Since I’ve never held a contest of sorts I figured now is the time, and not only that, I feel someone will benefit from the prize. Whoever wins this contest will be rewarded with a 1-year Flickr Pro account courtesy of Ludicorp Research & Development.
Contest Rules
It’s pretty easy, all you have to do is leave a comment with your favorite memory from childhood. That’s it! I’m a nostalgic kind of person and so are you, so this should be relatively easy.
On Friday, April 22nd at 5pm (EST) I will choose and announce a winner and that person will receive an email for a free 1-year Flickr Pro account. All submissions (or comments in this case) will be accepted until 12am Thursday, at which point the contest will be closed to remain fair to everyone.
Eligibility
Only those without Flickr Pro accounts are eligible. If you’re hankering to upgrade your free account to Pro now is your chance.
Good luck to everyone!
If you don’t win this time around I will be holding a few contests throughout the year for more opportunities to win prizes, so keep your eyes peeled.
I remember this one time at band camp.
Not a lot of competition.
If it stays that way, I’ll get back here and give it a try, I’d love to have a Pro account. 
I think I’d have to say one of my best memories is when my dad realized that I was really interested in drawing and thought i’d like to do it as job, he went out and got me a copy of ‘How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way’.
That one present made me feel like he was really accepting of what I thought I wanted to do and made me go at it that much harder.
I remember as a child seeing a kid in Big Bear having to use the bathroom. Needless to say, there wasn’t one around so he decided to go anyways. To make a long story short, Im sure some where in big bear theres a brown stained shoe laying among the trees.
HAHAHAHA.
Oh ya.. Ben and Jerrys is giving free ice cream cones away too.. Go here for more details:
http://www.benjerry.com/
Check it out!
We were just talking about this tonight. My parent’s are up visiting us, staying in their RV at a near-by campground and my mom made hot dogs tonight, had chili to go with it of course.
Reminded me of one vacation we took. Went to a little town in Arkansas, Eureka Springs, and we were eating lunch at a café on the main walk. I was a strange eater at that age and I wanted a chili bun. Not a chili DOG, mind you, a BUN. We had to explain to the waiter and the cook what one was.
You’d think a piece of bread with chili and cheese on it would be a pretty simple order.
hitting a home run in a little league world series baseball game when i was 12.
My favorite memory could have been an easily forgettable one. I climed my backyard tree as high as I could go, past my normal fear point, until I was about 40 feet up and could see the entire neighborhood.
I remember telling myself to never forget this feeling, and when I got old (I thought 18 was old) I needed to go back and climb that tree again to remember how good it felt.
My favourite memory was when I umm.. uhhhh.… I can’t remember. I’m still a kid. Goog goo ga ga.
Funny how easy it is to forget about happy moments that seem to be a lifetime away…even though I am only 23 today… I say only 23 because I just realised that I must be creating memories right now that I could narrate in a similar contest about my favorite memory from my youth another 23 years from now…so the 23 seems like a rather small number when put in this context even if it felt like “way too old” just a few moments ago…
Moving on to my favorite memory… I remember when I was about 2 or 3 years old I used to love playing with my grandfather…I remember sitting on his shoulders and pulling his hair when he used to watch the News nagging him to play house with me…I remember holding onto his finger and walking…i remember he held a picnic basket in one hand…we walked a very long way through a lush green and overgrown path to a structure that seemed to look like a castle situated on top of a hill surrounded by a forest…
it is most probably just an old withered tower in the middle of a reserve park which is certainly not as high as I had imagined then or as far… but I dare not visit that place again…my grandfather passed away when I was about 9 and I want to hold on to the magic, the dreaminess of those beautiful moments that I spent with him in that enchating place which is etched in my memory forever…
My parents divorced when I was pretty young and my father moved to the far northern part of Michigan (I grew up in the Metro Detroit area). From around 7 — 12 years old I would visit my father for a few weeks or month during the summer. He moved around a lot and every summer it was a new place. The only thing they had in common was the rural atmosphere.
Barns, ponds, and woods made up the backdrop of these summers. The funny thing is it isn’t the memory of my father that I remember. The truth is that he spent very little time with me while I visited. What I enjoyed was the freedom that my father’s lack of interest afforded me. That combined with the endless possibilities of exploration is what I remember most from my summers as a child. Exploring an old dilapidated barn, shooting out the windows of an abandoned car with my bb gun. I wandered around aimlessly and nobody questioned it.
I guess thats what some people do when they graduate from high school and spend a year abroad. I used to think I had a crappy dad. I didn’t realize then that his lack of parenting skills allowed me to satisfy my wanderlust at an earlier age than most.
It should be who — not whom:
“Whomever wins this contest will be rewarded with a 1-year Flickr Pro account courtesy of Ludicorp Research & Development.”
When I was quite small, small enough to be carried on my father’s shoulders in a crowd of people, he took me to an Oakland A’s game. We went to other A’s games, certainly after this one and maybe before also, but this one is the only one I remember in particular. One of the A’s made a spectacular catch during this game but I was too young to recognize a spectacular catch when I saw one, and I only knew it was spectacular by my dad’s reaction to it. I guess I wanted to share in what my dad was having, and to show him how much I shared it, because I became excited at the spectacularness of the catch and exclaimed that the A’s should be given a point for that, it was so great. My dad thought this was hilarious, and explained to me that you only get points for crossing home base, but I already knew that, and I told him I already knew that, and explained that the catch was just THAT good. They should just give him a point anyway. They should change the game and give him a point because that was such a great catch.
The A’s won the game even without my special point, and my dad carried me on his shoulders out of the ballpark, for a while chanting along with a large crowed “We Won the Game, We Won the Game.” I was surprised that it was us who had won, and not just the A’s (THAT was a part of baseball I did NOT know), but went along with it anyway.
My dad died a few years after that and I don’t follow baseball at all anymore, but once in a while I’ll still go to an A’s game, and whenever I overhear somewhere that the A’s won, I still think, Great, We Won!
–Robbie
We had lived through some turbulent times by the time I was nine. A lot of moves, two bad health scares for my dad, a miscarriage, a horrific gun accident at our neighbours’ house a few months before. So when my dad landed a job with the federal government — one that would see us move a few hundred miles away — it must have seemed to my parents like a chance for a new start. They’d shielded us kids from the worst of it, but looking back, I think we must have sensed a little of the tension.
It was our last night in our little town. Our possessions were in a moving van somewhere between this house and our new home — one that hadn’t been built yet. It could have been a terrifying, uncertain time.
Instead, my parents made an adventure of it. That night, we piled onto a big foam mattress in what had been my bedroom. A big bowl of popcorn appeared… and so did a brand. New. Colour television.
This was 1973. Most of the people we knew still had black and white. Our much wealthier neighbours had one of the only colour TVs I’d ever seen. I can still remember pressing my face to the screen, seeing those red, green and blue dots and realizing… this is what makes pictures.
Now I was looking at those same dots on our very own television. I can’t remember what we watched that night. I do remember the excitement, and yet also a profound feeling of peace, safety and closeness to my mom and dad, and to my brothers and sister. Not because of a new television, but because they could create an oasis of peace and wonder in the midst of chaos.
The next morning, we left that little town and drove off to our future. The trip was nightmarish — the car engine overheated constantly, we were all carsick, and we arrived many hours later than expected. It was weeks before we actually moved in to our new house. But it really was the end of the constant moving, and the start of a new, better life for our family.
My parents had pulled it off. And we caught our first glimpse of that new life in my old bedroom, lit by the glow of our first colour television.
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