Flashback Friday: Favorite Activity

The theme for Flashback Friday this week is Favorite Activity or Toy. Unfortunately, and quite astonishingly, I don't have any photos of me playing with Legos, which was probably my all-time favorite toy as a child (and those of you who know me in person also know that there are Legos to be found in our house at this very moment, and they're not Little Omi's!). I was heavily into the Castle series and had a whole portion of the floor in my room dedicated to my castles and surrounding forests.

While playing Legos was primarily a solo activity, by far the most popular toys my sister and I played with together were our My Friend Mandy and Jenny dolls, or "Mands and Jens" as we called them. We also had Becky and Mikey, and although you may remember Charles and Diana's as the biggest wedding event of the 1980s, you obviously did not receive an exclusive invitation to the nuptials of Mandy and Mikey. We worked for days on this big wedding. Our mom made all the dresses by hand. Sis and I made tiny tulle-wrapped rice baggies. And the whole event went off without a hitch, or apparently a wedding photographer, because we have no photos of it!

In the summers in Colorado, my sister and I turned our attention to our Lincoln Logs. I have to admit we spent many hours building, demolishing, and re-building to perfection "The Lincoln Lodge" even into our teen years. By this time, we insisted we were building, not playing. Note the distinction!

I am not sure if we built a huge number of sandcastles together, but I just happen to have TWO photographs commemorating this craft. I think they were taken in the same year. The top photo was taken on our road trip to the Pacific Northwest; I remember wearing that satin-heart-covered sweatshirt and wondering why so many people were still mistaking me for a boy. The photo below was taken at our grandparents' cabin in Colorado, and I'm pretty sure that shortly afterwards, we were busy playing with our Star Wars action figures in this castle/Hoth snow fort.