Country Bumpkins

I came across this blog that I had once written on MySpace. It gave me a good laugh. It's funny whether you know me and my siblings or not, but it's even funnier if you were there to experience any of these things with us. Enjoy!

The first thing that comes to my mind was when we lived in Bowie and used to climb on the roof of the house. We used to walk across the top as if we were gold medalist gymnasts walking the balance beam. I can't imagine what it would have felt like to fall and I am guessing that I never thought about that at the time. What kid actually weights the pros and cons of doing something stupid or dangerous? Our house had that tin stuff on the roof and we would have slipped and completely crashed into the ground. Nothing would have stopped us. Our parents hated when we got on the house. Of course we used to lie and say we weren't up there even though they could hear our feet from inside the house. Stupid kids.

We also had a garage, more like a shack, located beside the house. We used to jump from the house to the garage--about a 3 feet gap with a fence below--with no worries. Now, I'm thinking that we were lucky not to collapse through the garage because it was pretty old and did really resemble a garage that had been caught on fire. Plus, the house and garage were not level to each other. The garage was actually a little lower than the house. So it may seem easy to you, but we used to jump BACK to the house from the garage. Also, I think I was in like 7th grade and not very tall. My sisters were younger than that and even smaller. So how on earth did we come to the idea that jumping from the house to the roof was a good idea? I am thinking that was probably because of our older brother. He was usually the one who got us into such shenanigans. Which brings me to my next point...

My brother used to remove the ladder from the house/garage and we would have to jump to get down. I was on the garage with two friends (Lena and Joyce) and we decided to jump. One of them jumped first and landed on her knees. The other one jumped and landed on her butt. I jumped and thought I broke both of my ankles. I landed on my feet, like a cat, but then fell to the ground thanks to the horrible pain. Of course that didn't stop us from doing it again.

My youngest sister (Shelby) once decided to climb down the garage via the tree in the neighbor's yard, which also had this huge, tall, spiky fence. She almost fell and came up all scraped up and hurting. Yikes!

We used to trek out to this tank and play in the "quicksand". It felt like real quicksand. We would sink our bodies down into it and we would get stuck. We had to fight and fight and continue to fight in order to get out of said quicksand. We often had to pull one of us out because it was just too difficult alone. I can't imagine if we would have "pranked" each other and took off running and left the other one in the quicksand. I guess we wouldn't do that because then we'd have one less kid to get in trouble with.

Also, we used to swim in the tank. Thinking back, that's so gross. I can't imagine what kinds of disgusting things are lurking beneath the surface. We were out there ALL the time. My dad even built us our own makeshift dock. It was this wood platform with gigantic barrels underneath it and we even had a ladder. I know, creative, huh?

When we lived out in the country, my parents were nice enough to get us go-carts and a three-wheeler. Let's just say three-wheelers are incredibly dangerous and while I'm at it I'll just say so are go-carts. We used to drive incredibly fast on the 3-wheeler around the house. Well...you see...this tree jumped out in front of me...and hit me...and I was on crutches for like 6 months. 5th grade was the worst year of my life.

I was the passenger on one of our go-carts with my crazy cousin (Aimee) driving. She came down this hill and turned so fast I flew off. I didn't break my arm or anything, but it hurt like hell for a really long time.

We had some horse stables out behind the house. I think this was around the Babysitter's Club time frame because my sisters and me decided to make our own special clubhouse. So we brought chairs, magazines, a radio, and other assorted items out to our new clubhouse. We even used mom's sheets to make walls. Needless to say, those damn walls couldn't keep out our brother and his friends much less the disastrous thunderstorm that ruined our clubhouse AND radio.

Another time on the go-cart, we (my brother driving and me as passenger) saw a huge snake stretched completely across the dirt road. So we turned around at the cattle guard (yes we used to love to ride over that thing because of the bumps) and went screaming to our dad. The next thing we know, my dad, Uncle John, and Tim (a family friend) are out in the tall grass in their hunting boots with shotguns. I know, dangerous.

Oh man, I really could go on and on forever...

Thanks for reading about SOME of my crazy memories with my siblings! :)