Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

This is a guest post from Margie Hord Mendez.

     Hey, I got your attention… but no, we didn’t dance. But I’ve been thinking how different modern road trips with kids seem to be (from what I hear, mostly) to those back in my days. Now there are all kinds of contraptions to entertain them: talking books, DVD players, video games, MP3’s, iPods, you name it! Everyone can plug in to their own little world and leave one another alone, ideally.

     One cherished memory from my childhood is singing silly songs and playing little games in the car with our family, especially during summer. I don’t imagine we were very original, though we did harmony better than most, I suspect, with Mom being a lover of choral music.

    Silly songs are an all-time favorite, I’m sure. Everyone knows “This Old Man” and surely many are familiar with “The Quarter Master’s Store”. Now, I didn’t know what that was, which didn’t matter, but we honed our rhyming skills as we imagined “peas, peas, as big as Daddy’s knees” and an incredible variety of purchases there. There were some songs that had been toned down from raunchier originals, I learned later, such as “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” (Do they wobble to and fro…). I suspect that one was from Dad’s war days, and another song surely originated in some war: “I’ve Got Sixpence” (and each time the soldier sent less and less to his wife).

     Our Mom started Brownies and then Girl Scouts in our city, and there we also picked up favorites such as “There’s Something in My Pocket”, “something” being of course “a great big Brownie smile”.  One tune of a different nature was one we probably learned there, and I suspect had some type of religious origin. “Peace, I Ask of Thee, oh River”. Not silly, but peaceful and inspiring, and we did great harmony on that one.

     Then there were games to while the time away, with rules that could vary. We had to count special items we passed “on our side” to see who got more points. I think they could be cows, barns, cars from a certain state, whatever… for something like a white horse we could get extra points, and if I’m not mistaken, when we passed a cemetery all our points got wiped out.

     Our Mom was pretty good at inventing stories too, though I’m not sure whether they were only told at bedtime or also during trips. She kept us guessing as, for example, we tried to figure out what the “main character” of a tree had become after it went through many experiences… matches, perhaps?

     All this goes to say that, as amazing as the options offered by technology may be, hands down I think the old-fashioned “interactive” activities were better in terms of getting families to have fun together, silly or otherwise.

     These days one hears about cooperative web pages or “wikis”. I suspect my sisters and Mom have different memories, or corrections or improvements to make on this reminiscing. So shall we do a wiki story?

Related posts:

1. Road Trip
2. Homeschooling on the Road