My mom gave me a box of old pictures and other stuff from my past. I may try to post about some of the fun stuff I have found. First though, I need to show you how crazy it was to be a baby in 1980…
Nice cute picture. Mom is giving me a bath. In plastic basin, I am guessing it does not have any rubber grips or anything to keep me from sliding. Also, I am just sitting in there. Yeah, her hand is on my shoulder, but I am only four months old. I doubt my core strength was good enough to keep me from falling over. Also, no protective cover on the faucet? Geez, we have a cool whale on ours so the kids do not hit their heads.
A blanket and some kind of crib padding. Nothing too serious. Minus the fact that I am tangled in it. I feel like if I posted a picture of Logan like that, people would be screaming at me OR sending me information on SIDS.
First of all, look at this picture. Photography was great back in those days. I am sure my parents took this cute picture of me in the Death Swing and could not wait to get it developed. When it finally comes back, it is messed up with another photo (I think there is a term for that, but I am way too lazy to look it up).
Back to the Death Swing. I am only two months old. I wonder how many times I fell forward and smacked my head off that barely padded bar. It looks like I could have easily have slid out of the leg hole.
Where do I even start? This picture was taken on Christmas day, 1981. So I am over a year old at this point. Sitting in the front seat, I am not even sure if that seat is buckled in there. I am wearing a giant coat (again, imagine posting this picture to Facebook today…how many people would freak out?).
My favorite part: the cup on the floor. Is that a sippy cup for my juice? Nope. That is a plastic cup. You know, the kind you get at a party for your beer. It was 1981, drinking & driving was practically a national sport.
Can we also discuss how hideous that car is? What is it, a Dodge Coronet? Was brown & yellow the only color scheme available in 1980?
I am not posting this to make fun of my parents (if you are close to my age, I am sure your parents were guilty of some of this shit too–no one knew any better). Instead, the next time someone says how kids today are too pampered and that we all survived despite not having a whale faucet cover, please remind them that the infant mortality rate in 1980 was 12.6 per 1000 births. That number is down to 5.9 per 1000 in 2018. For those of you that may be confused. If you had a hospital in 1980, 12 out of every 1000 kids born would die in infancy, but that number has been cut in half since then.
