My Top Ten Favorite Toys of All Time (as a former kid ;)):

10. Lincoln Logs at Mimi & Popop Ninno’s house. I loved how the closet they were stored in under the basement stairs smelled like the Lincoln Logs (or did the Lincoln Logs smell like the closet?).

9. Stuffies: My Dumbo stuffie and Doughnut the Blue Bunny. Dumbo was a plain old souvenir stuffie my mom and I brought back from Gram Noble’s house when we went out to visit her in San Diego when I was 4 and she took us to Disneyland for mom’s birthday. I brought Dumbo back when we came home and took him to Mimi & Popops’ house to show him off and his bow came untied. I remember sitting in Popop’s chair and retying the blue bow – the first time I ever tied a bow! (Thanks Uncle Mark.) Doughnut was a blue bunny my parents bought for me when I was 6 weeks old – filled with plastic beans and definitely not childproof – would you believe I not only survived that dastardly childhood choking hazard, but Spawn did, too? He’s still a fixture in our house to this day. =D My dad tells me that after his and my mom’s divorce, he often took me out to breakfast on Saturday mornings when I was 4. We were leaving the diner one Saturday post-divorce and I was lugging Doughnut along with me, when Dad asked what my bunny’s name was. And I answered, “Doughnut.” No explanation, nothing. My dad said he was so surprised to discover Doughnut had a name after 4 years of love and abuse, it didn’t occur to him at the time to ask why I’d named him that. Some mysteries are better off left to the universe. ;)

8. My dad’s creeper – the thing with wheels that you lay on to skooch under a car to work on it? Yeah, my dad got one for Christmas when I was 2 years old and I used it to creep under the Christmas tree to look up at the lights through the branches. (My earliest childhood memory is of skooching on the creeper under the tree and laying down with my dad to look up at the lights.) I still lay on the floor under the tree to look up at the lights with DJ to this day. Walt and I even had a Christmas picnic in the living room once with wine – the works – when we first got married and I showed him the joy of skooching under the tree to look up at the lights. =D

7. The ancient old maple tree behind my Rutt grandparents’ house with the massive swinging branch and that held the old grill from an ancient barbecue grill that someone had wired to the tree and the tree had grown around. The first tree I ever climbed and the one I miss the most – though the lilac bush behind Gram Rutt’s house was every bit as much fun to play in. It made a great girly tree fort for me and the many cousins.

6. My Pappy Rutt’s garden. He even let me plant my own patch, choose what I wanted to plant, water (and over-water) my plants, pick my own berries and veggies, and even let me raid his cherry tomato and strawberry plants for snacks while we spent an afternoon in the garden pulling weeds and spreading compost so my cherry tomatoes and strawberries had more time to ripen before I ate them while they were still green. =D

5. My Gram Rutt’s silk scarves – scrounged from trunks in her attic by my cousins and I when we were bored on a rainy, spring day in the mid-80’s.

4. My mom’s dress slips, 70’s Little House sundresses, and high-heeled cork sandals.

3. The swings at the old Portland School playground across the street from my second childhood house. Even as teenagers in the middle of small town nowhere, the swings were something to do.

2. Big Wheels: What would all of us George Street kids have done without our Big Wheels (and Danny Lichten’s Mean Green Machine)? The sound of Big Wheels on new sidewalks is a sound that your memory never loses or forgets. I can close my eyes and think about Big Wheels and the sound of them on new sidewalks is the first thing that comes back to me.

1. The Cardboard Box: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2005-11-12-cardboard-box_x.htm Countless hours were spent luring my little brother into cardboard boxes only to shut the flaps on him and roll the box through the house with my neighbors Alan and Patrick. Payback - for when the little brat pantsed me in the kitchen in front of every other kid in our neighborhood that summer. ;)

Chrissi, Cyber School Mom