I had long, blonde hair that my mom would wash in the kitchen sink. I hated having my hair washed. When I was about 3 I decided things would go better if we used something I liked to shampoo my hair with, instead of that nasty soap that kept getting into my eyes. Something like say, butterscotch pudding. So, I pulled out the tub from the fridge, worked it all through my hair like my mom did, into nice peaks, and then trotted off to show her. To my surprise, she wasn’t happy. She screamed, in fact. I ran and hid. So successfully that the pudding hardened. 
End result was not only did I not invent a marvelous new way to wash my hair, I ended up spending untold extra time getting my hair shampooed to get hardened butterscotch pudding out. The exact opposite result from what I was hoping! :mad:
My mom had a brand new Cadillac, and I drew all over the back seat with a ballpoint pen I found somewhere.
I was about 3.
My brother, who was about 4 at the time, used our mom’s Steuben crystal pitcher as a kicking tee. Forty years later, she still couldn’t talk about it.
gigi: You want the scissors so bad, fine! <toss>
gigi’s bro: stabbed in the hip
My dad tells this story from when he was a kid. His parents had just purchased a brand new, very nice, large wooden dining room table, with a nice shiny finish. He had an uncontrollable urge to scratch something in it, but he knew he’d be killed if he did. So he carved his brother’s name. And never confessed when his brother got in trouble instead of him.
My folks bought a brand new 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon when I was three. One day when I was about five, I decided to play filling station attendant with a garden hose.
Shortly after that my dad went to Pep Boys and bought a locking gas cap.
kaylasmom, when she was about four years old, was given a small painted turtle as a pet. The ones that are about the size of a silver dollar. One summer afternoon, she decided that it was too hot to wear that hard shell. So, of course, she removed it.
During a Thanksgiving gathering, my two nieces (six and two) were left alone for a few minutes in the living room with art supplies . When the grownups returned from the kitchen, there was a huge hunk of the two-year-old’s hair missing from the front of her head, cut right at the scalp. The six-year-old was still holding the scissors.
Her mother was horrified and blurted out, “Did you just cut her hair?”
My niece never lost her composure, did not look the least bit guilty and replied, “Did you see me cut her hair?”
LOL. A little lawyer, at six.
Not really mischief, because my mother was OK with it, but we had the big balls of colored twine from my parents business, and I would take it and run it between and around every piece of furniture in the living room, creating a giant spiderweb/fort thingy. Nobody could even walk into the room unobstructed – but then, we didn’t use that room much anyway.
We had a ~ 1940’s Ford tractor for mowing the lawn and general tractor duty. “How could a BB gun possibly hurt that”? PING. Made for fun target shooting one afternoon until I saw all the water leaking out of the radiator. :smack:
Don’t think a real little kid can be mischievous? Think again. When my younger brother was in the early toddler stage, our Mom served him dinner in a dish with a lower compartment filled with hot water. One evening our meal included green beans, and he pulled off the cap and started dropping green beans into the water well!
Let’s just say that I’m the kinda person who has to pee on the electric fence to see if it’s turned on. When the sprog was old enough to get into mischief on his own, my parents started to laugh hysterically and haven’t stopped.
My son was three when he got out of bed in the middle of the night, grabbed a Sharpie permanent marker, (the big one) and drew several designs on the wall down the hallway, into the living room, and the kitchen. There was a heavy concentration of “art” around each switchplate along the way. My husband woke up to go to the bathroom and noticed the hall light was on; he woke me up to have a look at the walls. He was nearly apoplectic until we turned the light on in the kitchen. There we found the linoleum had also been decorated, and I don’t mean just a little. Vast swatches. I don’t know how my husband didn’t have a stroke.
We had to paint the entire interior, thanks to our open floor plan. We pulled up the linoleum and left the subloor for a couple of weeks. We hosted Thanksgiving at our house a week later.
This brings back a memory that makes me cringe every time. We had just gotten a new refrigerator which was a huge event – it was that brown from the mid-70s and we had it till my parents sold the house in the late-80s so a rare new thing.
Meanwhile my brother and I each had a play tool kit but they were working tools in a metal toolbox and yeah, I walked past the brand new fridge and scratched it with the corner of the tool box. My poor mom didn’t even get mad because it was an accident but I’m sure it made her sad. 
“This is why we can’t have nice things” sadly is a slogan for clumsy me.
Whoa. You must be really DETERMINED.
Can’t you get Doors to do it for you?
Not that I want him injured, you understand; it’s just that he might have an easier time obtaining a conclusive result.
When I was little, there was a tornado one night and we woke up to a knocked over tree in the front yard. Perfect for a play house! Even better, my mom was having the house painted, so my older sister and I decided we would paint our house, too.
We painted the leaves and the branches and started on the trunk, but that was kinda boring. So we decided that the garage floor needed to be white. But the garage floor was boring, too (way too flat) and way too big. And the darned car was in the way. It was a huge, wood-paneled burgundy station wagon. And it needed to be white, too!
Luckily for us, mom walked in just as our brushes were raised to start painting it white. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Until I found myself hiding under my bed when mom came in to give me a spanking.
My kids haven’t done anything on those kinds of proportions yet, though my son did try to scrub his asshole with his toothbrush and my daughter decided she wanted to be sparkly all over. So she smeared her Hello Kitty lipbalm all over her hair and eyebrows and thighs and came to give me a hug.
Edited to add: my son did try to booby-trap the tooth fairy. He lost a tooth and that night he set up a trip wire, motion detector (damn spy gear) and some cans by the bed. I almost killed myself trying to get that damn tooth. Landed half on top of him, half on the night stand. But he didn’t wake up. I almost left a note telling him to knock it off, but it was so funny I couldn’t stop laughing.
When I was a kid my parents gave me a chemistry set like this. They regretted it very quickly.
I was just talking about the old chemistry sets yesterday! You got real gunpowder and hydrochloric acid. I remember burning holes in our concrete picnic table, and my brother used all the gunpowder in one big bang. To hell with the lame experiments. I don’t think we even opened the book. 
Between this and playing in the fog behind the mosquito truck, it’s a wonder we survived our childhood.
I was able to make out the names strontium chloride, tannic acid, sodium carbonate, azurite, sodium thiosulfate, sulfur, aluminum chloride, and calcium oxide. The last one I recognize as lime; the thiosulfate is of course “hypo,” used in photography. Now what kind of trouble could you get into using those things?
“Daddy! Daddy! Did you know you can draw pictures on the car with a rock?!?!”