Show & Tell: Games I Played When I Was Little

Show & Tell is finally back after a long summer break! September's hostess is Olgakatt and she has chosen four interesting themes for the first month of autumn (these can also be found in one of the right-hand columns):

3 September: Games I played when I was little
10 September: If I could decide, I would...
17 September: My worst stupid fear/madness (noja)
24 September: A comment/remark I will never forget

So, how did I occupy myself when I was a child? I played with dolls a lot - both Barbies and regular dolls. I actually continued to play with dolls in secret until I was 14 or so. Malin was my main accomplice but other friends were also guilty of not wanting to grow up completely. Or maybe playing "house" could be seen as preparing for future motherhood and family life. We stopped when the youth centre (fritidsgården) became a more interesting hangout.

When I was 13 my family moved from a flat to a house and in my room there was (well, still is, but now it's my parents' bedroom) a smaller attic, one of those that runs along the walls of the house (with perhaps max 1½ metres from floor to ceiling). In there Malin and I "furnished" a small room and played house. Once we even lit candles in there before my mum caught us and gave us a lecture on safety. This room in many ways replaced the little playhouse and the caravan we had played in at our summer house that my parents' sold to buy the house.

I also liked lego a lot (still do), assembling models but especially playing house through lego. We used to build the contours of a house including walls and furniture, like a blueprint or layout of a house in legos. We used a '1 lego piece and a head to make a baby lego man :)

But with all this, especially the last few years, i.e. the late pre-teens and the early teen years, the game was all about the set-up and we didn't really play very much, except for going through our favourite baby names or having Barbie and Ken have sex a lot :)

I was really disappointed recently when I found out that one of my favourite childhood toys had been thrown out. I really thought it was in my parents' attic (the one we played in) where I still store a lot of my old toys and school papers, and since I got pregnant I had been looking forward to fixing it up. But after both my dad and I had been crawling around in there for a while without finding it, I started thinking that perhaps it had been stored in my grandmother's attic instead (she used to live across the road from us) and had either had been thrown out or taken care of by my aunt when my grandmother's house was sold a few years ago. After all, it used to belong to my aunt when she was little. But turns out she had not kept it; it went out with the thrash whenmy grandmother moved :(

So, please help me find a copy of this little toy pushchair! It's a 1940s (or perhaps early 50s) style in wood. Mine was green just like this one but I don't care if it's another colour because my plan is to repaint it anyway. The below picture comes from Blocket where there is one for sale for 550 SEK but I'm hoping to pay a little bit less - they have sold them for 300 SEK at auctions - unless I get desperate of course.



Another favourite toy of mine, which also used to belong to my aunt, is Kerstin, a doll from the same time period. Though she sort of looked like this already when I was little, so I didn't really play with her that much. I'm going to take her to the "doll doctor" to get her limbs attached again and I also think she'd appreciate a new set of hair. She has a voice box inside and used to be able to say "mummy" but I'm not sure if it's possible to fix that; maybe too expensive and not worth it.





I was also quite a tomboy as a child, maybe because I only had male cousins (in addition to my brother) until I was eleven when my cousin Emma was born, and liked climbing trees and building tree houses. I played football from age 9 to 16 and tried a lot of other sports including athletics and rugby (not that these are only boy things; just telling you that so you don't think all I did was play with dolls). Another favourite pastime of mine was jigsaw puzzles - when I was very little I was a quite active child and the only thing that could make me sit still for a long time was puzzles.