Memories

I never liked going to see Santa, but I loved all the toys. Note that Santa's watch is on the outside of his glove. He needs to know when it's break time so he can get a sip from the flask.

Not sure why, but as a kid I loved posing with my toys. I guess for historical and hysterical reasons that was a good thing. I was not a great archivist at the age of eight. You can see that I taped the now rare Batman Button banner to the wallpaper in my room.

We brought the kids to the Indianapolis Children's Museum yesterday. The museum takes toys seriously, the museum devotes half of a floor to the history of Barbie (I also saw a GI Joe display case from afar but we weren't able to get a closer look as the kids dragged us in the opposite direction). The mini museum was impressive with doll/playhouse/vehicle dioramas and representative dolls from Barbie's 50+ year history, mannequins were dressed in Barbie fashions from real world designers (like Donna Karen) and the first Barbie doll produced was displayed in her original box.

I guess I was typical of a child of the 1970s. I was a latchkey kid raised in a single-parent household. We had to learn to take care of ourselves at an early age because of our working parent. One of these challenges was feeding ourselves...can of fruit cocktail or pudding, Hostess, Little Debbie, Dolly Madison, and TV dinners (I remember peeling back the foil over the dessert and lighting the stove with a match, "Boy when that stove lit it sure made a scary sound!") By far the most important food of those years was hands down cereal!