To the Little Robby in All of Us

So when I was a little kid my parents always used to have some cute little-kid nicknames for me like Roberto, Robby-B, Sport, etc. I don't know why but for some reason it seems like a bit of that little kid has come out in me this past week and I was kinda hoping to get a little bit of that out of all four of you who will read my blog. I'm probably gonna reveal a lot about myself and how strange I was as a child (not saying that I changed much) but hopefully some of you can relate.

Remember playing with Marble Works? Maybe you have but you just can't remember. It was this toy set made up of a bunch of plastic pieces that you could assemble any which way to build vertically and create the world's coolest gravity-induced marble races (that's right, gravity induced. That means its green!). I remember saturday and sunday mornings spent with my older brother and sister trying to make the coolest marble-race tracks ever! I always made the coolest ones. The green marbles, which were mine, always won too. I remember getting upset when I lost or when my brother or sister wanted to change one of the race elements that I would throw a fit and just run everything over. That was awesome. Then K'nex came along with their big ball machine and the marble works never came out from under the stairs again. I don't think I ever figured out how to make that one right...

Sunday afternoons as a little tyke were always a delight. They consisted of making forts (again with my siblings), watching the old animated Book of Mormon Stories videos (The Tree of Life was by far the best one cuz Nephi saves that guy from falling into the hot chocolate river), and eating chocolate chip cookies. After the video I always used to love sitting in the fort and try to find where Waldo is or spy that sneaky Nephite and his buddies. The fort was by far the coolest part, but again I remember when my brother or sister wanted something I didn't I always decided it would be best to ruin it for everyone by standing straight up and just demolishing the fort.

Four-on-four soccer games where only about 3% of the soccer field would be used at one time. Boys' and Girls' Club basketball where even 7 foot hoops weren't low enough most times. Little League Night at the Kingdome and free Griffey shirts. Team Parties at Round Table Pizza and wasting all my money on that dang Simpsons arcade game.

Power Rangers. Yup. My brother and I used to pretend that we were Power Rangers. And I know what you're thinking, "Yeah, so did everyone else" but no... We made up our own Power Rangers and dinosaurs to go with it. My bro had an amethyst that he used as his morphing rock. For some reason he wanted to be a purple ranger, which I always thought was girly as a kid, but mine wasn't much better. I had an old lava rock and I was the maroon ranger... One time at our great aunt's house we couldn't figure out how to turn off the TV and Tales from the Crypt was on so we pretended like we were fighting that creepy skeleton guy who hosts it... (This is getting more embarrassing than I thought it would)

I used to wake up super early as a kid. Like 6:00 am every day. I would go and wake up my parents right away until they told me I couldn't wake up until 7:00. I still woke up at 6 but I would go out and sit on the kitchen floor and watch the microwave clock (the only digital clock we had at the time) until it read "seven-oh-oh" and I would run into my parents' room and jump on the bed between them. Those were the types of times that our moms or dads would say "I love you this much!" and hold out their arms as wide as they could. I never thought that was fair since I was so much smaller than them, so I found a way to one up them. I pinched my fingers together as tight as possible and said "I love you this much!" Of course my parents would get sad at first but I was a smart kid and I knew the world was round so I explained that what I meant was that it went around the world connecting my two fingers, forming a circle. Then they felt better.

*Sigh* how I wish life was still that simple. How I wish I could just go back and do it all again. Yeah life is good now, but life is also scary sometimes. Decisions have to be made and sometimes it's confusing knowing what it best or what God wants for you. Why can't life's biggest difficulties just go back to finding Waldo's blasted shoe that he lost on the last page...