At night we went out and caught fireflys in an empty peanut butter jar and stared for many long moments at them, counting flashes, watching them slowly slow down (oxygen starvation?), who got the most fireflys ? .... we schooled ourselves in science and physics and had no words nor vocabulary for what we learned ..... we weren’t told something and told to remember it .... we actually LEARNED stuff !
My mom would teach us a lesson when we said we were bored in the summertime. She’s hand us old shoe boxes, string and a Sears catalogue. We’d tear out daddy’s, mommy’s, and make a family and glue them to index cards and cut them out. The shoe boxes were the cars so we’d decorate them and tie string to them to pull them around. We had a big bush outside with a spot just made for kids to play under so that was our town! Kept us busy for hours and sometimes days!
We loved our summer vacations in Indiana, where we hung out with our cousins down on Wild Cat Creek, caught fire flies, and roasted weenies over the fire. Homemade ice cream (do they even allow THAT anymore?!), hiding in the cornfields letting my Uncle Rick scare the bleep out of us... LOL Those were the days. I don’t think we even bothered watching TV at all.