Recess

~You are worried about seeing him spend his early years doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I totally meant to blog yesterday but didn't find the time. We were up early (haha, ya, 8:00 is early now dayz) cleaning the church. I got really hyper-doesn't happen a lot but I guess it was the getting up early... but I had fun :) I didn't mean to but then I took a three hour nap! I love naps! They're amazing. I got to hang out with a friend for a while and went to see fireworks later :) It was a good day.

I started a church music station on Pandora-sometimes I can't listen to it very long but I really enjoy it. Oh, and I went to the single's ward today-a lot like my student ward at BYU (I guess that was a single's ward too though) but a lot smaller. I do feel too young for my home ward Relief Society but I'm not very social so idk about single's ward :P

Anyway, I was talking to a friend yesterday and we got on the subject of Elementary School. I was thinking about the games we used to play... oh recess. I think the most fun, honestly, was in fifth grade. We were all kind of united and my whole class would hang out together. We had a long stretch of sitting on top of the "S" bars-the monkey bars in an "S" shape :) We would sit up there and talk and sing all the songs we were learning in class. It was great fun. We sung the "Spider Fighters" song and the "Pink Pajamas" one... and we sung the one that goes, "I don't want to be chicken, I don't want to be a duck, I just want to shake my butt" a lot-and we had actions. Haha, but the principal asked us to stop because the little kids on the other playground were trying the same thing and would fall off-sad day.

The next best had to be when we had the whole grade playing together every recess. Second grade. We would start every Monday with two teams-boys vs. girls-of course. Yes, we played the basic "chase" type game-but if you got caught by the other team they had to drag you across the "potty" (a large circle grate by the portables). Then, you were on the other team. Pretty sure you could be switched back-but the details are a little sketchy. By Friday everything was mixed up and you didn't know who was on what team :)

We spent time playing "Truth or Dare," "Little Sally Walker," and strange games we made up. We pretended we were horses for a while, or that we had imaginary pet cats, or that we had certain stuffed animals we had to protect from the bad guys. Some weird stuff. We played kick ball and collected potato bugs and snails. One time, when it snowed, we make an ice skating rink. It took a while-piling the snow and packing it down so it was slippery... but so worth it. Pretty sure other kids helped make it and used it too-but at least they didn't break it like they did all our giant snow balls :)

Everyone said I'd miss recess when I went to middle school. I guess I kind of did-but not terribly. I would guess going to private school and only getting 15 minutes a day to prepare us for middle school helped. But we did have some pretty awesome times in those 15 minutes-we found baby birds and got sick spinning on the tire swing-we had a system. And we used to play a game on the, like, tile stairs behind the baseball thing. The stairs were pretty big and we would bounce a ball and try and have it hit every step on the way down. Then, we could only jump on the steps the ball hit when we went down to get it. Haha, always fun in our skirts-our uniforms.

But I guess I kind of grew out of recess...? Besides, recess in high school would have been all about competition and cell phones and ipods and who was dating who and who was fighting... just not the same.