I'm patting myself on the back right now.

Did anyone else play a game where one person randomly called out letters one at a time and everyone else took a step forward if that letter was in your name. You took two steps if it was a capital letter and it was decided pre-game as to whether middle names were included. I think it was more a girls game.

This game popped into my mind the other day whilst I was checking out that baby name internet site. You'd get some strange results with some of those.

Something else I've noticed over the last few years is the dearth of children playing in playgrounds. It seems to me that as councils replaced risky 'they'll sue us if their kids hurt themselves' equipment with 'unable to do your kid an injury' equipment kids sorta stopped using the playgrounds. Maybe other places NSM.

It may also be the lack of responsible adults to take them there.

Did anyone else play a game where one person randomly called out letters one at a time and everyone else took a step forward if that letter was in your name. You took two steps if it was a capital letter and it was decided pre-game as to whether middle names were included. I think it was more a girls game.

Yes! It was like What Time Is It Mr Wolf, a little.

I'm very upset about the lack of seesaws. In Michigan, at least, the two kids on a seesaw is still the symbol for a playground, but I looked for 2 years and couldn't find any.

Something else I've noticed over the last few years is the dearth of children playing in playgrounds. It seems to me that as councils replaced risky 'they'll sue us if their kids hurt themselves' equipment with 'unable to do your kid an injury' equipment kids sorta stopped using the playgrounds. Maybe other places NSM.

They put in an additional new playground at my elementary school when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The old playgrounds (there were three of them) were the old metal climbing things, swings, slides, etc. The new one was the kind made of logs, with little tiny safe plastic slides, a few things to climb, and a bunch of weird things like those spinny tic-tac-toe boards that we couldn't figure out what to do with. I didn't like it because it was too much stuff in one place. The old playgrounds took up a lot of room. If you were on the swings, and someone else was on the balance beam, there was a lot of space in betwen you. With the new thing, you couldn't move without bumping into other kids, too much of the stuff was just random and pointless, and very little of it was actually fun.

They used to have a see saw at Mr. Heather's bar. Not the wisest of toys to give the drunks.

What are kids supposed to do with those spinny tic-tac-toe things, anyway? There's no room to actually sit there and play it, and aren't playgrounds supposed to encourage movement in the first place?

They do tend to get rid of the best playthings on playgrounds. There used to be this huge rocket thing on a playground back home. Last time I was there it was taken down. Upsetting, and not just because I used to make out in the top level of the rocket when I was a senior in high school.

The first thing to disappear from Australian playgrounds were maypoles, then see-saws, then those metal roundabout thingies that you could get underneath and lie on your back so that you could use your legs and feet to make it spin really fast, thereby (in theory anyway) throwing the other kids off. Ummmm I wonder if that is why they were removed.