Saturday, my daughter broke her arm. 
Otherwise, no - I really don’t have any “prized possessions.” Though she once untuned my guitar. :mad: 
When Kid Kalhoun and I were living with the Ps when he was little, I fixed him a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, which he was carrying to the dining room table. He tripped and the plate went sailing through the air and landed on the 3-day-old off-white carpeting my parents had been dreaming of for years.
I figured, “that’s it…we’re dead”.
Then my folks came home looking ashen and distraught. Turns out they just came from the funeral of a friend’s 12 year old son, who was hit by a car.
They weren’t upset about the carpeting at all…the funeral kind of put things into perspective.
In the past six months, my 2yr old has “disappeared” approximately seven size 1 Inox knitting needles and three size 7 Clover bamboo needles.
These are not prized, necessarily, but what baffles me is I’ve yet to find them.
Several of the Inox were found poked into the upholstry of the couch. I even managed to work some of them back out. But the size 7s are the diameter of a pencil. I turned the house upside down, but they’ve completely vanished. And the 2yr old won’t say where.
When I was a kid, I drew pictures on the wall and ceiling in our room (I had the top bunk), and signed my brother’s name to them. He unfortunately couldn’t write yet.
Another time I flung a Frisbee at my brother in anger. He ducked and it hit a Lladro figurine of Cinderella, breaking off her tiny finger. It was a bitch to find in the carpet, especially as I was crying.
I also get blamed for breaking the head off another Lladro figurine. This one had been collected particularly for its resemblance to me. I don’t recall the circumstances, but looking at the examples above, I’m going to say that it probably involved my brother.
Oh, yes, I also cut up my grandmother’s nice leather case for her manicure set. I was old enough to know better, but those tiny shiny scissors snipped through those suede loops like buttah. I was careful to leave them hanging by a thread so she could still sort of use it, but she was still pretty mad.
I remember knocking over a prized old china candlestick in our grandparents’ cottage once, while running by to dodge the monsters chasing me. It made a really loud smash.
I believe visits were few and far between after that.
Only a teenager would think it’s better to break a leaded glass window in a wooden door than wake her parents up to let her in.
As a toddler I dissassembled my dad’s stamp collection. Not good. It makes me realize how young and naive my parents were (I was the oldest) that they didn’t know not to leave something like that in reach of a toddler.
Oh, I’m so sorry!
I remember well the utter sinking feeling that came when #1 son(about age 4) came to me, quaking, and told me he had broken X. I cannot now recall what X was, but it had been a treasure. In the space of a heartbeat, I decided to not breakdown or punish him. He was already so very sorry for what he had done; it had been an accident–he was such a cautious child. I didn’t have the heart to punish him, and I was proud that he had owned up–very conflicting emtions. I vowed to just move on and I suppose I did, since I can’t remember what it was that he broke.
I do remember crying over it softly for awhile, once he had left the room. I wish I could remember what it was.
I don’t have kids but I can relate one about my family. We had seen the movie of The Dark Crystal as kids, with our mom, and she loved the creatures in it. So at some point my brother had bought her a comic book of The Dark Crystal. This is HUGE because my brother almost never gave any gifts. When he was a teenager he and she were fighting and he tore up the comic book in front of her. She cried and cried.
On a lighter note, but still something I cringe about: My brother and I both had metal tool boxes to build little projects as kids. My parents had just gotten a new brown (it was late 70s) refrigerator and I almost immediately walked past it and inadvertantly scratched the front with the corner of my tool box. She was nice about it but I know she was very disappointed that this brand new thing was marred.
My son (aged 4) and his best friend-in-crime (also 4) decided that the insides of her mother’s grand piano would be a cool place to dump pails of sand from the sandbox.
The mother was livid and demanded that I pay at least half the repairs. I was broke, but I didn’t want to say so, so I just told her that when they played at my house, I actually supervised them, and if they damaged anything, it was on me.
I could go on and on about all their shenanigans over the years-- they remained friends until their late teens, and even at that point, I worried whenever they were together. When she was 17, she got pregnant by her boyfriend and that spelled the end of the close friendship, though they still keep in touch once in a while.
Oy. I’m sure anyone with even the most elementary grasp of computers would have taken steps to back up her thesis.
My mother is brilliant, but she does not fit that description.
Solfy, you should do stool searches: I bet she ate them.
I hit the garage a little driving my dad’s 1970 Plymouth Superbird about 8 years ago. It was limited to the driver’s side door and while sort of dented, the paint was ok. He was cool with it.
He later drove it into the back of the garage, significantly damaging the nosecone. :smack:
My siblings and I were playing with a ball indoors. We knocked a jade Dragon and Phoenix statue off the back of our upright piano. The thing was shattered. Our parents didn’t yell at us, but we felt pretty bad about it all.
Not my kids, but me.
My parents thought I was precocious, so in the spirit of trying to make one’s kid smarter, one year they gave me a junior handyman set, and one year they gave me a junior chemistry set.
I didn’t make that mistake with my children.
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When I was a wee lioncublet, my grandmother had records left over back when turntables were in use. I remember rolling them around and snapping them in half on purpose because it was fun. I didn’t know what they were at the time, but now I feel awful about it. I don’t remember ever being scolded for it, so maybe they weren’t that valuable. I think.
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I remember once I was pulling something out of a closet a number of years ago, and something fell out and smashed to bits. It was some sort of ceramic tugboat thing that I guess was a present for when my brother was born. I felt bad and cried and apologized, but my mom, being the hot-headed woman she is, kept yelling at me and telling me I did it on purpose. I dunno why she said I did it on purpose when I had no reason to break it…
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I was walking through the house with my backpack on back in high school and accidentally knocked over a crystal candlestick holder. Got yelled at good for that one too.
On a lighter note, once I was left home alone in fifth grade or so, and being hungry, went to get the aluminum baking pan out of the fridge that mom had made turkey in. Not realizing how heavy it was, it fell out of my hands and spilled the turkey as well as all the gravy/drippings/whatchacallit all over the tile floor. Since my mom has a short temper, I started crying in hysterics, knowing that I’d be in deep kim chee. I called her at work, sobbing on the phone to her what happened, and she started telling me it was perfectly all right and to stop crying, it was okay, and to clean it up as best I could and she’d take care of it when she got home. She still laughs about it to this day and feels sorry for me at the time, because she never did tell me how heavy it really was beforehand.
My four year old daughter recently drew with permanent marker all over our antique 1944 Lane cedar chest. My wife loves antiques and I bought it for her shortly after we got married. She was broken hearted.
We didn’t really get too mad at my daughter because she did not do it deliberately. She had been instructed never to use markers on ANY surface except for paper, and she followed that rule. The problem was that my wife had recently been wrapping gifts in the room, and had left some gift-wrapping tissue paper out, along with the marker she had been filling out the tags with. My daughter put a piece of tissue paper on the cedar chest and drew all over it with the marker.
Incidentally, if anyone here has any advice on how to get permanent marker off of antique wood, I would appreciate it.
Ouch. The two classic answers are hairspray and a rag or baking soda and a little scrubbing. I’m not sure which order to try them in.
My brother and I broke some little treasure of my mom’s by playing ball in the house. She was amazingly cool about it, though very disappointed and sad, of course. That’s not as painful a memory, though, as the year she and we thought it would be pretty to float lit candles in her leaded-crystal pitcher, though. It didn’t take long for it to explode, and we were all distraught. We weren’t rich enough that there were a lot of things like that in our lives, and it was so beautiful, and she had loved it so much…