When I was small, about 3 or so, some kids from the neighborhood came over to play in our kiddie pool…and the brought their kitty. I thought it would be a great idea to put kitty in the pool for a swim. I nearly drowned the poor thing. 
A friend of mine once found a baby bird that he brought home. He noticed that it’s knees were bent the wrong way, so he fixed them. :eek: Imagine how he felt when his mom told him what he’d done.
Hey, wow! I have one too, right in the center of my right palm… I was holding a pencil the wrong way, and it had a really sharp point.
Oooh…that reminds me, when I was 4 and my brother was about 3, we played a game where he’d try to grab my fingers… with a pair of SCISSORS. I lost, and ran around the house screaming and bleeding everywhere. Fortunately, the cut was minor, but I still have the scar on my left middle finger.
JerH, emacularius, I’m joining your pencil-dot club. In 8th grade I was idly bouncing a newly sharpened pencil on my desk, and brought my palm down directly onto the point. Ouch.
The point didn’t break off, it just left gray dust in the wound. It’s a tattoo.
Count me in as a member of the pencil tip club. One in my right palm, one in my right big toe. No childish hijinks to blame either, just my own klutziness. I dropped a pencil once as I was erasing, it fell a couple inches, and bounced on its eraser straight into my palm. I was so shocked I moved my hand instantly, and the sharp tip broke off right inside. Still there a good ten years later. For the toe one, I accidentally kicked a pencil lying on the floor into a desk leg, and again, the graphite snapped off in my toe. Damn pencils. Maybe this explains why I use pens to do everything now, even the crossword puzzle? Of course there was that damn pen that started leaking all over my hand during a job interview, so I’m not too fond of pens either.
Okay, that’s it, nothing but yellow crayons from now on!
Me and my cousins decided to make a tire swing. We had a huge tree in our yard with a limb that grew straight out for a few feet and it was high enough for good swinging action. So, the rope was about 15’ long, the tree was about 4’ wide, and the swing was about 3’ feet away from the tree. :rolleyes: Unlike a regular swing that has a chain/rope on either side, a tire swing doesn’t keep going forward just because that’s the way you pushed it. And I pushed it HARD!
The tire bumped the tree on one pass, my little cousin fell out, and the tire nailed her on it’s return, just as she was standing up. It pushed her face first into the tree.
One day, when I was about six or so, I was looking at the lamp in my room. I remembered that one of my friends had a red-filtered flashlight that made the room look really cool if you turned it on while the lights were off. I decided that it would be cool to have a lamp that did that…so, I got out my crayons, took off the lampshade, and proceeded to try to color the lightbulb red.
Needless to say, the crayon quickly began melting, which I thought was fine – hey, it’s just making my job easier – until I noticed that all it was really doing was blocking the light, rather than turning it red. Hmm, guess this isn’t going to work after all. Conscientious little guy that I was, I figured I’d better wash it off…
So, yours truly goes and fetches a cup of water from the bathroom sink, brings it back into his room, and dumps it all over the (still-lit) light bulb.
BAM!
The lightbulb explodes like the biggest 4th of July firework you ever saw. Shattered glass flies all over the room, sparks leap from the socket, and I sit there in wonderment of what the hell just happened. I then remembered that my mom had once told me something about water and electricity. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I called my mom up (she was at work; I was a latchkey kid up until junior high) and told her that I’d just exploded a light bulb, and what should I do? After reassuring her multiple times that I was okay (it honestly hadn’t occured to me up to that point that I could have been hurt at all, let alone seriously injured), she told me to unplug the lamp and then wait until she got home.
I guess some lessons you just have to learn the hard way 
Gosh, too many to mention here!
Add yet another entry to the pencil tip club–I was drawing on my leg one day with a pencil, and the point broke off and went under the skin. It’s still there, although it has wandered around just a bit.
When I was in 3rd grade, my mother made me eat oatmeal for breakfast one morning. I HATE oatmeal, and told her that if she made me eat it, I would throw up. She made me eat it. I was in school when the ominous feeling started. Being an extremely shy and quiet child, I didn’t know you were allowed to run out of the room to vomit. So I put my hands over my mouth, walked up to the teacher’s desk, removed my hands to ask permission to go to the bathroom, and—yurp! all over her desk, grade book, books, papers, etc. She hollered for me to run to the bathroom, so I did, leaving a trail of oatmeal barf all the way there. IIRC, by the time I got to the bathroom, I was through puking. It was really disgusting, and was made even more so by the fact that the oatmeal looked just the same as it had before I ate it. Ugh.
Another day I was swinging an old broken mop handle around in circles. My brother wandered too near, and it slashed him over his lip. He had to get stitches.
And when I was between 18 months and 3 years, I consumed the following: (1) a can of melted Johnson’s paste floor was (had my stomach pumped); (2) a bottle of my mother’s birth control pills, with a bottle of my aunt’s morning sickness pills for a chaser (had my stomach pumped); and (3) some blue paint from the trashcan of the neighbors who were moving out. When I ate the blue paint, I wandered into the house and said, “Mommy, this Phisohex tastes funny.” She was really freaked, thinking I’d eaten Phisohex, until she saw my blue mouth, teeth, and tongue. And yes, I had my stomach pumped.
When I was 5 and my sister was 3 she filled a dirty, rusty metal pail with mud and told me to make a line of mudpies on the cement steps of our house. I was doing it when she put her hand down where the next mudpie would go. I remember wondering if I should try to put a mudpie where her hand was, and then remembered she said “a line of mudpies.” So I did. And she ended up being rushed to the hospital for stitches in her finger while I was left home alone.
I am a member of the prestigious Pencil Tip Club. I was bouncing a pencil on its eraser while flipping it over and catching it near the tip. I missied once and jammed the tip between the thumb and index finger on my right hand. I dug most of it, but a slight stain remains. It’s my first tattoo!
two kids, one grass roller*(?), one slope, one wall. :smack:
We thought there was an ants nest under there ok! You know how much children love ants nests :rolleyes:
Cheers.
Engine.
*One of those things that you roll over grass after you’ve laid it. A huge roller type thing, filled with cement to make it super heavy.
Annie-Xmas, I’ve read your story three times and I just can’t follow it. What did you do when you remembered “a line of mudpies” and how did it end up hurting your sister’s finger?
I turned the rusty metal pile underside down and smashed it down on her hand. A jagged rusty edge gashed her thumb.
Oh man.
Farm kid. Lots of animals. Lots of vehicles and farm equipment. Lots of chores being done half-assedly. Lots of siblings to dare one to do stoopid stuff.
Before the age of 12 I had:
Run over the gas line with the push mower, leaving it spraying natural gas over the lawn (and luckily thinking to turn off the mower and get the hell away asap). That was more of a major disaster which inexplicably failed to materialize, since nothing actually caught fire or blew up.
Set a grass fire while burning trash which was large enough to bring out the VFD (Volunteer Fire Department, ya’ll.)
Killed a coop of about half a dozen pullets by forgetting to put the “roof” which provided shade to their pen back on. Poor chickens. I am a chicken murderer.
After floor wax, birth control pills, morning sickness pills and blue paint, you wouldn’t eat oatmeal??! That’s quite a sophisticated palate for a 3rd grader!
When I was about 3 or so, I was watching my older brother give the dog a bath in the back yard. I figured I could do that, too, so I grabbed one of the kittens and preceded to bathe it in a large pot. I drowned him.
Fortunately, my mother somehow resuccitated him. I think he cashed in about 7 lives that day.
Oooh, ooh! I just remembered another one. I had this nasty habit of licking electrical sockets. I don’t know why - I guess they tasted good. Maybe that explains the curly hair… :smack:
Oh, dear. I’d never read that book, but I did find it on Amazon.com. It seems vaguely…familiar.
To the folks that yarked on the priest during Communion - by any chance, was your head spinning around when this happened?
…just asking…
About 11- we had a big hill in our neighborhood - not a grassy hill, but mostly dirt and rocks that rose about 40 feet to an almost cliff. Quite a popular place for all the kids, young and old. Some friends and I got to digging at a boulder close to the top, thinking that it would be cool to dislodge that boulder and watch it roll down the hill.
We finally did get it rolling. As it picked up speed, it was headed directly toward a pair of girls lower down on the slope. It would have hit one of them, but they dropped to the ground just in time, and the boulder passed over them harmlessly.
I spent the next 5 minutes with a case of the shakes.
Did the car thing too…my sister and I wrestling in the front seat, I knocked the gear shift into neutral and the car started rolling down our back yard. I remember frantically slamming that gear shift lever back and forth on the ride down trying to get the car to stop until WHAM - hit a tree. I still wonder why I didn’t step on the brake.
My sister younger sister got a bloody nose- I got a severe whupping.
Here’s two stoopid kid tricks.
#1. I was about 10, wandering the tinder-dry hills of Southern California with some friends looking for fossils and snakes. We somehow found a box of bullets, I believe they were .22 caliber. What to do? Let’s set them off! How? Build a fire! We gathered dry brush together and carefully balanced a bullet in the center, then lit the pile, ran and jumped into a shallow ravine. We were pretending to be soldiers in a trench in WWII. The bullet went off…POW! That was cool. Now we have a fire and a box of bullets. So… we dumped the whole box into the fire and ran like hell to our “trench”. The bullets went off in an amazingly loud series of blasts, I still remember the sound of the bullets thudding into the soil above us! When there was silence, we poked our heads slowly above the trench to see… The exploding bullets had blown our fire apart and spread the burning embers into the surrounding brush! Burned down the whole damn hill!
#2. Put a tack on the seat of a kid in my class, looking for the cartoon yelp! Turns out the kid was a hemopheliac and had to be rushed to the hospital!
My head was spinning, but I don’t think it did a 360. However, I was 7 years old in 1974, about a year after the release of The Exorcist, so I’m sure a few in the audience made the connection.