Silly but innocent things you did as a kid

In My Humble Opinion
1

What are some crazy-ass, but ultimately harmless ideas you had as a kid?

At the age of, I don’t know, ten? I actually raised pet mealworms!

Now, why would I do a thing like that? Well, as a kid I loved the notion of keeping lots of animals as pets, including wild animals. The ones my parents were willing to tolerate were: 1) family dogs (two Cairn Terriers and a Yorkshire Terrier after the former died); 2) a pet rabbit for me when I was almost seven; 3) two or three birds I or my grandmother found and tried to rescue. One flew away, the other died.

Other than that, there was no encouragement to have a menagerie at home. However, my mother did once buy me a used or discounted book in French called “Amis animaux” (Animal Friends). My parents wanted me to practice my French, they did. Anyway, it was a lovely book that gave do-it-yourself instructions for making things like bird houses, bird feeders, terrariums and cages for various pets, turtle pans, etc. I thought I’d make some of these and maybe then my parents would let me get the actual animal. But whatever I wanted to make, I didn’t find enough material or tools at home.

But one rubric explained how to do something very simple: raise mealworms. All you had to do was take a metal tin, fill it with flour, and shove it in a damp corner. So that’s what I did. I took a cookie tin, put in the flour, and hid it under the heater oil tank in the basement workshop. And lo and behold, I managed to grow mealworms. Obviously, the book didn’t mean for you to raise them as pets but as bird feed or lizard feed or whatever, but I was like “what the heck, I can at least do this.” Maybe at some later point, as an amateur entomologist, I at least tried to make an ant farm at home.

As a kid I was often satisfied with feeble successes of this sort. Later as a young adult I decided I would rather try to attempt fewer projects but do them right.

2

I was an incredibly silly child.

I used to pretend I was an amoeba by covering myself in a blanket and crawling around the house making amoeba noises. (In case you wondered, they go, “Mwaaaap! Mwaaaap!”)

I may still… occasionally… do this.

3

Learned something today.

4

Around 10 years old. We had a big back yard so it was the kind of place where all the kids came to play. One day there were maybe six or seven of us hanging around when we decided we were going to put on a circus for the neighborhood. I think someone was going to jump a Huffy over some cinderblocks, someone else was going to pogo-stick, another was going to climb a tree or something. I was going to walk a tight rope, that turned out to be a slack-line, on a big fat rope tied to two trees about ten feet apart, maybe two feet off the ground.

We had committee meetings to assign parts and decide the order of the acts. We rehearsed for hours. We had a hum-dinger of a show to put on.

Then we all went home for lunch and we forgot all about it.

5

The neighborhood where I grew up was typical 1960s suburbia, a tract of modest 5-3-2s (five rooms, three bedrooms, two baths) on about 5000sf lots, all built by the same developer and all sold to families with young kids, so at any given time there could be a swarm of kids, ages 4-12 just buzzing around. All the parents knew all the kids, and vice versa, and we (the kids) didn’t think anything of going in and out of each other’s houses and backyards to get a drink, go to the bathroom, or drag Mike or Kenny out to play. At our house, we had a woodpile stacked adjacent to the garage, and it became the de facto neighborhood pee spot, at least for the boys. If we were playing outside and didn’t want to go in to go to the bathroom, we’d whip it out and pee into the woodpile. It wasn’t unusual to have four or five kids peeing into the pile at one time. It was never a problem.

Until, that is, years later. The woodpile started out about six feet tall, and our family didn’t go through a lot of wood. It probably took 10 years for the pile to shrink down to the ‘little kid pee level’, and I distinctly remember coming home one day with my dad kneeling in front of the fireplace, starting a fire. Within seconds, the room filled with the stench of burning pee. He blamed it on neighborhood cats. My brother and I knew better.

6

A baby mouse. Like that gray baby mouse in Tom and Jerry. Unfortunately, that involved going around the house in nothing but my underwear.

I was, like, 6. Cut me some slack.

7

Ah yes, the joys of relieving oneself at leisure, in places where one is not supposed to go.

At home, we had two sheds in the garden. One was well-built of wood and particle board and was used for storage. The other was of aluminum and I used to play in it. In fact I tried to make it a clubhouse, but unlike @ricepad I didn’t have too many friends to join me there. The floor was made of concrete. On at least one occasion, I peed in a corner, perhaps on a few wooden planks or something. I think my parents never noticed.

Incidentally, at one point that shed was converted to a house for my rabbit.

8

I’m afraid that I did mostly dangerous and stupid things when I was a kid.

9

I got a picture of you:

10

I’m not sure the following is exactly silly, but it’s very interesting and clever. And I’m not the one that did it but I wish I had thought of it.

My friend Mary lou, not her real name, a woman I worked with over 40 years ago told me that when she was a little kid and she would get mad at her mother for something she would sneak into her mother’s closet and bite tiny holes in her clothes. She would only do two or three holes in a couple of garments. So it would be a while before her mother noticed. I guess she must have done this on several occasions over a span of some years of her childhood. Her mother never figured it out. I guess she thought it was moths or something.

I just think this is so incredibly clever and creative and stealthy and, let’s face it, passive aggressive. I really admire that little kid. It’s like something that Resistance would do during the war. Someone should use this in a novel or a movie or something. I don’t own the rights to it so anybody who’s reading, have at it.

11

Look at my avatar. Superimposed on the maple leaf is a chipmunk. This is a nod to the fact that as a small child who grew up with Richard Scarry books, I imagined myself as a series of anthropomorphic animals. The last one, and the one I stayed with the longest, was a chipmunk (like Chip ‘N’ Dale).

Around the age of five, I would do things like stick out my front teeth like buck teeth or draw a tail above my butt in the air with my finger.

12

Several times I played with large , tall cardboard boxes by climbing into them and drawing controls and indicators all over the inside surface like a sci-fi spacecraft, then pretending to pilot it. I even had explanations in my head for what all the scifi-speak labels for the weapons and so on meant.

I built a “robot” out of Legos - this was before they came as kits, they were generic “Legos”, with an internal logic for how it all worked. Red Legos were for energy, blue for computers and sensors, white was structural & armor, curved ones formed a circle and were the power plant. I also wrote the plans for it down, and after I took it apart I could recreate it at will.

13

And from when I was 7 to when I was 9, I actually tried to build a working airplane.

It was after my first flight (well, the first flight I remembered) on a family vacation to Cuba, when I developed a passion for aircraft. I got the idea to build my own plane. As luck should have it, my parents were renovating various parts of the house. I took the shell of the old bathroom wash basin, and used it as the center of the fuselage. In it I inserted an old hand-pulled shopping cart; this was the undercarriage. I tried to make wings with ailerons from some panels removed from the material for the sliding wardrobe door that my parents inserted in their bedroom, but these were far (far, I say) too thin.

I seriously imagined myself as placing the airplane on the street and taking off with it one day. Finally, one day, while working on it, I stepped on a board with a nail that probably I had left in the workshop. My parents used that as an excuse to get rid of my airplane construction project.

14

Yep. We invented a game called “Death-Mo War” and pretty sure we were ahead of the curve on Parkour.

There was never any safety equipment involved.

15

Very clever @Spice_Weasel.

I just lay very still and pretended I was a slug.

No one noticed much. :face_with_peeking_eye: I must’ve been very good at it.

16

Our version of the amoeba was inspired by the movie “The Blob”. We’d get under a large blanket then cruise around the house making weird noises, then find a sibling and devour him or her, making the blob even bigger and going in search of another sibling (we had a lot of them). Fun times. I still do this with my grandkids.

17

I wanted to barbecue a meal just like Dad did in the backyard on our Weber grill. Unfortunately, it was winter and way too cold to cook outside.

So I figured: indoor grill.

I was about six. This seemed perfectly reasonable.

I found an old, large Charles Chips tin and set it on the concrete basement floor. I didn’t have any charcoal briquettes like Dad used, so I filled it with scrap wood and sawdust from his table saw. Dad had a very cool basement woodshop, which, in retrospect, contained far too many interesting things for a six-year-old with initiative.

I also found a pack of stick matches and some lighter fluid.

Excellent.

I liberally doused my lumber pile with lighter fluid and tossed in a lit match.

For dinner, I had hot dogs pilfered from Mom’s refrigerator, already skewered on sticks. I could practically hear the family applauding.

Chef Tibby!

Surely Mom would whip up some potato salad and baked beans to accompany my gourmet wienies.

Well… that didn’t happen.

What did happen was that my homemade fire pit sent flames shooting toward the basement ceiling, blackening the rafters and making a reasonably serious attempt to burn down the house.

Either my screams or the rapidly accumulating smoke alerted Dad, who came flying down the basement stairs and extinguished the conflagration.

Instead of the applause I had envisioned, I got my butt thoroughly whooped and was sent to my room for what seemed like eight to ten years.

Totally unfair, says I.

There I was, showing initiative, creativity, culinary ambition, and basic problem-solving skills—and my parents chose to stifle the arts.

18

A friend of mine, when she was 5, decided to regale the minister, who had dropped in to visit her parents, by preparing (to the best of her recollections) and serving a full tray of martinis, as she’d seen her parents prepare numerous times before for other company.

19

Dug a hole.

One of the neighbourhood kids and I decided that, one summer when we were maybe ten years old, that we were going to dig a hole to China. So we started digging in his backyard’s garden.

The project lasted a few days, until we conceded that the Earth was a lot bigger than we estimated, and left it. But not before his father asked us to fill the hole back in. Which we did. At least, there was cold lemonade from my friend’s mother after we had finished filling the hole back in.

20

I was a big fan of the “Swallows and Amazons” books. If you’re not familiar, it involves a couple of families of kids who are all mad about sailing who have various adventures, set in 1930s Britain. They regularly use flag semaphore, both traditionally and for writing secret messages to each other. So, of course, I learned the semaphore alphabet. I practiced pretty diligently, even kept a diary written using semaphoring figures. I was convinced this was going to be an important life skill.

I unfortunately missed the key point, that in order to be useful, it required knowing someone else who also knew it.