When I was a little kid, we had a park that our parents would drop us off for playdates and hours of fun. These hours would fly by like seconds as we covered every fun activity there was to take advantage of, making up our own games, or playing old games, to simply swinging on the swings. And if you’ve ever played without care, you’ve certainly been injured before. Mom used to dab Mercurochrome on our cuts and this is one of my strongest memories!

These are some of the sites at the playground that we were most fond of as kids.

SEE SAW

This teeter-totter was those one of those park activities that was only fun when you played on it fairly. But with my prankster friends, that never happened! The long planks balanced in the middle of a fixed support, and on each end we would sit. Sometimes we would be one on one and other times we would pile on either end. Up and down we would go by pushing the ground alternately with their feet.

However, one problem with the seesaw’s design is that if one of us intentionally would jump off when the other end was in the air and they would hit the ground hard. Looking back, it was all part of the fun but it could have potentially have caused injury. We never thought about that when we were playing on them. Did you?

JUNGLE GYMS: Get the Mercurochrome Ready!

These were large, metal, usually geometric-shaped contraptions that are still common on playgrounds, but they sometimes may lead to injuries when children fall off and hit their heads on the bars or when they swing on them in the wrong way!

Sometimes the metal would be too hot to touch on a summer day, so newer jungle gyms are now often made of alternative materials such as rope or wood. Yep, I hit my head many of times!

MONKEY BARS

The monkey bars were a significant piece of playground equipment consisting of a horizontally mounted overhead ladder, from which children could swing. Back then, it was a natural challenge to see how far one could get across the monkey bars without his or her hands starting to swell from holding on to the metal bars for so long.

We would hang upside down from the bars, sit on top of them feeling like the king of the world, and we would have challenges to see how many times we could swing back and forth across the row of bars.

SLIDE

There was nothing more memorable than going down the scorching hot slide in the summer! OUCH!!

SHUFFLEBOARD

This competitive game requires players to use special cue sticks to push weighted discs (or pucks), sliding them down a narrow court which is designed with multiple score areas, and with the purpose of having them come to rest within the best-marked scoring area.

Watch one town create their new Shuffleboard Court Below, very interesting!

What else did we used to do at the playground? Press “Next” to find out.