Remember When You Were a Kid and Life Was an Adventure?

Do you remember when you were a kid?
Your friends were really your friends... Friendship would last forever...
You'd hang out all day... and Summers were eternal too...
You lived where you did and would do till the end of time... and you were never going to leave the house you grew up in...
Anything out of the ordinary, like a trip through the woods or down a street you'd never been was an Adventure... Just like staying out late after dark or having sleep-overs!
Enough money for a bag of sweets was more than you ever needed...
Where the idea was to stay out as long as possible and not in...
When not having a bike would have been worse than today's equivalent of not having the latest 'games machine'...
A time when kids were kids and your life was infinite with no end in sight.

How times change; you may have even completely forgotten what it was like growing up - until I reminded you just now.

Some of you reading will now have kids, so you still get to experience 'being a kid' once in a while. Fortunately I get to borrow (and return) my nephews when I want to remind the kid inside me how simple life used to be. We hang out, play, talk nonsense, discuss possibilities of things that are 'out there', watch films - even though they think the last Star Wars trilogy is the original and prefer the Lego versions anyway.
Yep, I also admit to watching the latest Disney and Pixar flicks and use them as an excuse.

Now, if you're like me you'll remember those feeling mentioned earlier and great 80's films like ET, The Goonies, Stand By Me, Flight Of The Navigator & The Explorers. As kids and young teenagers they were wild rides of the imagination, yet real enough that it could be you.

Well I got to watch 'Earth To Echo' with the nephews recently and it's the nearest to all of those films these days, with the memories and feelings you're likely to get that I mentioned earlier.
It has been updated to modern times, to include camcorders and mobile phones - but these kids are ready to hit the dirt road on their bikes and ride into the night to see how far they can go, rather than hide inside.
Borrow a couple of kids if you have to or just watch it yourself to feed the 'inner child'.
If you've not seen the 80's films I've mentioned earlier, check them out too.

Remind yourself how great life used to be and can be again; if you just treat it, once more, like a kid on the ADVENTURE of a lifetime - your lifetime! THIS Lifetime!

Let me know when you've watched it and what you thought.

Some Rules Kids Won't Learn in School

Things that kids did not and will not learn in school. How feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them up for failure in the real world.  See the list below...

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it! 

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. 

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both. 

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. 

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity. 

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them. 

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room. 

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. 

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters.. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time. 

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. 

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. 

Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts. 

Rule 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately. 

Rule 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now.  

You're welcome.

Original list by Charles J. Sykes

Author of "Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add" 

and "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education"

http://www.the50rules.com