More Growing Up Memories

When I was about eight or nine years old, some of our favorite things to do was play outside for more than twelve hours per long summer day. We only went inside to eat (which we also tried to take outside), get necessary supplies for our games, and go to bed (which we tried so so hard to avoid). Something that we just loved playing with was our tire swing, which my dad tied on the birch tree's branch.  We would spin it around and around (with no rider of course) so fast that my mom couldn't watch for nausea. When it got so spun up that the rope twisted to about 6 inches long. ( : Then Eliza and I would hold the tire swing so it wouldn't unwind and at the same time hoist five year old Nonnie onto the tire.  Then, we let go.  Big mistake.  After that, all we saw was a blur of Nonnie's clothes and her long blond hair swirling around in big circles. She was screaming really loud, and I do mean really.  So the tire swing stopped, and Nonnie teetered off the tire swing, almost falling down, and when we asked how she liked it, she promptly replied that she would love to do it again!  Another thing we did was tease the cattle.  Summer 2009, we had steers and bulls over at our place all fall, winter, and spring.  There was an 800lb steer who was mean. We named him Gordy. (My mother heard this and said "Gordy?! That's no name for a mean steer. It's like 'ooh, fear Gordy.'") He had a gang of sorts, which was a ragamuffin band of mismatched harmless steers.  They would 'kidnap' other steers and literally take them over to the back pen.  So we declared war.  We would dance around the pen and sing, "Gordy is a punkin eater! Gordy is a punkin eater!" Then 'Gordy's Gang', as we called it, would run at us as if they were going to bust through the fence and charge at us.  So, we would scream like girls and run for the other side of the pen and do it again. So the vicious cycle continued.  Another fun thing to do was to sit in our treehouse (it hangs out over the bull pasture) and dump buckets of  water on the unsuspecting bulls. ( :  We also would (this was just a year ago actually) throw snowballs at the 1800lb bulls and watch them get mad and stomp their feet and snort.  We would then, like usual, run and scream like girls.  Man, that was fun.