My grandparents used to save the newspapers up for like a month at a time. Don't remember why exactly. I used to go over there and cut all the Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield strips out of the comics and glue or staple them to sheets of paper and make my own comic books.

When I was like 7-8ish I used to go catch monarch caterpillars in this vacant lot that was full of milkweed.

When I was about 10 I taped a cassette walkman with built in radio to my handlebars and would ride my bike around for hours listening to tunes.

Between 6-10 my friend and I would flood the sandbox with the garden hose and make little cityscapes with canals and stuff. We also collected acorns, nuts, berries and stuff like that and made little stashes "for emergencies". We eventually realized nobody was going to eat that stuff and started hoarding real snacks.

We used to be heavy into rock collecting. I still am.

Nobody I knew ever had a full set of one type of action figure so we made up our own games with what we had and just pooled the batmobile with Gargoyles and GI Joes.

Legos. Fucking Legos.

We would ride our bikes to the little army/navy surplus store and buy a bunch of camo and other crap. They would sell you anything. Butterfly knives, tripwire, you name it. We would go rig the patch of woods in the neighborhood like we were planning some special ops and lie in wait wearing the camo and ambush the other kids. Nothing actually violent. We just got off on being sneaky.

Street hockey was huge

Yoyos, pokemon, pogs, toy guns..

When we got a little older, we would raid our parents garages and build weird shit. We made crossbows out of PVC, rubber bands and wood. We tried making potato guns. We all went through a serious phase of lighting things on fire or melting stuff. The dollar store would just sell us lighter fluid when we were 12.

I remember one of the first times I ever had money and was allowed to ride to a real store. Me and the neighbor girl were like "we are gonna go nuts and treat ourselves to some yummy stuff that our parents wouldn't let us get". She got a huge thing of flavored coffee creamer and I bought a brick of ungrated parmesan cheese since I loved the grated stuff so much. We figured out really quick why you don't just chug coffee creamer or take a huge bite of parmesan cheese. It's just too much!

Then we got heavy into rock and roll and the occult around 13.