D: ignore this thread
Okay, I will.
Give me, like, five minutes.
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Victory for Sylvanas
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Did everyone have a fun Halloween
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Pile in, WrA. New jungle gym on the playground.
I get the high bars.
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Hell yeah, time to swing (not the pineapple kind).
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The only reason the local playgrounds in my area kept their swings and slides for as long as they did was because the local city council is a dysfunctional mess at the best of times.
I understand that we have to keep things as safe as possible, and that dumbest people will ruin things for everyone else, but the sad replacements, swings, see-saws and this profoundly unnerving caterpillar-like abomination, just doesn’t have the same impact as the monkey-bars and the metal slide.
Returns the soap-box for the next person, goes in search of their vicodin.
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My neighborhood recently lost its beloved wooden castle-type playground. It’s been there for decades (insane for a wood playground), but years of weather, termites, repairs, and apparently insurance costs was the end of it after a prolonged battle to keep it. To my township’s credit, they really tried, but 30 years is a long time to maintain even the best of treated wood.
I have countless memories of playing on such playgrounds, including all the splinters, the feeling of getting lost in its mazes, all the imaginative play with other kids, and of course, getting stung on my stomach of all places after I crawled over a mud dauber’s nest on the high bars.
I hope they replace it with something equally insane so more generations will have their own epic playground stories to tell.
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The metal slides. I think I have PTSD from the metal slides. The ones at school were like 50 feet tall, I swear. And there there was the summer sun and shorts. Not a good combination. I think I had to go to the doctor for burns once. And merry go rounds. I managed to fracture and hyper extend and ankle. The 70’s were actually an awesome time to grow up - if you made it through natural selection.
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Nothing was safer than the rusted metal bars of that weird looking dome thing that we climbed around on.
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It broke my heart to see stoppers on modern swing sets that prevents the swing from going parallel with the top bar.
That was the whole point! Get equal with the top of the swing set then launch into the gravel pit.
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Man, not again…
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It’s over, Anakin!
Don’t try it.
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My area had one of those safety hazard slides, it was one of the infamous metal slides and ended in a pile of wood chips.
Someone must’ve hated children because the slide was steep and oriented in a way that it would get as much sunlight as possible.
I even fried an egg on it, just for fun, well it started a small fire that a child, who learned how to be cool about fire safety, put out a tiny fire by smothering it with their jacket.
Oh and my brother donkey kicked a girl down one, one time.
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Nothing beat those lethal merry-go-rounds, aside from exploring creeks that were a good half-mile away from the nearest adult who could hear your screams if you ever got into real trouble. Plus, everybody knows that getting your toes pinched by crawdads and giant waterbugs builds character!
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It’s all wistful sighs and fond memories until the realization it’s the survivorship bias talking kicks in.
Like a lot of us didn’t make it.
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Pfft. Next you’re going to say that it’s a good thing they started putting safety nets on trampolines. As if it wasn’t a child’s God-given right to achieve escape velocity and tour the skies for a bit whenever their friend’s older brother jumped really hard next to them.
Bonus fun fact, catching snakes was a way safer summer activity for kids than nervous Nellies liked to pretend. The venomous ones almost always have rattles or funny colors to warn you away. Again, character building.
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Actually, yeah. I lived in a small town out in the middle of nowhere. By the time I was 5 I could identify what could kill me. I knew to stay away from rattles, snakes with a white mouth, and the little snakes that are red, yellow and black, have really small mouths.
As someone said, my generation grew up with hose water and neglect. I remember some of the kids building ramps for bikes to see how high they jump. I also remember getting to see an open skull fracture. it was pretty neat in a twisted kinda way. The kid was fine. He had a helluva scar to brag about though.
Good times, good times.
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The worst injury I ever encountered as a kid was when my cousin pulled loose the safety rail on the top bunk of a bunk bed and they both crashed on my head while I was quietly watching TV on the floor bellow. I was honestly safer with the snakes and the crawdads and the natural selection inspired playgrounds.
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Growing up, we knew where the venomous snakes tended to hang most and our parents made it clear never to go there. Otherwise, my father would regularly check for and handle all sorts of harmless snakes before he mowed the yard, so we always had some cool ones to look at, learn about, then release so it was kept out of harm’s way. I grew up with a very “steward of nature” family outlook and it’s likely why I later went into rescue.
Of course, being a kid and therefore stupid, me and a few others eventually ventured out to the venomous snake spot, anyway. There were MASSIVE boulders at the highest point of the backyard creek where no trees grew, so they were infested with copperheads who either sunned themselves atop or chilled below. Luckily, my father had spooked us so badly with childhood snakebite stories that when we spotted an impressively long and well-fed one sunning itself on the outermost rock, we said “well, good enough!” and headed back home.
See? Character building!
(Provided that grown ups teach nature’s basics such as “if it’s brightly colored or rattles, DO NOT TOUCH.”)
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