My older brother said he’d help me get ready for the “President’s Physical Fitness Test.” We started with practicing the flexed arm hang (girls didn’t have to do chin-ups) on the shower rod. It bent. Then we tried to bend it back, resulting in two bends going in opposite directions. Then we decided that if we just closed the curtain maybe no one would notice. They noticed.
More than creepy. Keep a close eye on this kid, if I remember correctly, something like 90% of serial killers started with animal torture. I’m serious here, that’s sociopath behavior…
Habit rules the unreflecting herd. - Wordsworth
My oldest son, when he was less than 1 year old, got into our pantry, opened up a bottle of oil and poured it all over himself and the kitchen floor.
After that, we kept the pantry locked as a matter of course.
Of course, when you make a habit of things, you sometimes absent-mindedly forget to do them (don’t realize you hadn’t yet done them). And indeed, our nine-month old daughter crawled into the pantry and did the exact same thing just a few weeks ago!
Some people never learn, do we? :o
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
I must have been around 4 or 5… One hot summer day (remember, this is in Beaumont TX - hot, muggy, buggy) I decided to get into the garbage cans out by the street and retrieve the tuna salad sandwiches I’d seen my mom throw in there earlier that morning. You see I was hungry, and so were my little girlfriends, and we didn’t want to bother mom for anything - besides, those sandwiches were right there, and I had a GREAT idea…
I announced (to the delight of my little pals) that we were going to have ourselves a tea party, complete with delicious warm tuna fish sandwiches. There was much rejoicing. About an hour later (after we’d each been forced to down an ipecac shake), there was much lamenting!
StoryTyler
“Not everybody does it, but everybody should.”
When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my mom and dad bought their own gas station. Dad would work from 5:00 AM to 8:00 PM but Mom would take him his lunch and fill work part of the afternoon so he could take a nap. My grandmother was our live-in babysitter, but the older we got the less time she spent actually watching us. This sets the stage for some mischief.
My sister and I lived in a pretty isolated area out in the country and the nearest kids our age were thugs. But we were so desperate to play with someone other than each other that we kept inviting them over.
One time we were down in a sandy spot of the backyard when they talked us into unhooking a sprinkler so we could make mud. We build a little sand city with canals or rivers or whatever. It was probably the most fun we had with those kids but my mom was upset that her calf pasture wasn’t getting watered and her children were covered in mud.
Another time these kids spent the morning playing with us in the wading pool. When mom was ready to leave at noon, she told us to tell the kids to go home because she didn’t want them there without supervision. So I told them go home, but come right back as soon as my mom was gone. But, while they were torturing us in the wading pool (“Look, just run and jump in and it’ll be like a slip ‘n’ slide!”), grandma happened by and of course she got on the phone and told on us.
The thugs were pretty much banned from our property after that, which was ok because we didn’t really like them, we were just lonely. They moved away shortly after that.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
When I was around 3 years old my family lived in a trailer park for some time and I remember getting into all sorts of nonsense there. One day I was upset because there was a tree in the front yard (actually a postage stamp sized area of grass with a spindly sapling about as thick as a Pringles can) and I wanted to play baseball or some nonsense. I decided I was going to cut it down and get it out of the way…that’s how my mother came to find me hacking away at the tree with a potato masher (the round disk-shape kind, not one of those wire squiggles) which was the sharpest thing that I could wrap my tiny mind around at the time.
Once I was sent to my room for being punished and I decided to run away. Not having any idea of what would be a good destination to run to, I decided on the Dairy Queen across the highway. I slipped out the back door, left the trailer park, crossed a ditch and scaled along a fence (the wire kind that has like 4-inch square openings…don’t know what it’s called) until I got to the end of the fence at an intersection. That’s where I was waiting to cross the freeway, pants soaked from the knees down, when my mother screeched up wild-eyed in the car. I can’t imagine how I even got that far, or what would’ve happened if had tried to actually cross. Of course I had no money even if I did get to the Dairy Queen, but I’m sure that didn’t even occur to me at the time.
The BEST story though is how I begged and begged my mom to let me go to the park down the street by myself and she finally gave in. At last my chance to do what I’d always wanted: Climb the baseball backstop. Why? Who knows? It looked so high and easy to climb. So I stick my foot into a hole in the chain link and start climbing. I make it to the top, look around, and start climbing down. I’m about six feet from the ground when my sandal gets caught in one of the links. Not responding to the gentle tugs, I decide to give it a yank with my hands, which of course were holding me upright on the higher links. Whoooosh! I end up falling backwards and dangling upside down with my foot caught in this fence, my head about 3 or 4 feet off the ground. I managed to yell loud enough for some “big girls” (maybe 10 years old) to come running, but they couldn’t reach high enough to get my foot out. They asked where I lived and at the time I was only able to come up with “The United States” so they asked if I lived in the trailer park, what my name was and ran off to start banging on doors. Maybe 10 minutes later I see them and my mom TRUCKIN’ down the street and after some serious grappling I’m freed and put upright on the ground so the blood can drain back into my body.
Hmmm, I just remembered. I have to write my saintly mother…
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"OU KID"
This just happened a few weeks ago:
My daughter, who is almost three, usually comes bounding into our bedroom when she wakes up. On this particular morning, I woke up, and the house was rather quiet. I walked in to her bedroom, and she wasn’t there. Walked out in to the living roon, and found her. She was sitting on the floor, with my Mary Kay eyeshadow/blush/lipstick compact. It was open, and she was looking in to the mirror, carefully applying lipstick…to her entire face.
I had just bought that lipstick the day before, and it was a shade that looks particularly good on me. The lipstick was totally wrecked. But I couldn’t get mad at her. She’d seen me putting on my makeup dozens of times. Besides, I was the one that left my purse out where she could get it. And even though she had the lipstick all over her face, it was just on her face, not the walls or the couch, and she just looked so darn cute putting it on.
Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.
My sister used to have a big interest in snails–we had a lot of them in the garden and my mom would pay her a penny a snail to collect them in a bucket.
Eventually, at about age 3, she invented games with the snails. “Hocking snails” was a big one–she’d put a bunch of them on the patio and whack at them with her hocking stick like they were golf balls.
The worst, though, was when she saw a picture of a slug and thought they were just snails without shells:
Us: What’cha doing?
Kid: I made slugs and now I’m having a slug race!
Us: (shudder) Oh yeah? Who’s winning?
Kid: That one–it’s still moving!
eeeeewwww!
(Worry not–she has outgrown these tendencies and is now a reasonably normal 12-year old.)
We could swoop over trees
And sweep under carpets
We could dive into suns
Tho’ it’s not recommended