2024, Family, Kids, Nature, Science, Uncategorized

Cool Rocks

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Our grandson is now 6 and has developed an interest in rocks. I remember my mom getting me a cardboard box that displayed all different kinds of rocks when I was the same age, some polished and all quite colorful and interesting. I had them until our children were in elementary school and they somehow disappeared after that.

Grandson wants to identify and collect every interesting rock he sees. Our son got him some geodes in a rock shop that they had fun opening with a hammer to see the crystals within. Earlier this week I sent Grandson a set of very heavy and colorful polished quartz bookends we had in the basement. It is a win-win for all of us since they are just what Grandson is collecting these days and now we don’t have to find somewhere for them when we move. They also serve a double purpose as bookends.

What did you collect when you were a child?

27 thoughts on “Cool Rocks”

  1. I remember being fascinated by a rock tumbler that a relative of mine had up at their cabin in the north woods. It turned out the prettiest shiniest rocks. I pestered my folks for a tumbler for at homr but they never got it. This is just as well because I have since learned that this isn’t a day long or weeklong process but weeks long process. I could never have been that patient when I was in junior high in high school. I’m not sure I could be that patient now.

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  2. Napkins! I had the most wonderful collection of delicate, often colorful, paper napkins. Mostly they were small napkins intended for afternoon coffee, but dinner napkins were included if they were pretty. This was a pretty common practice when I was about eight or nine years old. I spent many happy hours with other girls my age, admiring each other’s collections, and trading ones we had duplicates of.

    I also collected stamps, but not in a very organized fashion. I was interested in the most colorful and beautiful stamps I could find. Dad on his travels would make a point of sending me postcards or letters with pretty stamps on them. In an attempt to organize my collection, I had several albums to glue them into. But, I’m a big picture person, and got bored and frustrated with the endless detail that you needed to keep track of if you were going to collect stamps in a meaningful way, so I gave up when I was about fifteen.

    I, too, collected rocks, but again not in an organized or scientific way. Living close to water, I was forever picking up stones along the shoreline. I didn’t really know much about rocks, but I was attracted to the surfaces, often colorful, especially when wet, smoothed by centuries in the water. I’m still fascinated by rocks and have several large chunks of petrified wood from Wyoming. I also still have a few rocks I picked up in Russia and Greenland.

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    1. We never return from Lake Superior, it seems, without a bucket of interesting rocks. There are always some adorning windowsills in our home. Is it a collection? I don’t know. I think a collection needs some organization at least.

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      1. I wrote a short story about people collecting Lake Superior rocks to bring home.

        I had a bucket of agates, not collected on the shore but on our land and in the river that ran nearby. I gave them to a man who was caretaker to a wife with dementia, I now realize, whose hobby was making jewelry out of agates. He was very good at it. They were sold in gift shops.

        Clyde

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  4. Regrettably, none of my childhood collections were distinctive or even interesting—certainly not as idiosyncratic as the collections Robin and I maintain now. I had a couple of those boxed sets of labeled rocks and minerals when I was a kid, but the rocks I collected were agates. When I say “collected” I mean those were the ones I looked for and brought home but never displayed as a collection. They were probably in a bag or box somewhere. I also collected pennies and had one of those three panel blue penny folders.
    I had some baseball cards but since I never paid attention to the games or players they meant nothing to me and were just what was left over after I had consumed the bubblegum.

    When my girls were young and had an interest in rocks, I did buy them a rock polisher. As Sherrilee has mentioned and as we discovered the process takes much longer than you might expect and my girls had lost interest before the first batch of rocks were polished.

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    1. I collected coins for a while, too. Again, not in a very organized fashion. Too much detail to pay attention to for my temperament.

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  5. My dad collected coins in, yes, the blue tri-fold, and we still have some of them. ANYONE want them???

    I don’t remember collecting anything as a child – what does that mean? But maybe other comments will trigger something…

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  6. I have a lot of agates. I’m not a good organizer, so they aren’t organized at all. I do have them mostly in one place now though. Some are polished, some are not.

    My parents did get me a rock tumbler when I was a kid, but as others have observed, it takes too long for the results you want. Kids aren’t always patient.

    I was more interested in frogs. I tried to collect them. Once I had 27 frogs in a plastic box with a lid. I put water and stones in the box, along with a few twigs and leaves. I didn’t seal the cover over them tightly. I just left it sitting on top of the box, somewhat askew, so they could breathe. Then I went to school.

    Mom was pretty angry when I got home. She asked me how many frogs I had. I answered, “27”. She said they weren’t in the box anymore, and I’d better find them PRONTO. I was ordered to let them go, outside, where they belong. And don’t bring frogs into this house again. Apparently she had seen several of them hopping all over the house.

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    1. Husband was a camp counselor at a bible camp at a lake in Wisconsin when he was in high school. The 9 year old boys in his cabin decided to collect as many frogs as they could and brought them into the cabin. Husband came into the cabin to dozens of frogs hopping all over the place.The boys were extremely excited.

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  7. Rise and Shine Baboons from JacAnon,

    Cousins. I had 36 on Mom’s side. I had nothing to do with the decisions about this though. Other than that, I did not collect anything.

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        3. They started buying firecrackers in SD all year after July 4 whenever they could, and stored them in their bedroom until the next 4th of July. Boomgaarden is a Dutch word for apple orchard, but I understand that it also evokes images of exploding vegetables!

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  10. I have enjoyed all the recollections from Trail Baboons about their recollections. It is clear to me that physicality is not expected among us. Let’s encourage everyone to explore their surroundings!

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    1. What do you mean physicality is not expected among us? Between casting aspersions and jumping to conclusions, I get plenty of exercise.

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  11. I think I mostly collected books. I had a little metal recipe card file with index cards listing the authors and titles. I believe I filed them by author. A true collector, though, would have had them indexed by title and by author, in separate recipe card files.

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  12. I remember a time when I went to a nature trail and we made a stop by the river. I gathered some “naturally polished”, or weathered, rocks. Then I dug a hole and I found a couple of more rocks. I was planning to see crystals. But I didn’t. But still, I found some interesting rocks.
    Later that day, I came across an extremely weathered rock. Then I took that rock home.

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