The stupidest things you said/thought when you were a kid.

I thought the bingo call 'Doctor's orders number 9' meant that you were pregnant (woman would go to the doctor for results of pregnancy test and doctor would say "It's a number 9, madam").

My childhood best friend (and subsequent first snog)'s mother said you could tell when a person was lying because they'd have a big black line down their tongue. "Stick out your tongue! You're lying!"

I was firmly in the potato camp, of course.

"Officer, yes it's another habitrail incident. I have the perpetrator red-handed"

"I'm just a patsy, I tells ya!"

Oh my god! Me, too! My dad worked at Jodrell Bank and would come home with all these stories about interstellar disasters. So of course, I was terrified that our sun would go supernova and turn into a black hole, like, next week. The other thing I was scared of was the expanding universe. That we would become separated from the rest of the universe, and our planet would die cold and alone, a barren rock by itself. Yeah, like Earth would become separated from the Sun, and the Sun would become separated from the Milky Way and everything would get cold and we'd die.

Cause kids have no concept of time, and don't realise that there is a difference between a million billion years and, like, next week.

Traumatised by science! That should be a new thread!

(just kidding on that one...)

Youthful members of our family believed my grandfather's fake plastic Xmas tree TALKED (it was really my uncle on the intercom from the kitchen, urging the kids, 'FEEL MY BRANCHES...OOHHH...MUUUUCH BETTER!'in paedo voce while the adults tried not to wet themselves from laughing too hard).

Madchen's Narnia one reminds me of how my family used to tell me my Grandma was a witch (a good one of course) which was why she had 2 cats and why her old house was called the Coven. We had a besom in the garden shed and thinking it was one of Grandma's cast offs I used to get it out from time to time and sit on it reciting every magic word / phrase I could think of hoping it might take off but of course the fucker never did. bah.

I thought clouds skidding across the sky were a result of the rotation of the earth and not the wind.

I used to pray to the Little Baby Jesus to protect me from volcanoes and tornadoes. It was my bruv showing me a map of tectonic plates and fault lines and how relatively safe the UK was that lead to my departure from the Catholic church.

There, I've said it

His mother asked him, "Put more coal on the fire, Jimmy, it's going out . . ."

"All fires are going out, mum" he responded deadpan.

I'd've given him a slap if I was his mother.

http://www.raven9.freeserve.co.uk/witchway/pictures/broomstick-1.jpg

As for the tooth fairy, I think I've told that story before... Basically, I left her a note in a drawer (cuz I mean, if she was real she would just KNOW to look there, right?) telling her to meet me at my pop's house that afternoon as I'd be there for dinner. She was supposed to meet me back in the tv room when I was in there alone to prove she was real. I told her if she didn't show up, I wouldn't believe in her any more. My mom found the note and kept it.

In grade school, when we were studying the 50 states, I insisted to the teacher that my aunt's name was Maryland. My teacher said, "Oh, Sarah, your aunt's name is probably Marilyn, not Maryland like the state. But I insisted she was lieing and that I was gonna tell my mom.

Oh my god. I have too many of these stories.

In kindergarten, I refused to participate in the Halloween singalong because I said it was evil and I was a Christian. The teacher made me sit right off the mat and wait while everyone else sang together.

Similar to the black hole stories, I was afraid the world was going to end. But it was because I watched a video with my mom on Nostradomas (spelling?) and they simulate the end of the world - major monuments being blown up and people screaming. When my dad came home, I burst into tears and hugged him for a long time and then he yelled at my mom for letting me watch the show with her.

My brother once asked a rather portly nurse if she'd tried slim fast.

I tried to make a hole in the trunk of a small tree in our front garden thinking it would lead me to another dimension. It would have died if my dad hadn't sealed up the hole with tape.

The mind boggles...

I used to pronounce the word "polo" "pole-o" instead of "po-lo". IT took years to realise I'd been doing this wrong. Strangely, my sister also pronounces it like this. My best friend says "melk" instead of "milk" and when we tried to teach him to say it properly it came out "meeelk".

when meeting a childhood friends grandmother, who i had been told was from wales, apparently i just looked at her and demanded "wheres your hat?"
i have no recollection of this, of even a vauge understanding of it, and i am reminded of it by said friends mother at every visit. IT'S BEEN *13* YEARS.

I once saw a black woman with her baby on the bus and asked my mum what the woman was doing with a monkey. Stevenage is a very white town :(

Honestly, Jerry...

??? These are pronounced the same!

i told my friend JR about this, and his mom overheard and i was banned from his house for life

awwwww remy!

i was greatly relieve to (a) learn i was wrong and (b) recognize that because i was adopted my parents hadn't, necessarily, participated in this gross process.

i had a friend who as late as 8th or 9th grade thought the female monkeybusiness was all located in the upper pelvic region just below the belt.

which all came to light listening to snoop and arguing what doggy style was

around christmas where my nephew lives I guess the firemen drive their truck around neighborhoods and have a dude dressed up as santa stand and wave at all the kids or something. The little dude freaked the fuck out as the truck approached because he loved the concepts of santa and trucks, and was all wide eyed and quiet when the truck and the wave actually passed. After it went by I asked him if it was all he wanted it to be and he burst into a huge smile and went "Yeah!!! And Tomorrow! The Easter Bunny! He's gonna come by on a GARBAGE TRUCK!"

sorry for that post it wasn't me

My sister nearly had a mental breakdown as one Christmas Even approached when she was maybe 5 or so. My mother FINALLY got her to talk about it, and it turned out she was terrified that a strange man was going to come into her house/room while she was asleep and everyone acted like it was perfectly normal.

Which isn't strange or stupid at all, really! She's clearly the sensible one among us loons.

remy, I haven't told you this for a while but I really like you very much.

i thought you could put as many horizontal lines in the middle of a capital E as you wanted to. the more lines you put the fancier the E was so i used to spend ages on each E to the point that each one would look like a comb.

i was greatly relieved to (a) learn i was wrong and (b) recognize that because i was adopted my parents hadn't, necessarily, participated in this gross process.

One of my friends asked me once if my parents had adopted me because they didn't want to have sex. We were probably like 12, 13.

I don't know if all adopted kids go through a lot of intense myth-making about their possible parentage, or if all kids do that and just find other justifications for it, but when I was five I was definitely fond of narratives that started out, "I don't know for sure that my real father wasn't an astronaut who was exposed to cosmic rays that will eventually give me amazing powers..." Even once I found out a very little bit - my father was a cop - I started thinking, you know, he was some super-cop who couldn't have kids because the bad guys would take them hostage or something. Years later - 30 of them - my mother explained that as far as she knew, my father was just a cop who'd gotten someone pregnant other than his wife. Balloon deflated.

i thought you could put as many horizontal lines in the middle of a capital E as you wanted to. the more lines you put the fancier the E was so i used to spend ages on each E to the point that each one would look like a comb.

me too

omg I love comb E

my dad had (and still has) a habit of referring to all of his friends as "uncle john" and "uncle rusty" in my presence, such that i thought they all actually WERE my uncles. "uncle" rusty owned a pizzeria and i remember going around the playground one day telling everybody that the guy who owned that pizzeria was my uncle. (i later ended up actually working there when i was 16.)

as it happens, my dad has an older sister and my mom is an only child so technically i have no uncles

this one isn't mine, but it's always stuck with me. a friend of mine when i was a boy, but not so young to have any completely ridiculous ideas left - we were probably adolescents at the time - were having a discussion about this thread topic when he told me that when his mum was a child she'd believed that electricity pylons (transmission towers merkins call them?)/the power lines that they carry were trampolines for horses. i find myself inexorably thinking of that every once in a while when i see pylons.

http://www.carboncommentary.com/wp-includes/images/Electricity-pylons-001.jpg

As a toddler, I first associated the word 'new' w/ toys & gifts. Thus, while en route to a camping trip in New York (aboard the family station wagon), I was devastated when we crossed the state line & it was the same boring old grass, trees & cars, and not the kaleidoscopic swirl of primary colors and teddy bears I had envisioned.

I recall the first time I was allowed to go outdoors at nightime, I was struck at the appearance of the nighttime sky. There were all these tiny lights that looked really far away. I imagined they were like little blue Christmas tree lights up in the sky. My mother told me those were stars and that they were actually big, and only look small because they were far away. So I imagined they were big light bulbs up in the sky, maybe 5 meters across if you climed up a tall ladder and got close to them.

One night I saw a star that, unlike the others, was slowly moving across the sky. When I asked my mum why one of the stars was moving, she told me that wasn't a star, but rather a plane. I had never seen an airplane up close, nor understood it's function. I just knew planes were kinda like stars except they moved across the sky instead of staying put. They were both just little lights in the sky at nighttime, and the only real difference between stars and planes was that stars stood still and the occasional planes I would see moved. As far as I understood, except for their motion or lack thereof, stars and planes were essentially the same thing.

^^
this is the most bonkers one of the lot in it's own way. had you not seen pictures of stars or planes before?

I didn't "truly" believe this, but the thought had occurred to me..

This was when I was at Sunday School, South Shields, so I'd have been five maybe. Basically, that everyone was 'acting' in front of me, that people were waiting for cues to appear in front of me, say/do whatever, then go 'backstage' and so on.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

When I did get to see the film, I thought it pretty well done, funny, and so on, but the ending was a bit disappointing (basically, he gets out, and the film ends), so one day I might get round to writing my version.

reminds me of another calvin and hobbes strip where he imagines his parents are aliens and are just wearing human masks.

as it happens, my dad has an older sister and my mom is an only child so technically i have no uncles

― Sittin' Fran (donna rouge), Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:16 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Your parent's cousins can be your uncle, too.

um no, they are also your cousins

I used to think the president of the US used to live in this little office complex (where you might have a doctor downstairs and a dentist upstairs and thats it) because the building had columns out front barely oriented the same as the white house. Like, when he got upgraded to president of the whole country he went on to the fanciest of buildings with a small group of columns in the front.

You are saying that that my mother's cousin is also my cousin? My cousin's parents are my great cousins?

yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin

basically, everyone in your family is your cousin but some cousins get special names (aunt, uncle, mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent, etc)

(your parents' cousins are your first cousins, once removed)

So me and my family aren't totally crazy to use uncle and aunt instead.

oh no you're still totally crazy

Haha alright whatever I'm not calling my Aunt Lynn great great cousin Lynn.

I call those relations auntie and uncle etc. but only on the latin american side where just about anyone is an auntie or uncle.on the scottish side I call them 'sorry who are you again?'

This was when I was at Sunday School, South Shields, so I'd have been five maybe. Basically, that everyone was 'acting' in front of me, that people were waiting for cues to appear in front of me, say/do whatever, then go 'backstage' and so on.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

i thought this too, i assumed it was a pretty common fun/paranoid fantasy. like "maybe my friends aren't really my friends, maybe my parents just paid them all to pretend to be my friends."

i thought that the laugh track on sitcoms came from other people laughing in their living rooms and that the speakers on the tv acted as a microphone.

yes!

also when we first got a VCR and my parents recorded something we were watching I sat VERY QUIETLY, thinking any noises I made would be recorded too. Then my mother asked me a question and I got irritable and didn't answer, and she said "you didn't think you'd be recorded, would you?" and I had to pretend that I knew all along but didn't feel like talking.

In Britisherland it used to be a thing for friends of your parents to be "auntie" or "uncle" even if they were no relation at all. That is mostly dying out but it's still a handy generic term for "some kind of relative who is roughly the same generation as your parents or older", or at least that's how it works in my family. (I don't know if I'm pointing out the obvious or if there is another great Atlantic divide for ILX to have a squabble over.)

Auntie or Uncle for someone who is so close to your family is still done in the US. Depends on how family-oriented people are...it varies wildly.

When the Truman Show came out, I was somewhat "OK, wait..", and of course no-one believed me when I said I'd had the same basic storyline idea back when I was five.

i thought this too, i assumed it was a pretty common fun/paranoid fantasy. like "maybe my friends aren't really my friends, maybe my parents just paid them all to pretend to be my friends."

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, April 12, 2011 9:39 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah p sure this is a normal thing. I know I had such fantasies as a little kid & then got a similar deja vu shiver as a while reading Breakfast of Champions as a teenager - at the end when Bunny Hoover takes Kilgore Trout's story as gospel & imagines that the world is an elaborate set-up made by God/aliens just to fuck with him.

yeah i def thought everyone had that thought at some point as a kid...

One of my ex's thought that the truffles that pigs sniff for in the ground were the chocolate kind. We were out eating one night (around age 21-22) and they place brought truffles with the check and he was like, "You know pigs find those, right?" and I was all "O rly? Pigs find chocolates in the ground, huh? You don't say!" lol. He didn't know truffles were a type of mushroom and just never thought about the fact that chocolates don't grow in the ground.

That is kinda cute

^^ this was me until my mid-teens. Oh! There are TWO kinds of truffles! Except I didn't know there were chocolate truffles and I thought people ate the mushroom kind as a sugary treat 0_0

VG it was v funny and adorable at the time. Aw ffm :)

i broke up with someone once not too long after we went swimming in a bay and he said, quick! come and have a look at this, i think it's a crab! and i went over to look at it and it was a seahorse.

okay this thread is inspiring me to create some morel-flavored dessert

xp: hahahahahahahaha

that Jimmy Carter meant it when he said "I'll never lie to you"

also, when I was about four, I think I believed that women grew penises when they got older

(probably just wishful thinking)

hahaha

a little old for this thread, not to mention this conviction, but for a few months in eighth grade i became convinced not only that i was meant to have three testicles but that i had in fact had three testicles previously and had lost one (presumably through excessive masturbation)

i still remember the stunned wash of relief and deliverance when someone at school mentioned "both" of his own testicles

i am very pro-sex-ed

this is one of the best threads of all time

When I was little I thought Oscar from Sesame St's name was Ask Her the Grouch.