I think it was Dial deodorant soap that had a TV ad where the people who used Dial (or whatever) walked around 3 feet off the ground. I completely believed that I could do that if my parents could just be convinced to buy that brand of soap instead of stupid Lux!
When I was like 3 I thought that “medium” meant really really big, because it was a much bigger word than “large”…so several times I was really disappointed when my burger or drink was smaller than my brother’s.
How does a Light Bright not work? All it needs is a light bulb and the colored pegs.
I never got to go to camp. A thousand movies and TV shows about the fun and hijinks of sleepaway camp. Even Charlie Brown got to go to camp. We just stayed home and sweltered at the school playground parks & rec.
I got the idea in my head one day it would be a swell thing to take our cat for a walk on a leash, like a dog. We would go around the block, him trotting at my side at a brisk pace. 
You can’t take a cat for a walk. You CAN take a cat for a drag, but I certainly don’t recommend it. :smack:
I only found out about it later, as a young adult, but it was still a disappointment.
My family didn’t tend to do things that cost money. Not only were we lower middle class, but my dad strongly disapproved of anything that smacked of luxury or fanciness, just on general principle. He was a classic Depression baby.
So we never went to Disneyland. I went once or twice, but only because my best friend’s parents asked me along on their family trips. That was fun, but what I really wanted was to go to Disneyland with my own family. That was “too expensive”, so it never happened.
Then, when I was in my early twenties, my mom let slip that dad had stayed home from work one day when I was in school, and they went to Disneyland without me. She knew from the shock on my face that it was a mistake to tell me, so she wouldn’t talk about it anymore.
It still annoys me, honestly.
It’s pretty hard to forget my biggest disappointment.
When I was a kid about 7 there two very similar games I wanted. I figured out which one I preferred. I let my mom know this. many many times.
Come Christmas Morning I opened the appropriate sized package and it was the wrong one. I was so utterly crushed, I couldn’t hide the disappointment. My mom sadly apologized, that she had got it before i was clear on which one I had wanted, it was mail order so she couldn’t return it, and they couldn’t afford to get the other one as well.
Later that night after spending the day after pouting the whole damn time, I had one of the great revelations of a lifetime. That look on my mom’s face as she explained it to me was one of the saddest I have ever seen her because she felt so bad for disappointing me, and it was my fault for being so ungracious.
And that made me fell so shitty, I still can’t give or receive a present without reliving that horrible moment when a little kid learned like a sledgehammer to the face what a guilty conscience really means. I still can see the exact look in her face in my mind 
The above post is really sad!
I ordered a Frontier House out of the back of a comic book. Sent in my dollar and everything. I wasn’t totally stoopit about it…I knew it was going to be some kind of painted cardboard but figured it would be stronger/better than anything I could make myself.
It never came.
As a toddler my first set of parents took me with them to a big department store around Christmas time. There was a metal dollhouse (curtains painted on) with wee little furniture. I wanted it so bad! On the ride back (cars had vinyl covered bench seats back then) I slid from one end to the other alone in the back. It was great! A first taste as to what carnival rides could be like later on.
To this day I can’t remember if I got the dollhouse or not.
:mad: On your behalf, I am outraged! Not so much that they went without you, but they ‘let slip’ that they did so! :mad: That’s rather cruel.
The Baby Alive doll. I had no business asking for one for Christmas, I wasn’t even into dolls that much, but I had to have one. It ate, it drank, it wet, it pooped. (Read the 1970s dolls)
What a stupid, uncuddly, messy, stinky thing. Then after feeding it whatever gooey paste you mixed up, you had to feed it several bottles to help flush the stuff from its inner works so that the goop wouldnt rot or breed flies or whaever that urban legend was. I think I used it once Christmas day, once a week or so later, and maybe a third time months later when I felt guilty that I never played with this doll. But she had a trapdoor in the back for batteries, which I lost.
The only good thing about her was I had convinced my grandmother to get both summer and winter clothes for this doll, and those clothes fit some of my other dolls.
My mom belonged to a group called the “Newcomers Club.” Apparently it was for people who were new to a city, as a way to meet people or whatever. I was probably about 3 or 4 and I heard it as “Cucumbers Club.” I thought people met up to eat cucumbers and trade cucumber recipes and talk about growing cucumbers. Imagine my disappointment when she took me to one of the meetings and there were no cucumbers anywhere. I was hungry too - I didn’t eat much before because I was expecting to have cucumbers!
I hated dolls, but BEGGED for one of these when I was a kid. I think my parents were glad to learn I was actually a girl-child. I only wanted it so I could make it do tricks, like some sort of freakish humanoid puppy. I didn’t get that “alive” in this context only meant having a tube connecting your mouth and a hole in your butt.
I think I played with it once.
I wasnt’ a very popular kid in 6th grade but was so happy when my parents told me I could have a graduation party from elementary school and every kid was going to attend. The day before the party, I tore a tee shirt when it got caught on a fence that probably cost my mother five dollars. She made me call every child and cancel the party. As an adult, I recognize how truly cruel that was for her to do over an accident.
You are the third person beside myself who was not into dolls and wanted a Baby Alive, and years later speaks of the experience bitterly. I am wondering if there is some kind of correlation.
I won second prize in a colouring competition and received some dried out felt pens.
I always hoped to be so desperate for R White’s lemonade that I would wake up in the night to drink it but I never did.
Mine must have been defective. Most of the pegs didn’t fit in the holes, and if they did, the paper never aligned right so half the pegs ended up in the wrong holes.
And it was not operator error, damnit. :mad:
Cruise Control didn’t drive the car. Only now are we getting there.
X-ray glasses. Seeing how I got money from a paper route where I woke up at 4 am in the morning, it was a very very bitter disappointment.
11 years old. Wanted a monkey for Christmas. Was so sure I was going to get a monkey for Christmas I could hardly contain myself with the excitement.
Christmas morning I got a monkey charm…you know for those charm bracelets everyone had in the 60 and 70’s. I was really upset and mad…it ruined my Christmas.
When I was a child I concluded that adults are full of shit. That was, you know, disappointing.
I wanted a pet raccoon. I would have accepted one on Christmas or my birthday, either day. My pleas for a pet raccoon fell on deaf ears. A lot of my pleas fell on deaf ears, so I wasn’t actually that disappointed. (dang. I was gonna call him ‘Bandit’.)
oh hell, while I’m here…I read a lot as a child from an early age. Kids books, of course, kids having all kinds of adventures. Solving mysteries. Saddling up and riding their horses all summer, entering contests, sneaking out at night with their friends, investigating the Old Johnson House at midnight, staying up late! I knew fantasy from reality, of course, never expected to be whisked off to A Better World, but dammit, how come MY life wasn’t as interesting and exciting as the characters in all those kids books???