Ever watch a kid doing something and instantly wish you had a DeLorean so you could travel back in time and punch yourself for doing the same thing when you were a kid? No? Just me?
Oh.
Well, I do it a lot. Every single time Alexis balances on the couch arms and swings her legs all around in the air, I hear my mother yelling at me. "GET DOWN before you break the couch!" I'd still be willing to call her bluff that anything I did would break the couch, but the fact that I could have broken my face acting like a goober is quite the revelation.
Then there's that sassy mouth thing that Alexis has going on. When she starts talking back, I feel the apple falling off of the tree and landing on my foot. On it's way down, I think the apple mutters something about "karma" and "paybacks" and "getting what you deserve." I'm not positive because I'm always too busy thinking about how I should have had my mouth sewn shut when I pulled some of the same crap.
However, perhaps my most face-slapping worthy moment came to me this past weekend as Alexis and several other neighbor kids did this:
I had completely forgotten about The Slip-n-Slide Shenanigans. Or blocked them from my memory. Whichever.
As Alexis and her friends took turns running across the yard and launching themselves down the plastic, I remembered doing the exact same thing with friends as a kid. So many things were the same. Our current neighborhood is somehow reminiscent of the neighborhood where I lived from 4th grade on. You know, if you swap out the run-down mobile homes with new 3000 square foot McMansions, but who cares about details like that? We've got the same middle-of-nowhere-yet-close-to-town thing going on, and that's what counts.
Some of Alexis' neighborhood friends are a bit older than her and some are younger. There are boys and girls, sisters and brothers, and generally just a great mix of completely dissimilar kids who manage to share a common love of fun. The same can easily be said for the kids I hung out with back in the day.
One thing that is different, however, is that we never really had a good yard for a Slip-n-Slide. They pretty much require grass, and that's something that was mostly lacking in my neighborhood. There was lots of dirt and mud and weeds, but nobody had a great lawn. And, really, you HAVE to have a decent lawn for a Slip-n-Slide.
So we improvised.
And used the Slip-n-Slide indoors.
IN. A. HOUSE. (Technically a double-wide trailer, but whatever.)
It wasn't an adult-supervised activity, obviously. It was a little something that sort of maybe kind of happened when Rhonda's parents were at work. We would roll out the Slip-n-Slide in their living room, use pitchers and cups to haul water over to it, and slide. In the living room.
I really need to go find 12-year old me and slap her for that crap.