Moms… I am turning 40 this year. 40, the BIG 4-0, FORTY!!! October is going to be a big month!!!
I love this stage of my life, so rather than get down about the fact that I am leaving my thirties behind, I thought I would share with you 40 things that made life awesome growing up in the 80’s….you know the things that this 1979 baby LOVED, but that our children have no clue about!
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- Recording your favorite song off the radio on a cassette tape!
- Phone Booths / Collect Calls
- A console TV
- A busy signal
- Rotary Dial Telephones (if one of your friends had lots of 9’s or 0’s and you messed up ☹
- Big Wheels
- Atari – Pac Man, Centipede, Pitfall, Asteroids, and Space Invaders
- Starched jeans
- Girbaud Jeans
- Garbage Pail Kids
- Actual Text Books with Book Covers
- The Sony Walkman
- The Goonies and Chunk’s Truffle Shuffle
- Saturday Morning Cartoons/ kid shows: He-Man, The Smurfs, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Fraggle Rock, Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rodgers, Land of the Lost, Captain Kangaroo, The Dukes of Hazzard, JEM and the Rockers,
- Grunge: Flannel, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Doc Martins
- Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, Teen Witch
- MTV!!!! Top 20 Countdown, The Real World, Yo MTV Raps, My So Called Life
- THRILLER
- Markey Mark and the Funky Bunch… he was hot even way back when… “Good Vibrations”
- Waiting to get your Delias catalog in the mail and wanting to buy everything in it!
- Steve Madden Slip On Sandal. You know you had a pair, or seven!
- Using a Rolodex
- World Book Encyclopedias – No internet here kiddies, well… not yet!
- THE WORLD WIDE WEB! “You’ve got mail” and wait 47 minutes for it to connect.
- Floppy discs
- Waiting for film to be developed
- Phone Books
- The Dewey Decimal System
- Those hard-plastic lunch trays, and while we are on the topic, actually good school lunch! Square pizza anyone???
- Pagers
- Using an actual map when traveling – no Google maps y’all!
- Full Service Gas Stations
- Using the street lights as a clock. “Be home by dark!”
- Rolling down the windows. Literally.
- Friday nights picking out movies at Block Buster Video! “Be Kind and Rewind!”
- Cabbage Patch Kids
- Vinyl Records
- Blowing on a Nintendo cartridge to get it to play.
- 90210
- And if it was broken, MacGyver could fix it with a paperclip, and a chewing gum wrapper.
I had so much fun compiling this list with the help of some friends and family, and I hope this brought some of that wonderful childhood nostalgia flowing back for those of you lucky enough to have grown up during the time that analog made way for the birth of the digital age!
The last 40 were so great, I think I’ll hang around to see what the next 40 bring. In the words of Steve Perry and J0urney, ” Don’t Stop Believing!” (You know you just sang it!)
Have you celebrated a Milestone Birthday, tell us about it in the comments!
