As an opening statement, I'd like to point out that I mainly make these posts for my benefit, and since they're hard to understand, just know that I don't quite expect them to make sense to everyone.
The map above was from the children's book series The Edge Chronicles. Those books were so epic! Pirates and murderers and thieves and magic and... oh, it was heaven for a nerdy little chubby girl like me. And judging from the map alone, I'd say the story line was so good it could have even been made into young adult books. I never got through the whole series, which I kind of regret now, but the four I read really changed me. That was when I started being really into pirates. Especially since these guys rode ships that flew!! And everyday after school by little brother and I would go to the fort in the backyard and pretend it was our ship. Oh, those were the times. But that's not the only game we would play.
This is probably how old they were when we really got obsessed. My sister was somewhat of a tomboy so she was usually Ron, my little brother was Harry, and I, already having the book smarts and sass, got to be Hermione every time. We pretended we were at Hogwarts and actually had school, and would take turns giving each other homework. That's usually all we did, since there was no way to fake spells or flying, but it was still super fun. My brother and sister and I had some other games, too, that we just fabricated from really weird ideas. One game was called Poor People, and we would just try to make things out of stuff we found outside, sew clothes out of scraps, and eat really tiny bits of food. I think once we ate grass. But we got really into that one, too. A whole story line and everything. Also, something called Dumb People, usually consisting of us pretending to work at a restaurant and misunderstanding orders. It sounds super lame, but we had fun. Let's see, sometimes we would turn our brother's room into a huge blanket fort using chairs and tables and whatnot, and that would keep us busy for hours. My sister and I had a lot of Build-A-Bears, which we would play with pretty much all the time. I even thought they were real, the way kids nowadays believe in those creepy Elf-on-a-Shelf things. My brother and I got really into swinging, and we started doing synchronized swinging things. In order to make chores more fun, we made up the Clean Squad and had a theme song to go with it. Now that I write it, it all sounds so dumb. But you got to believe me, it was super fun back then. It was probably fun because I was young in the early 2000's, before it was appropriate to let young children go on computers or have iPods. And I am actually really grateful that I was a kid when I was, because I don't think I would have ever developed my imagination as well as I did. I can feel it fading every time I come out of the comatose of watching tv, or pulling myself away from the laptop screen for a moment. I can tell that I'm becoming less of an individual as I constantly shove other people's ideas in my face. What happened to that childhood? What happened to that girl who made up her own rules to her own games, who strung together elaborate systems of play that she enjoyed with no one but her two like-minded siblings? Where is that girl now? You know, we even made up a code, one that only the three of us would understand, and my sister and I actually became quite proficient at it. That's how inventive we were. I wish that could last my whole life. I still have a chance i suppose; it's only been a decade, whereas most lose their childhood altogether and never look back. I won't be that kind of adult. The key to life is balance- and that is not going against my Christian views or anything just because it's a world-known concept- so to balance one's maturity with their imagination is actually vitalizing life. And, IN MY OPINION, that's the way it should be.
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