The Funny Thing About Parental Supervision

This story could go in my Pirate category, we were still very much invested in our pirate ways when this occurred but I decided to let it stand on its own. Anyway as I alluded to in, Pirates Part 1, my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and various other concerned adults weren’t constantly up in our business during our adventures.  I’m more grateful for that than I can say.  I dislike what seems to be the current trend in parenting where parents are constantly breathing down their kids necks while they’re playing or giving them iPads to entrain themselves.  Of course I’m not a parent so I can’t really say how I’ll act or how parents should act, it just seems that me that the way my family did it was the way to go.

Anyway to the story:

Cast of Characters:

My sister and brother: Colleen and John

My Cousins: Patrick, Thomas, and Noel

My grandparents house, where I spent quite a lot of time growing up, is wild.  There is the house, the lawn, and the pool but there is also a ton of other land that they never really did anything with, other than carve out a driveway.  A driveway that is constantly under assault from the trees and blackberry bushes.  This driveway is hilly and no matter if you’re at the top by the house or at the beginning on the street you’re going down hill.  It’s also a semi circle so you’re never far from the pool, which is where the adults spent their summer nights.  It should be noted that we called the driveway “The Jungle Book”.

Anyway someone in the family was the proud owner of this wonderful machine:

we called it Big Green, and it was the source of hours of dangerous fun.  We packed between three and five of us; yes we did get five people on that thing on a regular basis, and road down The Jungle Book.  Three people sat on the seat and two pilled into the tenuously attacked bucket. Eventually we lost the bucket and only three of us could go at a time.  It was a sad day.

I was usually the driver because I was the worst at it.  Yep. That’s our eight(ish) year old logic at it’s finest.  I was the WORST driver so I HAD to drive.  Colleen could usually negotiate the us safely to the bottom of the driveway, Patrick didn’t want to drive, and John, Thomas, and Noel were too young by our standards.  Noel was actually banished from The Jungle Book after one ride because she started crying.

Because I was the worst driver we crashed nearly every time.  Usually it was into the black berry bushes, sometimes we tipped it over and fell in the dirt.  Once in fifty runs we’d make it to the bottom of the hill unscathed.  It was always disappointing.

The next logical step was to drive it into the pool.  We took the bucket off for this, probably at the insistence of one of the grown ups.  I wasn’t driving this time, I think Colleen was, and we road as fast as we could at the pool.  The front wheel went over the edge and we tipped in.  The tractor fell on top of us… and floated there.  Yep.  It floated.  So disappointing.

We spent the next week or so trying to figure out how to sink it.

What crazy things did you do as a kid? Leave a comment telling the story.

Hope you leave here laughing,

Leenie