I Miss Hanging Upside Down…

Carnival barkers wait for customers to walk by on a rainy afternoon during the 2013 Slyvan Beach Festival in LaPorte, Harris County, Texas
Copyright by WyoJones. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

What do you miss about being a kid? This photo, taken by the hubs, took caught my eye. We didn’t do a lot of carnivals when I was a kid, because money was always tight. No, what caught my eye was the stuffed toys hanging upside down.

I used to hang upside down a LOT when I was a kid. If it was:

bar-like
had clearance for knees
was up
or anything one could hang their head off of, including the couch

… we’d try to hang from it. I’m not sure playgrounds have monkey bars now. Or swings you can hang from (oh yes we did). Gravity was kinder back then. or I had less mass. It’s probably gravity that changed. But back then, I could get my knees over my head without laying on the floor. And my arms could support my mass.

I’m not sure why kids like to hang upside down. Or why I liked to hang upside down (though I was NOT alone) when I was kid. It wasn’t as if I needed to see the world new. It was new to me. And constantly changing and constantly interesting.

Once I knocked myself out because I tried to hang by my knees from a bar. Well, technically it was the bar’s fault. It lost its grip.

And yet I still went on hanging upside down.

I also liked to be up. We climbed trees, up on the roof, up bleachers, hillsides (so we could roll or run down), and oh yeah, the stilts. What was up with the stilts? Were we trying to get taller (something I still wish for!) or trying to kill ourselves?

There were 40+ kids in the single block of the little town where I grew up. All of us trying to fling ourselves from one thing to another. We laughed. We fought. We tried. We failed. We banged up knees and elbows. We lived.

And part of it we lived upside down.

I miss hanging upside down.

What do you miss about being a kid? Not only do you get to be nostalgic about being a kid, but all comments are entered into my drawing for an AnaBanana Gift basket that won’t make you young but can make you smell yummy and better. Winner is announced first blog post of the new month.