Boys and sticks

I don’t think you ever lose the urge to collect things. I have a jar of pebbles I have been adding the odd one to for years, but now my obsession is sea glass and I can’t be on a beach without looking for it, which makes it very tedious for those I am with as it takes us ages to get anywhere. They generally b****r off and leave me to it!

Both my GD and GS have to have a stick of some sort when out for a walk. The GD also collects stones, her pockets are always full of them. I currently have an old frying pan filled with them, lying outside the playhouse door. Last year we collected big stones, the two GC painted them then we placed them in the nearby wood as part if the 'stone trail'.

My grandson always picked up sticks ...the bigger the better. I have a large flowerpot outside my front door where he has to put them . They are still there and he’s 11 and hasn’t brought a stick home in years. My granddaughter brings snails...wood lice....worms .... spiders , in fact anything she can find into the house if I don’t catch her first. One day I said ...enough with the creepies...so I had to put them all into a shoe box and take her and them on two buses to her house where mum was expected to welcome them with open arms. She told her mum that nannies house is too clean for bugs....but they’ll be alright at her house.Daughter NOT amused!!

Our sons never bothered much with sticks but they often came home with interesting stones and pebbles, especially 'lucky's ones with holes in them. Our grandaughters collect shells, beetles, other peoples loose change, and coughs and colds which they're very generous about sharing unfortunately.

My granddaughters 3 in number have always collected stones. My daughter does a wonderful "Return stones to the sea" ceremony. They find it very acceptable, I find it hilarious.!!

I suspect some boys never grow out of collecting sticks. As I drove home tonight along a country road I spotted an elderly man using a large stick to prod and poke around in an overgrown road verge. There didn't seem to be a dog anywhere around so goodness knows what he was doing!

Also, if you watch this little film about the Severn Bore, there's a small boy with stick at approx 9 seconds in.

breeze. Good for him.

I think this shows that even if children were raised as "gender fluid" evolution will still win. My three grandsons all love a nice stick which becomes a sword or gun or just something to poke about with.

When I was 10, I used to walk home from school through some woods, for lunch.

I found a lovely stick that I used as a walking stick, and for the whole of that year I would hide it in the bushes at each end of the woods and retrieve it on my next next walk.
I wouldn't have dreamed of taking it home with me - as a girl of that age, I don't think it would have been considered 'normal'! Ah, nice memories ☺

Not sticks, but fir cones. I used to gather them up and play with them as a child, and my DGS, when he was a toddler would pick them up and give them to me to carry when we were out with my dogs.