Lemonade Stands and Puppet Shows

Well, I was working in the Cub House today and there was a family that came in. Two boys and one girl. They were sitting at the art table, doing their craft for the day and I started to hear them talking about this "plan" they had. The little girl came over to me and said "Guess what?!" She was sooo excited! "What?" I asked. "My brother and I are going to have a lemonade stand!" Then her brother piped in adn said "Yeah, we're going to earn money for the family!" I thought it was so cute! Then their little borther who is about 3, and at least three years younger then his siblings, got really excited about the idea and said, "Me too! Me too!" The two older siblings looked at him a little disgusted and told him he wasn't allowed to. He seemed to be ok with that though. He just went about doing his thing. The whole thing just made me smile because I started to remember some times when I was younger that I would actually do those kinds of things. My brothers and I also thought that a lemonade stand was a genius idea at one point. In our little minds we were going to be rich and be able to buy whatever we wanted! If anything we'd be able to go to Bashas' and buy a doughnut or something. It was an exciting prospect! I remember multiple times, while we lived in Safford, setting up a "lemonade stand" with way too watery lemonade and sometimes even rice krispie treats or cookies we would make. We'd put everything by the road, stick a HUGE sign on the front, with our little kid scrawl on the front and patiently sit in our lawn chairs and wait. Well, more accurately put would be that we would try and wait patiently until we couldn't stand it anymore and we would either run to the neighbors house to ask them to "come see our lemonade stand," or we would get so hot that we would drink the entire pitcher of lemonade ourselves. We did usually have success though! We had some very kind neighbors and people that would drive down the street who would stop and buy lemonade from us. Oh boy, you should have seen how excited we got when someone stopped to get some! You would have thought we hit the jackpot, and to us, we probably had! We had paying customers and we were going to have money to get something we wanted. What fun we had! I loved those times as a little kid!

Another thing that was very popular for my brothers and neighbor friend to do was to put on puppet shows or plays. We would either write out a story line or we would do a play based on a story we knew. There were countless times when we would make a "set", or make stick puppets, or practice lines over and over again til everything was perfect, usually lasting most of the morning. We would then advertise our plays to the neighborhood by knocking on the doors of our neighbors and telling them what time it would start and then asking how many tickets they needed. (Yes, we even made tickets! Pretty fancy huh?!) Then we would usually hold the play in our neighbor's house or backyard. At the time of performance we would have someone taking the tickets and any "donations" they wanted to give. Everyone would sit down and we would announce the performance. We sometimes ended up with a whole room full of friends and neighbors! It was always so exciting! Then we would start the play and there would always be an intermission. (These plays usually lasted about 10-15 minutes, so an intermission was definitely necessary!) For the intermission someone would go out and start strumming a guitar and making up a song that had to do with the play. (Mind you that none of us knew how to play the guitar, but we did a really good job tricking everyone!) Then we would finish up and everyone would applaud us and we would do our bows. Oh it was so exciting! Then everyone would start to leave and of course compliment us on our job well done. We were all smiles! Then we would clean up everything and talk about "how cool" everything was and that we had really done a great job and we would get so excited about how many people had come to watch us.

Oh boy! Those are some wonderful memories! I love reminiscing about all those fun things I used to do with my brothers and friends. It's amazing the imagination we had when we were little! I definitely don't feel like it's the same now, but I sure am glad I had those experiences. It brought a smile to my face today to hear a brother and sister talking about that today. Little do they realize how important those memories and fun times together will mean to them when they're older. It's awesome!