Olden days

One of my children asked me if I had Lincoln Logs back in the olden days. Yes, my darling daughter, my own flesh and blood, thinks I was alive in the olden days. I personally don't know the exact calendar dates of the olden days but I'm pretty sure I wasn't alive then. I don't even think my parents were alive then and they grew up before color TV and knew what it was like to use an outhouse or live in a cold-water flat. So if my parents aren't olden, I sure ain't olden. But the point is that olden can be golden. There is something really valuable about playing with toys as simple as blocks or Lincoln Logs. There is something to be said about being able to play without electronic assistance. I was talking to a kid once and told him he was being so well-behaved while he waited for his sister to finish her activity. He said he was cool because he had his mom's iPod. What in the world did we do without iPods? Do you remember watching shows like Little House on the Prairie. Life was so different, so simple. They didn't need much. Even as the world advanced, things were still pretty simple. A pinball machine. Simple, fun. Atari - very simple, fun. That was probably when it all started. Atari - games like that which catered to kids love of moving images. I guess they had to come up with something to entertain us since we only had four television channels. There's a commercial on right now where one kid is desperate in the back seat of his parents' car because they are singing. His buddy is in the car next to him and he's happy because he has headphones on and is watching a movie in the car. (Personally, I think portable DVD players are awesome for long trips, but if you're putting them on for a 10-minute drive, it's kind of ridiculous). I just wonder if we're hooking kids up to technology and doing them a disservice by not giving them the power to create fun and use their imaginations. Really, is it such a bad thing to be bored once in a while? I guess if we don't give the kids the iPods or the DSi or whatever else they can play with, they will find a way to entertain themselves. At the soccer field the other day, a bunch of kids were following a bottle cap down a stream. They were thinking of ways to get it to go faster and get it to turn and watching the progress. It was so cool to see them spending their time that way - doing a really simple thing. No one was fighting. No one was trying to see who could get to a higher level faster than their friend. They were just having fun - kind of like we did in the olden days.