Starting at 10, we could take the bus to the mall (it was a WHOLE QUARTER!) I think mom walked us to kinder but not after that. I know I was sometimes home alone from when I was 9. Rule was we could ride bikes around the neighborhood but not cross the 3 main busy streets until we were 12 and more road savvy, and only with permission. I remember walking to the Gulf gas station to buy soda, only a few blocks. We also used to walk to the 711 and TCBY about a mile away. That was definitely 5th grade.

Summers we got the ok to ride our bikes across Alameda (one of the 'busy' streets we had to cross it for school. At the time one wide lane each way, 30 mph limit. It's 4 lanes now....) to get ourselves to swim lessons. With a stop at Sonic afterwards for floats. Still within a couple miles.

Actually, a couple of the kids I grew up with in the neighborhood have since bought houses there (next door, the house she mostly grew up in, as did her mother, that her grandparents had built! And she's not the only 2nd or 3rd gen owner.) Their rules are fairly much the same as ours were. The neighborhood is really stable. The Miller house is still called that by people who moved into it decades after Mrs. Miller died.

At our school, the 3rd and 4th graders are allowed to walk home by themselves if you sign a form, but when Dylan's in 3rd grade, Aeryn will be in pre-k, so unless they have wildly different dismissal times it wouldn't really make sense for us.

We had neighborhood schools where I grew up, so there were no major/busy roads to cross, and at some of the other intersections were adult crossing guards. Everyone walked, kindergarten on up, and we also walked home for lunch and back again, unless you had no parents home during the day.

But we also were out riding bikes around our neighborhood all day in the summer, and we just knew to be home at dinner time. No way could a mom have found us at a particular moment -- we were all over.

We could walk home in kinder, parent discretion. Lots of kids had older sibs or just older neighborhood kids who were charged with that duty. And Mrs. Eubanks was always out on her porch on the corner at dismissal times. She bandaged many a skinned knee broke, broke up spats. And we thought she was MEAN. She was just no nonsense.

There are a lot of young kids around here fairly unsupervised. I'm sure the presence of the Y draws some, but the Y also fills an existing need. Now some of them, there's a clear bit of parenting-issues going on, but others remind me very much of us when we were little.

We could walk home in kinder, parent discretion. Lots of kids had older sibs or just older neighborhood kids who were charged with that duty.

Yeah, I always walked with Charlie, when he was really little, but at lunchtime I was too cool to wait for my dawdling little brother, so he was usually ten minutes behind me.

School was generally too far away to walk to when I was a kid, but my parents never seemed to worry about me wandering around our trailer-parkish neighborhood or the adjoining woods when I was a gradeschooler. Which makes me wonder if my mom grew into more of a worrywort in later years.

My Avengers DVD shipped today, going from Sterling VA to Laurel MD, where it is now. Now of course I understand carrier routes, but still I'm thinking, I could have driven to Sterling and picked the darn thing up.

Also, my BFF's DVD, which I ordered for her a week ago, arrived today. Mine was preordered in June!

jonesing for Avengery goodness

I just saw Romney's talk about his wife and the windows in the plane...

I don't know what to say. It didn't look like he was joking.

My Avengers DVD shipped today

Mine, too. And while it's guaranteed to be delivered tomorrow, I have a meeting after work that goes until 9 or possibly even 10, and I can't get out of it. Damn it.

I was considering calling out sick so I could watch it as soon as I got it. Then I decided to be a groan-up.