I saw my nephew this weekend. He’s ten and a lot of fun. (I’m biased. )
“Aunt Mouse, did you know that Coke used to have cocaine in it?”
“Yes, I did know that. They replaced the cocaine with frog spit and had to change the price. They used to sell a bottle for 5 cents, now it’s a dollar or more.”
Thanks to Google, I’m sure that I’ll get call from Nephew about the ingredients in Coke, and I’ll confess to pulling his leg.
What are some harmless tall tales for children? What stories have grown-ups told you?
“Before 1964, the whole world was in black and white…”
“We didn’t have electricity growing up. We had to watch TV by candlelight.”
“After Grandma and Grandpa divorced, we were really poor, but we always got clothes and something to play with for Christmas. One year, all I got was a pair of jeans with a hole in the pocket.” (I waited until he was a teenager for that one )
“Thunder and lightning is really Grandma and Grandpa fighting up in heaven.”
The best one was when a friend of mine told his daughter the one about walking to school barefoot in waist deep snow, uphill 10 miles both ways. He grew up in Vietnam.
Here’s some classic ancient silliness, passed down through the generations. If you put salt on a bird’s tail, he can’t fly away, and you can grab him. It took me a while to figure out that birds won’t let you get close enough to salt them, let alone grab them.
My neighbor’s kid told me, sincerely, that mustard plants grow upside down. That’s why you never see their bright yellow flowers until after the spring plowing turns over the soil. I had to keep an eye on that kid. He kept wanting to paint my rocks white. Oy.
Your grandmother has been replaced by an android with foot in mouth disease.
(Sorry, I guess that would be harmless fibs I’d like to tell YOUR kids. )
More on topic:
My father once had me convinced, at the embarrassingly ripe old age of 6 or 7, that there were kittens in cat food. Worse, he got all Socratic on my ass and made ME figure it out without actually telling me. His logic was impeccable. As we were walking through the supermarket, he’d pick up cans of food and cover the print.
"What’s in here?" he’d ask.
“Peas!”
“How do you know?”
“'Cause there’s a picture of peas on it!” I said proudly.
"What’s in this one?"
“Chick peas!”
“How do you know?”
“'Cause there’s chick peas in the picture, duh!” Obviously Daddy had not read the Bobbsey Twins or he’d be better at this mystery stuff.
“This one?”
“Peaches, silly! Look, they’re right there!”
"Well, what about this one?"
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
When I went on vacation to visit my dad in Oklahoma with my brother and his wife and the nephew we had the nephew, who was 4, convinced that in Oklahoma there are packs of mean flying dogs that roam around at night time. Well one night it was pretty windy and he was a little scared because my dad lives out in the country and the wind can get to pretty high speeds out there and my dad told him not to worry it is just a pack of the mean flying dogs flying around the house.
Well he screams, jumps up and runs into the bedroom and then into the closet. We all laughed because it was funny. We find him hiding under a pile of cloths crying because he was so scared. We had to talk to him for quite a while to calm him down and get him to come out of the closet. It was funny though.
My young cousin once found a sanitary napkin in my purse. She carefully unwrapped it and looked at it and asked me what it was.
I told her that it was a mouse bed.
She examined the sanitary napkin again. Noting the extensions on the front and back (intended for attaching it to a belt), she said “It’s really more of a mouse hammock, isn’t it?”
We used to tell the kids that all restaurants hired greyhounds to lick their dishes clean. We had a greyhound at home which we used for the same purpose (of course, we still washed the dishes)!
I used to fib to kids (mine and others’) all the time. Kinda part of my obnoxious idea that it is funny to say outrageous, clearly ridiculous things with a straight face, and see if people accept it as true. Often preceded with “Would you believe…?” As my wife has often observed, it is not my most endearing trait - essentially being humor at someone else’s expense. (Well, actually after 21 years we’re still waiting to figure out what endearing trait(s) I might have… But that’s another story.)
I think my fibbing used to be worse when I used to drink. Moreover, I’d spew BS while drunk, and then not realize later why kids were acting a certain way around me. Like when my nieces and nephews always wanted me to take off my shoes - and I refused - because at one time I had told them that I had “more toes than anyone else in the world” and they wanted to see them.
We had a stretch of woods behind our old house. I often took my kids and nieces and nephews on treks through this area (which really was only 50 yards of so wide and a few hundred uards long, but seemed huge to little kids!) Folks would toss piles of brush back there, which I told the kids were “bear houses.” The area was really buggy, so we would have the kids put on bug spray, calling it “bear repellent.”
One time my sister thanked me for making her kid impress her teacher. In kindergarten or so, each kid was supposed to state a “safety tip.” Most kids said things like “look both ways before crossing a street”, “Always ask your mother” and such. My darling niece piped up "Always use bear repellent when walking in the woods behind uncle Dinsdale’s house!"
Man, seriously there are too many to remember. Somewhat frequently my teens will remind me of some particular bit of BS I had them believe when they were young. Like the trolls who lived in the little metal boxes near busy intersections and switched the traffic lights from green to red. If you don’t believe me, then why is there a little metal box at every single intersection with a traffic light?
Or this one kinda unusual church at the intersection of 31st and Wolf, that I convinced them was built from the top down starting with the steeple. We were all shocked when some recent TV ads showed various famous buildings/monuments being constructed “from the top down.”
I must really be a PITA to have to live with. You folks are lucky you don’t have to deal with me IRL!
I told my kids when they were very little that I couldn’t hear whining, that it’s too high pitched. If they whined I would just say, “I can’t hear you, talk in your regular voice”. Neither of my children ever whine.
To get them to give up their pacifiers I told them that once they were three the store wouldn’t let me buy anymore for them. So the pacifiers got “lost” until we only had one and then that one would get too icky they gave it up.
Our oldest, when he was around two, loved to be naked so he had naked time after his bath. He never wanted to get dressed when it was over so we told him about the Naked Police. We sometimes pretended to call the naked police on the phone, he didn’t quite believe us but he was a little nervous.
Once I ran out the back door and around the house so I could pound on the front door and yell “Open the door, this is the Naked Police”. That one scared him and the game was kind of over.
My 6-year-old brother Robert convinced my 4-year-old sister Mary that chocolate Easter eggs were made out of bunny doodoo. For years, every time the family had an Easter candy hunt, Mary would give Robert all of the chocolate eggs and keep only the jellybeans and marshmallow peeps.
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