would re-enact Discovery Channel-esque scenes with her stuffed animals (the wild cheetah stalks the gazelle and eats it, etc)
• I used to spend a lot of time looking over my older brother's shoulder, watching him do various things on his computer like write music, write programs, and play videogames. Sometimes I would help him record various interesting sounds (squeaky cabinets, thumping on a door, etc) to use in his music. Other times I would help give him ideas for videogames he would write.
• I was in a girl scout troop and we'd have meetings every week or two in which we would usually work on some sort of arts or crafts project towards various badge or charity purposes. Our troop leader took us on regular hiking, camping, and backpacking trips. While we were on these trips we would often do various sorts of freeform roleplay, either live-action or with someone as the storyteller and everyone else narrating their single character. As we got older we'd organize these trips for ourselves and also became mentors of a younger troop and would help them out. Every year we had to sell cookies every year to fund our trips. We did this door-to-door individually, but in group outside grocery store and on university campuses.
• I remember watching eclipses as a child with great fascination. I also enjoyed trips to the local observatory and planetarium. In addition to that, a rotating selection of local museums were free on Tuesdays, and there were several I enjoyed going to. In high school, my friend and I made a train trip by ourselves to nearby LA to see an exhibition our history teacher had mentioned.
• In later years of high school, my boyfriend and I would go on various trips with our parents - his took us around the country going to vintage ballroom dance events, mine took us abroad going to math conferences. His parents would also bribe us with boba tea to go to regular ballroom dance classes.
• Hmm, this is potentially getting past the childhood stage you're looking for. Back to younger things. My family would have a family reunion of sorts at my grandparent's house in Florida every few years around the 4th of July. We would set off fireworks and go boating and have barbecues and that sort of thing. My grandparents had a house on a canal, and once while swimming in it, I rode on a manatee. They are very slow moving and easy to lure in with fresh water and lettuce and the one I rode on did not seem distressed and eventually rolled over when it didn't want me there anymore.
• In second grade or so, a kid in my class accused me of not really reading during reading time, because I wasn't saying anything as I read.
• Around the same time, my parents made a SAT study program, and bribed me with the Verbal sections to practice the Math sections.
• Sometime during elementary school, there was a year of mandated music education in which everyone got a flutophone and had to learn to play it. The flutophone is an utterly ridiculous instrument that no one should ever learn to play.
• At another point, a charismatic guy came to school and made chess sound really cool and gave magnetic pocket chess sets to everyone who joined an after school chess club. After school chess club was tremendously boring and we were all utterly let down, but the magnetic pocket chess sets were still neat.
• When I was very young, I found my mom's safety razor and tried rubbing it on my head. It didn't seem to do anything that I could tell, but she later freaked out at me about it. Another time, when I was even younger, I was riding in the car and had an itchy tag on the back of my neck, so I rummaged in my mom's purse for scissors to cut it off with. All my hair was in the way of getting to the tag, though, so I chopped it all off. I was very proud of myself for solving my problem, but my mom still freaked out and pulled over into the first hair salon she found :P
• Another time when I was very young, my dad was taking me on a road trip. While we were driving, he was trying to teach me to tell jokes. I made up a bunch of dumb kid jokes that he thought were hilarious. I also got carsick and threw up. After that, he told me to let him know if I was feeling sick again, and he would pull over first. I waited a while, then puffed my cheeks out and made sick noises. After he quickly pulled over, I laughed. He was proud of me for playing a prank on him.
• During elementary school, I lived in an apartment complex, and didn't have cable TV. On my way home from school, I would visit the complex's main office to sit in their lobby and watch cartoons. The staff there all thought I was cute and would give me candy.
• I would occasionally walk around town by myself, when I was late elementary school and middle school aged. I would visit various interesting shops, like the bookstore, the candy store, an occult shop, various art galleries, etc. Sometimes I would go visit my mom at work.
• Once when I was visiting the mall by myself (in fourth grade or so), I decided to read they puberty books aimed at boys, since they only went over the girl stuff in my health class in school. A man noticed me there by myself and started talking to me. I tried to escape the conversation by saying I had to go home, but he said he would walk me home. He asked me what grade I was in and other things as I left the mall and tried to figure out how to lose him and not lead him to where I lived. He suggested we could be friends, and I said I didn't think my mom would want me to have adult friends (a lie, actually, I considered myself friends with several of my mother's friends). He said I didn't have to tell her. We got to across the street from my apartment complex and then by sheer luck I saw my mother and waved and called to her. The man abruptly turned the corner and left and I never saw him again. My mom was shaken and gave me the Find And Tell An Adult If There Is Someone Being Creepy At You talk.
• For a while, I was in an after-school program that would give kids play money when they were good, which could be used to buy things like candy and plastic bracelets and cool erasers and such at the end of each week. My friend and I were generally good kids and got awarded a decent amount of the play money, but we would still go over to her house and make counterfeits every week to get more candy.
• On the bus, my mom started chatting with a local university student who ran the anime club and was active in the SCA. She started taking me to SCA events and I would borrow anime from him to watch.
• When I was very young, my favorite book was my uncle's "bone book", a large, full-color, 2-volume photograph atlas of human anatomy. It was in Spanish, and I loved it so much my mom got the English version for me. I was confused when, as an adult, I found the Spanish version in my uncle's house, but remembered having been able to read the book. My mom explained about the two different versions.

Oh wow, this list got REALLY LONG. I will stop for now.

Tamien wrote:For a while, I was in an after-school program that would give kids play money when they were good, which could be used to buy things like candy and plastic bracelets and cool erasers and such at the end of each week. My friend and I were generally good kids and got awarded a decent amount of the play money, but we would still go over to her house and make counterfeits every week to get more candy.

Good kids indeed! xD

Well, "good" as far as the people running the program were concerned - we played nicely, we were respectful to the staff, we followed directions, and so on. And they never caught us on our counterfeiting (somehow), so for all they knew, we were quite exemplary :P

I am not sure if my childhood was lonely/boring/not-happy enough, but I cant offer many personal ideas:
*I used to draw during recess when I was 10-12 this atracted a future-friend that wanted to learn and I started to give him lessons, that devolved into simply drawing together. This could be used for any skill.
*I once got lost in the mall and had to wait in the room where they made the annoucements.
*I dont reallyyyy have any personal material that fits the kind of childhoods that effulgence kids have, most of what I remember is boring or family making fun of me or sad, if you need that let me know.
*Hospital visit, the kid character can be sick or visiting the sick friend. If you want it specific, the non-magical classmate is going to go through a important surgery and the class visits they. Is that enough?
*Wishcoins + Children = Lots of fun! Can go many ways, some coins might be special gifts for birthdays or christmas.
**Triangles = the kid got the first batch of wishcoins. They cant use them all at once, but how long it can last? Triangles are so small, it wouldnt hurt to use just one more, right?
**Squares = the kid is rewarded with a dozen squares "altered" so they will only give toys, the kid has a entire afternoon to kill, what toys will be wished?
**Pentagon = the kid has a friend that is failing classes, so they ask for a pentagon.
**Hex = an extra special gift is a personal play room that the kid can design with the parent help

Me an my two younger cousins (for child-child interactions)
-My little cousins and I played a lot of hide and seek. The older one made beeping noises when people were close to her hiding spot.
-We designed superpowers we wanted and made up superheros/villains to go with them, and then played as them. My younger little cousin was my sidekick and the older one was my friendly nemesis.
-In the winter, we went sledding together. On steeper hills, the sled sometimes flipped over and I wound up buried in snow. Afterward, the grownups made a cauldron of hot chocolate for everyone.
-I got my littlest cousin to play with me with little dolls while I pretended to be a benevolent deity sort of thing and he caused them natural disasters.
-We would create pillow forts with furniture and then try to find ways to sneak into each others forts through holes already there without collapsing the forts.
-We used washable facepaint to paint each other's faces. Their mom would help if we wanted any of the lines to be very neat. We would also paint each others toenails in the summer and sit around on their lawn eating frozen things and telling stories or talking.
-We went geocashing a few times and left art projects we didn't want to throw out but didn't want to keep and took slinkies and yoyos.
-We took turns pushing each other on a swing set while singing songs we'd heard recently or talking.
-(when my oldest little cousin and I were very young and my youngest one hadn't been born) We wanted to help my aunt with baking our Grandma's chocolate birthday cake. She put the ingredients together and put the mixing bowl on the floor and gave us both whisks. We stirred it for a while and were doing okay, so she thought it would be alright to go to the bathroom for a few minutes. While she was gone, I accidentally picked the whisk up in a way that flung the batter into the air. My cousin thought I did it on purpose and it looked like fun, so she copied me. We soon had flung the batter all around the kitchen and when my aunt came back, we were dancing in the chocolate batter and rubbing it in our hair. She wound up making a different and less complicated cake by herself.
-My littlest cousin would sit on my back and I would crawl around the room and take him to fight the sofa monsters and explore the blanket forests.
-My older little cousin walked to school with me and we made up names for the different patches of cacti we took shortcuts near.
-I used to be exactly one head taller than my oldest little cousin, and she was exactly one head taller than her little brother, so we would sometimes stack our heads up and pretend to be a three-headed monster when our families were trying to take our pictures.
-We played a lot of I-Spy games on the computer because we were about equal at finding things and the computer chair was big enough to hold all of us, which was good for group work.

Me and my parents (adult-child)
-On weekend mornings, we would all snuggle in their bed and drink coffee or tea while we talked or read or watched TV.
-My dad and I set up a game where we would pretend to be robots and when one of us poked the other's nose, we'd little beep noises.
-When I played games with hand puppets (simple bird, butterfly, snake, lizard) he would cooperate and make up stories with me by making a spider with his hands.
-My mom taught me the basics of playing piano and writing music.
-We went to a lot of science museums. At a children's science museum, I got to put some sort of colored powder into a cup, and the museum staff melted it to make a candle.
-My mom is a physicist and I got into some trouble at school for kicking up a fuss about there being more than three kinds of matter, and no seriously, plasma's are cooler than all of those other ones, didn't they care about freaking lightning?
-My mom used to be a meteorologist, and she liked to show me clouds and tell me what kinds they were. Sometimes we went on walks in the morning and admired the pretty sunrises. She explained (in simple terms) how the sunlight colored the clouds.
-My mom and I sometimes listened to audiobooks while she knitted and I finger-knitted. I never learned how to cast off, so I've still got a bag somewhere of an extremely long string of loose stitches connected to a ball of yarn.
-I occasionally insisted that I was a fairy and they helped me pin cloths to the back of my shirt for my wings and found me a scarf to pin to my pants. I was really confident about the last one because I was certain that there were such things as "fairy tails" and that was where the expression came from.

I hope some of these help!

More summer camp-type stuff:
canoeing/kayaking, fishing
rock climbing
high ropes courses (similar to rock climbing but usually involved some sort of team-building exercise as well)
camping in tents, including relevant hiking and campfire and camp-cooking (dinner that was basically meat+potatoes+corn wrapped in tin foil, smores, pudgy pies, "banana splits")
writing an acting in a play
exploring old houses/mansions (the camp I went to had a "castle" built in the 1920s with a secret passage and interesting history stuff)

I am really enjoying all of the adorable childhood stories in this thread :D

Kappa wrote:I am really enjoying all of the adorable childhood stories in this thread :D

Yay! Me too!