Growing up sucks. I am 22 years old and I barely know how to take care of myself. What are taxes? How do I call to make a dentist appointment? I can put bleach in all my loads of laundry, right? 

Regardless of how ready for adulthood I may or may not be, I can rest easy knowing that one thing is absolutely certain. The generation I grew up in had the best childhood. No questions asked.

All kids know these days are how to use an iPad and how to set up a Blue Ray system.

We didn’t have fancy Blue Ray players, but we sure knew how to wait around watching TV for a bunch of kids to jump over animated movie reels because we knew that a Disney Channel Original movie was about to play and the night was about to be lit.

Kids these days will never understand what I’m talking about, as well as many other things.

I seriously doubt a 10-year-old today could figure out how to get a Furbee to shut up when it’s crying that it is hungry, a skill that young adults my age are gurus at.

In my youth I used to put my jellybean helmet on and lace up my Etnies looking for adventure. Etnies were essential. The puffier your shoes, the cooler you were.

These adventures consisted of knocking on my neighbor’s doors to challenge them to scooter races on a daily basis.

This was mostly because my neighbor’s moms and mine would lock us out of the house to go play and run out of energy so we weren’t so annoying all of the time.

Let me tell you something, you have not yet lived until you have beat all the kids in the neighborhood in a down hill scooter race. Even if you had to fall into a rose bush to be victorious, it was worth it.

While children my age were recovering from rose bush wounds, there were a variety of activities we could do inside too. We didn’t have cell phones to send memes back and forth to our friends, but we still had our fair share of fun.

Nothing could really beat eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and watching Saturday morning cartoons. “Power Puff Girls” really changed my life. I learned lessons from those three courageous super heroes that I will take with me the rest of my life. But most importantly I still strive everyday to be sugar, spice and everything nice.

And I’m succeeding.

There were also all of the times we had to master the skill of cheating while playing with an Easy Bake Oven. Everyone knew that the little light bulb inside of the oven could not really bake such delicious little pastries.

One of the saddest moments of my life was realizing that I was going to have to transfer my bakery projects into an actual oven. I think this was my first taste of realizing that life isn’t fair. But here I am today, on the other side of that heartache, and thriving. Maybe it is a good thing that kids will never have to lose that type of innocence.

That and the first taste of panic attacks when you could not reach the high score playing Bop It or even almost slicing off your ankles while participating in a game of Skip It. But we are better people today from having gone through such experiences.

After growing out of games like Operation, Life and Pokemon Snap, we even had the opportunity to taste the world of technology.  We are the privileged generation that knows what it is like to not be stuck on social media, but when we did join that world, there was really no looking back.

Middle school eventually happened and skinny jeans and side bangs eventually started to take over. Lunchables were replaced with the pizza line during lunch period and hanging out after school was replaced with MySpace.

I can’t tell you how many friendships were ruined over who made each other’s “Top Eight” on MySpace.

If you were knocked off someone’s “Top Friend’s” don’t worry about it, you didn’t need that kind of negativity in your life anyways.

Long story short, those of us who are in the beginning stages of adulthood had the absolute best childhood anyone could ever have. Now that we are making our best attempts at adulting, we at least have all of these memories to keep close to our hearts.

But seriously, you should check on your Tamagotchi. It’s probably starving by now.

Heather Tomaszewski
Guest Columnist
Published April 6th, 2016