My mother used a hand mixer like this when she made cookies. Afterwards she would give me one of the (detachable) beaters, and I would lick off the cookie dough while watching cartoons on TV. Always loved that.
I give myself a peanut buster parfait every year for my birthday.
We couldn’t afford an actual Wham-O Slip ‘n’ Slide but since our garage was at the back of our house there was a driveway along the side with two stripes of concrete for the tires and dirt/grass in the middle. Perfect!
Woe unto thee should you veer from the straight and true, however.
But will they remove the salt???
I got to choose to have a party or to go to the Kahiki for my birthday. I always chose the Kahiki, a local tiki restaurant that was SO cool…a little river in front, one wall thru the restaurant was an aquarium, the other side was a little rainforest with real birds, smoking drinks delivered by girls in Hawaiian-type dress, etc, etc.
Core memories.
Making homemade ice cream on Saturday afternoons in the summertime, using fresh cream from our milk cow. Then eating a bowl topped with fresh peaches from Grandpa’s tree.
Beverly Park - https://lamag.com/lahistory/remembering-beverly-park - WTF? No mention or photos of the 20’ fiberglass Paul Bunyan statue that stood over the park. I’m guessing it was added sometime in the mid-or-late ‘60s.
Getting to lick the mixing bowl and or spatula after mom made some chocolate dessert.
Freezing cherries with liquid nitrogen so we could have them out of season. Using leftover LN2 to freeze other things not meant to be frozen (e.g. Super Balls).
Playing with blobs of mercury, eating paint chips, playing with matches, and hitchhiking.
We couldn’t do this when we were eating inside. But at picnics we were allowed to put black olives on our fingertips and wiggle them around for a bit before we ate them - one at a time - right off our fingers.
And one of my sons doesn’t like olives. He’s never done that.
My dad built me and my sisters a sandbox in the backyard. Every late May or early June we’d climb into his old jeep with a trailer hooked up and we’d go to the sand pit. You would have thought we were going to Disneyland! While we climbed around on the piles of sand, my dad would shovel sand in the trailer. When we got home, he’d dump it in the sandbox. I remember thinking how huge the pile was. It was the good sand too. We could mold it into castles and cakes. We’d have buckets of water and make lakes and rivers. We’d get up at the crack of dawn and immediately head out to play in that sandbox. I don’t think we even ate breakfast. My mom was probably still in bed!
Off topic a bit, but at the pizza joint I work at now, absolutely grown-ass adults still do the same thing.
I will also occasionally find an olive stuck onto the cap of a ballpoint pen.
When I was around 7 or 8, my parents got me one of those glow-in-the-dark sticker sets of stars, complete with moon and comets, and we set it up on the ceiling above my bed. I loved looking at them after “lights out” time.
The way there was candy in bowls throughout the house free for the taking in the runup to Christmas. Especially the Hershey’s kisses in red and green wrapping.
After all night poker parties my dad and his friends would end the game when the kids got up and dump all of the loose coins onto the floor for us kids to scabble over. It was proably less than $10-$15 but that was a good sized chunk of change back then for 6 or 7 kids.
Mulberries. Perfect dark purple little buggers right there on the path to Grandma’s house.
The local Chinese restaurant. We’d get the Pu-Pu platter, it came out with a bunch of little treats around a center flame. I guess that was Sterno? You’d grab a treat, stick it on a skewer and grill it over the flame.
Sledding at my friend’s house. He had a perfect hill on the side of his house, we’d be out there for what felt like hours, until we were too tired to climb back up. My jeans were always soaked and frozen, his mom would get me a pair of sweats and dry my pants for me so I could go home.
Sugar.
In all its myriad wondrous forms… Grabbing my friends on Allowance Day and heading down to the drug store to convert every penny of it to candy.
Remember Bonomo Turkish Taffy, or Gold Rush Gum? Oh, and Bubble Gum Cigars (the “Gold Dragon” ones were fake banana flavor… as were Circus Peanuts). Mary Janes, Bit-O-Honeys, we loved it all.
Luckily, my dad had a sweet tooth, too. Every Saturday, he’d give my mom a break by taking us kids on his errands… which always included donuts! To this day, a trip to the hardware store on a weekend morning makes me crave a stop at the local bakery.
And he’d often take us for a walk after supper that ended up at Baskin-Robbins. Which was odd, because we had a Frozen Custard place that was much superior to ice cream…
… But we didn’t care!
Sure, there was chocolate superior to Hershey’s, licorice classier than Red Vines, road trip snacks much better than Stuckey’s Pecan Logs. But that was okay, it was all SUH-WEEEET!
Yes, honeybun? 
For us it was the local 7/11. We were not allowed to eat candy, so our forays were carried out in secret and we gorged on our spoils at the park before we went home. I was fond of Look bars and Big Hunks, as well as anything chocolate covered. Peanut M&Ms were a favorite.
There were also Rally bars – remember those? I loved them and was sad when I couldn’t find them anymore.
Another who remembers 2/penny candy, and 5 cent and 10 cent candy bars, and collecting the nickel deposits for pop bottles immediately preceding going to the local drug store. On a good day you would pick up a DC 100 Page Super Spectacular for a quarter, each containing a couple of new stories and a shit-ton of reruns.
When I was a child in the 80s I remember eating saltine crackers that were a big square that was the size of four saltine crackers sold today.
Ahhh, those DC 100 Page Super Spectaculars!
I just sold my entire comic collection… but I kept a box of my favorites, including ALL my 100-pagers. Especially the Detective Comics. The “shit-ton of reruns” were from the Good Ol’ Days, when Batman was one of a half-dozen detectives in those comics.
I loved those hard-boiled noir-types, like Roy Raymond, TV Detective. Even The Martian Manhunter’s secret identity was Detective John Jones.
Staying home from grade school when sick and watching the morning sitcom lineup on TV—The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, and the Dick van Dyke Show—while Mom brought me hot tea and sometimes a cookie, if I looked sad enough. I even managed to stretch a few “sick” days into two-day affairs. And on one Oscar-worthy performance, I scored a three-day sick leave—what can I say, the kid could act!
But the universe keeps receipts. Karma showed up in the form of double pneumonia. Twice. A month apart. That’s basically quadruple pneumonia. Combined, I missed over a month of school, teetering between cabin fever and actual fever, not to mention acute respiratory distress. One day, my teacher even came to check on me, which was sweet—until she handed me a stack of homework. That part was less sweet.