More childhood memories

OUR FAMILY HOME

I was born in 1951 so when I was a child we didn't have inside plumbing or electicity. I remember doing my homework by lamp light (which I contribute to causing my eyesight to be bad), we never played in the house no matter what the season. In the summer we played outside using pieces of broken pottery as dishes, our yard didn't have a lawn, just packed dirt so we would make outlines in the dirt to represent the rooms of our dream house and would play there for hours at a time, we used our imagination to create all kinds of wonderful realities.

I come from of family of 14 children so we never had a shortage of playmates, either my siblings or our friends. We didn't have much but neither did our friends so we thought we were rich.
In the winter we would skate, toboggan and sleigh down the hills near our home, make forts in the snow and snow people. In the winter was the only time we would have jello or great homemade frozen fudgesickles made from coco drink set outside in the snowbank and frozen. We had no electicity and our fridge that we used in the summer had a big block of ice that we bought from the ice truck that made the rounds.

I remember always having a garden to grow our own fresh vegetables and we got baby chicks at Easter that made it onto our table for Thanksgiving but we accepted that as part of life. I remember gathering eggs from our laying hens and taking them, still warm, into our mother to cook for breakfast. We didn't live in the country but our town was pretty small back then and we knew all our neighbours.

There was a pickling plant near our home and we would go there and collect the rejected cucumbers that our mother would make into our own pickles and so I guess we did our own recycling.. lol. My mother always made her own bread, biscuits, and deserts. We didn't have a lot but we were never hungry.

We lived in a small house that is no longer standing (there's a Sobey's built on the land where we used to live. Imaging all us kids in this small little house. It only had three bedrooms, one for our parents, one for the girls and one for the boys. Although there would have never have been 14 kids in the house at one time, I think at the most there would have probably have been 9 or so. Our mother would get up early in the morning and get the wood/coal stove going so that the kitchen would be warm for the crew to get up from their warm beds. I remember as a child, on a cold winter night, our mother warming bricks to place at the foot or our beds, under the blankets, to keep our feet warm.

I also remember that at Christmas we would each get only one toy and we would be so excited to receive an orange or a Red Delicious apple in our sticking with a few hard candies and though we were in heaven. So how was your childhood?