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Post by queenzod on Oct 1, 2020 8:25:43 GMT
There was a lovely post on twitter recently from a father whose young daughter (7 or 8 years old), loved to read and would stay up until all hours reading with a flashlight under the covers, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to do that. He said in the number of years she’d be doing that and secretly rebelling against the rules, she’d never once questioned why the batteries on her flashlight never died.
As a flashlight under the covers reader myself from a young age, I thought this was so sweet! 😂🥰
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Post by mllemass on Oct 1, 2020 12:27:12 GMT
I read about the flashlight thing, too, and it was adorable.
My parents were very strict about certain things, but not at all about other things. Manners were (and are) important, and there was absolutely no talking back to my parents. I still don’t do that today! They were strict about curfew, but not about bedtimes. TV was fine, but I wasn’t allowed to go to movies until I was in high school, and then I had to show my mother that the movie wasn’t rated R. I was never allowed to go to school dances until my graduation dance. I wasn’t allowed to attend sleepovers because “You will sleep under this roof”. In my last year of high school, my friend had a party and wanted me to stay over afterwards. My mother gave me her usual “Ask your father” answer, and he said no. I begged him to let me go. He compromised and said that I could stay at the party as late as I wanted, and when it was time to go to bed I had to call him to come and pick me up - no matter what time it was. So that’s what I did - it was 3 or 4 in the morning when I phoned him, and he came to get me. He kept his word and wasn’t angry.
To be honest, I was happy to be able to leave because the party had gotten out of control. Word had spread, and there were hundreds of high school kids there. They weren’t from our school, and my friend didn’t know most of them. When I talked to her the next day, my friend told me that they had to call the police because the house had been trashed and her parents’ stuff, including her mother’s mink coat, had been stolen. Her parents had gone away for the weekend and had given my friend and her older sister permission to have the party. They had locked all their valuables away, but the “guests” broke the door locks.
So really, there was sometimes an advantage to having strict parents. I could always use them as my excuse to get out of doing something with my friends that I didn’t really want to do!
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Post by roverpup on Oct 1, 2020 19:37:14 GMT
I did the flashlight under the covers too, but it wasn't because of what I was reading, it was because of the HOUR I was reading at! I'd wake up in the wee hours of the morning and read under my covers (sometimes at 4 am!). My Dad came home from his shift on the railroad (he was a locomotive engineer) and caught me. He wasn't angry - just worried I wasn't getting enough sleep.
We were read to every night before going to bed by my mother. In fact, long after we were well old enough to read for ourselves we (my sis and I) insisted my mum still read to us! Even today I LOVE when Dan reads stuff to me! And we read to each other a LOT!
I wasn't into novels much even when I was young. I read a lot of informational books. Bios, history and science books. I did like scifi books for awhile. My mum sent us to our room every night after dinner and we were expected to do "homework" until we went to bed on weekdays. Even in high school. I usually was finished early with my assignments, so I would just put a pleasure reading book inside my school text and disguise it and if my mum checked in on me, I was still "studying ". And my favourite reading was a self-assigned project of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britainica! I learned so much trivia! Lol! I have to admit - I skimmed many parts! We also had this set of Books of Knowledge that was published in 1936 which I read (and I kept wondering why Hitler was barely mentioned and NOTHING was said about WWII!!). It was the set of encyclopedia we had before my mum and dad bought the set of EBs! My sister inherited it when my mum finally passed away.
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Post by mllemass on Oct 1, 2020 20:48:20 GMT
That’s interesting! I have a friend who’s a big reader, but only of non-fiction. Over all the years I’ve known her, she has read the occasional novel that I strongly recommended, but fiction is never her first choice. She reads every kind of self-help book, celebrity biographies, and health and fitness books. She’s very knowledgeable about a lot of topics!
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Post by dickens38 on Oct 2, 2020 0:54:44 GMT
There was a lovely post on twitter recently from a father whose young daughter (7 or 8 years old), loved to read and would stay up until all hours reading with a flashlight under the covers, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to do that. He said in the number of years she’d be doing that and secretly rebelling against the rules, she’d never once questioned why the batteries on her flashlight never died. As a flashlight under the covers reader myself from a young age, I thought this was so sweet! 😂🥰 Love it! What a wonderful dad.
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Post by dickens38 on Oct 2, 2020 0:56:15 GMT
That’s interesting! I have a friend who’s a big reader, but only of non-fiction. Over all the years I’ve known her, she has read the occasional novel that I strongly recommended, but fiction is never her first choice. She reads every kind of self-help book, celebrity biographies, and health and fitness books. She’s very knowledgeable about a lot of topics! Each to their own. Obviously your friend never feels the need to 'escape.'
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Post by onebluestocking on Oct 3, 2020 5:45:45 GMT
This was my childhood, too, although I was also allowed to see Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theatre. Then when I was 9 or so, my parents got rid of the TV altogether, so I just read or drew from then on. Along with lots and lots of chores. We lived in the country, so there were chickens, ducks, geese and pets to take care of, and we heated and cooked with wood stoves which required endless tending. No dishwasher, so I had lots of kitchen work, too.
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Post by dickens38 on Oct 3, 2020 9:08:46 GMT
Blimey, you had it hard.
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Post by mllemass on Oct 3, 2020 10:44:59 GMT
Oh yes, how I hated washing dishes! My father used to joke that we didn’t need a dishwasher because our family already had two - me and my sister. Ha ha. Now that my parents are older, my mother is the one stuck washing the dishes, and she regrets not getting a dishwasher way back when their kitchen was renovated.
I was in high school when I learned that other kids did not spend their Saturdays cleaning the house and washing their clothes, and that’s when we started rebelling. So I may have still cleaned the bathroom Saturday morning, but I did it with the tv blasting cartoons.
From what I’ve noticed, my cousins don’t want their children spending their time doing chores like we did, so they don’t require their children to do anything around the house. It seems like the only time I see them helping with anything is when it’s a punishment for something they’ve done.
There are some young families on my street whose kids are involved in all sorts of sports. No matter what the season, we see them going off in a different uniform to play on some team. I realized one day, when I was outside shoveling snow, that I had never seen those kids doing anything at home. They were getting lots of physical activity through sports and just playing outdoors, but they had never shovelled a driveway or swept a walkway or raked leaves or washed a car - the things that my sister and I did when we were growing up. It seems so weird to me to see the parents out there doing that stuff. My father bought a snowblower after we’d moved out because he had never had to shovel snow before!
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Post by roverpup on Oct 3, 2020 11:37:21 GMT
I had tons of chores too. Every weekend cleaning the house - dusting, scrubbing floors, cleaning all the windows (and we had THREE french doors - so that was 90 individual panes of glass to clean on top of the house windows!), vacuuming and after we were older, outside chores as well. All for a 25 cents a week "allowance".
And nightly dish washing. But that was fun! I never minded washing dishes.
When Dan and were married we didn't have a dishwasher for the first 18 years, so the dishwashing by hand continued for some time.
Once we finally moved into our current home (26 years ago) we got our first automatic dishwasher and Dan declared that we would never look back!
This past year our dishwasher broke and because foul ups I had to wait a month before the new one was installed. I didn't mind going back to washing dishes by hand (I look at it as conversation time) but I realised just how much more sanitary dishwashers are over hand washing, so I was anxious about returning to throwing dishes in the dishwasher just to get them REALLY clean!
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