On Saturday mornings I would quite often stick my large toe into my brother’s bowl of cereal… as he innocently sat on the floor watching cartoons. After he would run off crying I would sit down and finish his bowl of cereal while enjoying conjuction junction what’s your function.
One more…One day after school…when I was quite young I stole a chameleon from the older kids classroom. Yes I was a punk! I know. I secreted the little creature in a comic crate in my bedroom closet and told not a soul. However, I had no idea what lizards ate. After much deliberation I decided that nettuce was green, like the lizard, so it had to be a good food source. This went on for several days and the poor thing actually tried to eat the nettuce! I eventually released my half starved victim in the backyard…in the middle of Detroit. In the winter. When it was snowy. Yet it still looked happy to get away from me. Yes…I was not a very bright child.
When I was around 3, my father was outside watering the lawn. I asked him what he was doing and he told me. So then I asked the favorite question of 3-year-olds, “Why?” He said “To make the grass grow”.
When he had finished watering the lawn, I took the garden hose from him and bent over and put it on my hair. He said, “What are you doing?” And I responded “Watering my hair so it will grow, Daddy!”
When I was about four I got away from my mom at a department store. She was frantic and the store was turned upside down looking for me. They finally found me, behind a counter, talking on the phone to the credit department. I thought I was talking to Santa.
I was a child who anthropomorphized everything. When I was about five, after Christmas had passed, my parents moved the Christmas tree into the garage to wait for some good weather to burn it in. I was very distraught that they would burn our beautiful little Christmas tree, and went out into the garage to check on it. I told the tree the terrible news about its fate, and coincidentally, the tree fell over.
I went tearing back into the house, grabbed Mom and said, “Mommy! I told the Christmas tree that you were going to burn it, and it fainted!”
I went to school in the second grade and repeated a joke I heard my father tell someone. It concerned Pedro and some pussywillows. She wasn’t amused, and I was sent home with a note.
I don’t remember this, but my mother tells the story of when I was in the first grade, I got sent home on several occasions. I wasn’t misbehaving, I had finished my assignments and was going around and finishing everybody else’s as well.
We went to the state fair and walked through the barns to see the livestock. When we got to the pigs, little 4 year old me said “Look at the baby hippopotamuses!”
When I was young, I don’t know exactly what age, I used to always answer the phone “Hello, How may I help you?” I thought that I was being polite and efficient, but I still get teased about it.
sk8rixtx – That is . . . okay, it fits the insane part, though the cute thing is still beyond me. Full points for . . . well, considering you stuck toothpicks and straws in it, that sort of makes it art, so it was a creative exercise. Adorable!
Really, all these stories are awesome and adorable. And now I must tell the ultimate little brother story. Or two. One’s short.
My brother Brad (who is currently 17 and enormous – 6’1" and 180 lbs. or so) was at one time a very fat and round baby. His very first word was “bird” – “boid”, really. We live on a farm and we were all strictly forbidden from the machine shed and the tractors within. One day, Dad walks into the machine shed, let’s say to get a big wrench, and discovers Brad sitting on the little 1935 Allis Chalmers (and I’m not dating myself) gazing delightedly at the pigeons in rafters. Dad runs and grabs him and says, “Brad! What are you doing? Bad boy!” Brad just smiles, half-toothed, and says, “Boid! Boid!”
Okay, so the other little brother story (It involves violence! Maybe gratuitous violence!) will have to come later.
I could read at a fairly early age, and one time while driving with my parents, we passed a liquor store. I asked my mom “what do we lick at a liquor store?”
My grandfather used to love telling anyone who would listen about this, to him I was a miracle child. One night when I was about 3 we were laying on the floor watching tv together. A Nyquil commercial came on and after it was over I looked at him and said “Damn Papa that’s good stuff, all you got to do is show it to him and he sleeps all night”.
Hokkaido Brit, I was debating whether to post this story until I saw yours.
When I was four or five, I received a piece of doll furniture for Christmas from Santa Claus (I still believed wholeheartedly at this point). Mom saw me turn it over to read the “Made in Japan” on the bottom, and immediately started sweating, trying to figure out how she was going to explain this one away. But I got a big smile on my face, ran up to her, and said, “Mommy, look! This was made by a Japanese elf!”
The other cute family story about me was when I wanted to help my mother when she was digging in the garden. I kept asking if it was my turn to use the shovel yet, and she kept telling me “later”. Finally, I went and tugged on her, and said (in very serious tones) “Mommy, I think we need to have a little talk, about sharing.” I got my very own toy shovel the next day.
When I was a little girl I liked to play Nativity Story. I don’t remember too much about it, but apparently some shepherds got a bit spooked by angels bringing good tidings. So I, as the angel, reassured by imaginary shepherds “Do not be afraid. It is only snowflakes.”
Once, when I was about, oh, three or four, I was out in the back yard by myself (yes, I had an inattentive mommy), and I found these green berries growing on the fence. They looked sort of like grapes, but they weren’t in bunches, like the grapes we brought home from the store. Still, I figured they must tie them in bunches at the store somehow. (Hey, I was just a little kid.) So, of course, I ate some, then went in the house to tell my mom that I had found some grapes growing outside. That’s the last thing I remember, but apparently they had to take me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.
Then, when I was about five, I saw that one of my older sisters or my mom had left their razor sitting on the tub. Well, hey, I wanted to shave my legs too. So I lathered up and went for it. Somehow, I got the razor at such an angle that it stripped the top layers of my skin off. Okay, it’s cute if you don’t think about that last part.
I also remember–okay, never mind. I just realized that all my cute childhood stories seem to end in injury.
Now this is cute: my niece Corah, who’s eight now, started calling corn on the cob “corn on the bone” when she was about three. We were not allowed to laugh at her cuteness when she did that, though, or she would get mad at us.
As a small child I had a habbit of every time my parents took me to Wal-mart (or a similar type store) I would pull dangling price tags off the clothes and would have fists full of paper tags in my hands when we left the store. (Some how they never noticed or I hid them until we were leaving.) Unfortunatly this seems to be a genetic thing as my children try to do the same thing to me, but I’m better at catching them in the act.
A couple years ago I found out from my oldest son’s preschool teacher that during their free play time my son and a couple of his friends liked to play “nativity” (much like Caricci mentioned). My son always played the “doctor”. Did I mention I was pregnant with my third son at the time. giggle
My grandparents favorite cute story about me is also the first sentance I strung together. Before this, I was only talking in one or two word bursts.
My gramma’s house is a big circle. The kitchen has doors into the dining room and the living room, and there is a door between the living room and the dining room. The bathroom is off the kitchen.
One day, while I was in the livingroom, I had to go to the bathroom. My grandpa’s recliner was up, and blocked the living room/dining room door, so I said “move!” while jumping up and down.
“move feets please,” he corrected. From experience, I knew that he wasn’t going to do what I wanted until I repeated what he wanted me to say. However, I was just about fed up with all of these people ordering me around.
I puffed up and spouted “Move feets, wash hands, cake a baf! God!” Threw my hands up in disgust, and walked around the other way to the bathroom.
I used to help my gram cook. She’d let me break the eggs in, and pour in the measured ingredients. I was a very obedient child, despite the occational outburst of frustration, and I would wait to be told what to put in before I did it.
One day, while making cookies, she told me to put in the cinnamon. “Simanim?” I asked.
“No, Cinnamon. That’s this spice right here.”
“Simanim? Sim-a-num?”
“Cinnamon.”
I ran to hide in the corner behind the bathroom door and practiced over and over until I could say cinnamon. Then I came out and proudly announced: “Simanum!”
She laughed, and I promptly burst into tears of frustration. I also had problems with ‘enemy’ being ‘emony’ and ‘oficer’ being ‘ocifer’.
At around 7.y.a., I read this book in my school library, called Banty And Her Chicks–the timeless saga of how chicks developed inside the egg and then hatched. Into just how the eggs were actually fertilized, needless to say, the book did not go. But there was a series of pictures showing the development of the chick, from tiny germ cell to fully grown chick.
I was so fascinated by this, that I used to hide under a small blanket and pretend I was a chick developing, and then hatching.
