Agent Lightning’s idea:
What about just a general “when I was a little kid” thread?
“When I was little, I thought all the teachers slept in the school at night…” –Doctor Who, Season Two
Patience, Please
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YES!!!! I am a complete and utter noob and I snag the first posting!
Anyways, when I was a little kid, I read Muse. Eight is little, right? I also fell into a public fountain once.
NO 8 IS NOT LITTLE EIGHT IS A PERFECTLY RESPECTABLE AGE!
/random8yearoldpridedefensemechanisim
I am sorry for activating your /random8yearoldpridedefensemechanisim. I just thought of myself as little, mainly because three days after my birthday (coincidentally, the day we were moving from Indiana to Maryland) I ran out of the bedroom shrieking that a tooth had fallen right out of my mouth onto my tongue. I was kind of a late developer, maturity- and dental-wise.
Nah. It’s cool man, it’s all cool.
After all, it’s when I came on to the blog.
Thanks.
Eight is the beginning of mental maturity.
When I was little I thought there was a really lazy groundhog who lived in all the traffic lights, and it was his job to flip the switch that changed the light but he always fell asleep and that’s why red lights took so long.
When I was little, if I wanted my parents to read to me and they were reading their own book, I’d take the book I wanted them to read and whack their book with it while shouting, “Away! Away!”
I would draw pictures of these weird creatures called “Tiny Catunies.” There were a bunch of different ones, and they all had names.
I used to… think? I’m not sure if I actually believed it, or I just sort of made it up. Well, anyway, I “thought” that when you turned thirty, you would die, but the year that you’d turn thirty, you might instead turn “thirty-teen” and keep living. I’m pretty sure I believed the part about dying at thirty, but not really the thirty-teen thing?
I also thought that you would die if you were poked with a mechanical pencil, although I don’t think I was clear on what a mechanical pencil actually was.
And… there was another thing I was going to put, but I can’t remember what it was. Argh.
When I was about 3, I announced that I was a duck.
I did that too! Or, rather, I used to be different animals every day. I believe I would wake up every day and announce what animal I was going to be for that day.
I also once stuck an entire box of Band-Aids — the kind with the pictures of stuff on them — all over my body.
I was a weird little kid. I could probably fill up this entire thread with stuff I used to do…
…You mean you’re not?
She didn’t say that.
I thought I was the only bird on MuseBlog…
I think there used to be a Purple finch, too, although en left before I arrived.
When I was about 3, I announced that I was a boy, answered only to “Christopher Robin,” and refused to wear barrettes.
Oh, geez, Christoper Robin messed me up so bad…
(IRL name)
I SAID THAT I WAS A DUCK TOO. SOMEONE CALLED ME A LADY AND I REPLIED THAT I WASN’T A LADY, I WAS A DUCK.
When I was little, I asked my parents if there was ever life on Mars.
When they said scientists didn’t know, I asked if there was life on Mars during the time of the dinosaurs.
I also believed that God had a dimetrodon fin on his back. It was orange, and his daughter’s was purple.
A six-year-old I knew asked his parents, “When people are gone, will the dinosaurs come back?”
That is a very impressive question. I never would have thought of that at six years old.
When I was very little, I thought I knew what God looked like, so I always thought it was weird when people said nobody knew what God looked like or showed Him off-screen in illustrations.
But I cannot for the life of me remember how I thought He looked beyond being a nice man in a blue shirt.
I took the “Adam was made in God’s image” bit literally, so I imagined God as just a giant version of Adam. They had pale skin, black hair, black eyes… So did Eve, but her hair was curly, and theirs was straight. Mind you, I still picture Adam and Eve that way. I even picture God that way when he’s anthropomorphized too much; it’s a habit I’m trying to break because it just brings all the wrong associations into my mind. When he isn’t anthropomorphized, I picture… a white light, which isn’t much better. Well, at least I never thought he had a grey beard–or any sort of beard.
I couldn’t read cursive when I was three. I thought that Longs Drugs was called Kanga Dunga R. (I wasn’t aware that Rx meant “prescription” as a shorthand for pharmacy.)
Combining this with Enc’s post, I now want to read a story about Kanga Dunga R, the Dimetrodon god.
And his daughter!
And if we add your post, KaiYves, Kanga Dunga R will wear a blue shirt.
I never realized my weasel was actually supposed to be a pacifer til I was about… eight, I think.
Coincidentally, my favorite nursery rhyme was Pop-Goes-the-Weasel.
My mother made up all sorts of silly little rhymes for different situations. The most memorable ones are, respectively, for the word “hey'” and having my hair brushed.
Hey is for horses
And horses are for hay
[and then something about fruits. It’ll come to me later.]
Ow ow, meow
Ow ow, meow
The little cat said
me: meow
[that repeats with a slightly higher melody.]
Mm. I hated Pop-Goes-The-Weasel. I still do, actually.
I had 2 barrettes–well, more than that, but 2 relevant barrettes. One had a star on it, and the other had a spiral on it. They were my favorite barrettes. I’m sure it says something about me that this was because I thought they were a starfish and a snail.
I didn’t love all invertebrates until I was 8, but I always had a much more favorable view of them than most people.
When I was 5, I was in school and had an argument about whether Santa was real. My parents never did the whole Santa thing with me, so these arguments were fairly frequent. However, my final verdict this time was, “If you believe in Santa, then Satan is upon you.”
I believe I went home early that day.
That is awesome.
The funniest part is how my teacher pulled me over and gave me a long lecture about not imposing my religious beliefs on others. I seem to remember her exact words being, “You may believe that, but I do not believe that if you believe in Santa, then Satan is upon you.”
6- Rx comes from a Latin phrase that would be given as directions for medicine given in doses. It means “take one”. (It always makes me laugh to see it printed on bottles of pills you’re supposed to take two of.)
8- You have officially gone up five levels in my Awesomeness Meter.
From when I was a toddler to when I was six, I declared what I now wanted to be when I grew up every time I changed my mind – which was about four times a day.
It took me about half a year to learn the name of the brother of one of my friends in preschool. I’d always called him “The Codfish” (long story).
It doesn’t mean “take one”. Supposedly, it’s an abbreviation of either “recipere” or the imperative form, “recipe”, which simply means “take”, no number specified. There’s a number of other theories as well, including invocations to Jupiter or a symbol the eye of an Egyptian god.
Oh. Sorry. I swear my Latin teacher said that that’s what it meant.
hmm when i was three or four i had a copy of through the looking glass that i pretended to read, except i would also pretend it was about the power rangers
i think this explains a lot, actually………….
I love you so much.
HERP DERP identity probably revealed, oh well
No, all that’s clear to me is that you’re not Axa. And not me, obviously, but I already knew that.
Now it has to be you…
(of course, this suggests a lot of things about me as well… hmm)
I always thought that once I turned 10, I would get to live a parallel life as a Pokemon trainer. Whenever I wanted to switch lives, I could go be a trainer and have tons of fun, and then I could come back to exactly the same place in my original life without anybody noticing. (For the record, nobody has noticed. ;))
I. Thought. The. Exact. Same. *highfive*
And then after I turned ten I decided to create imaginary worlds where I was a Pokemon Trainer/Coordinator/etc. and etc. etc. etc. and I still go there sometimes
I thought that to!
I thought I would get a letter from Hogwarts when I turned the right age. A little later, I thought I would get mutant powers when I hit puberty.
It’s been eight years in both cases.
I’m still waiting.
Those are hard ages! One birthday, you get told you can’t be a Pokemon trainer, and the next, you don’t get your Hogwarts letter!
On a related subject, my brother just realized a few weeks ago that he’s been kicked out of the KND and has had his memory wiped. (He’s fourteen.)
My aunt sent me an EARLY ADMISSION TO HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDY official-looking certificate when I was about 8.
I was really excited for a few seconds… Then reality settled in as I saw the return address
When I was ten, I thought that I would find the “other” omnitrix. When I was in 6th grade, I thought I was gonna be swept away and go to Hogwarts.
(STILL WAITING!!!!!)
8 – Lol, I believed in Santa until I was 9. My little sisters found out before I did because my parents didn’t think I could handle the truth.
When I was a little kid … I was really into dinosaurs. My favorite was Compsognathus, for some reason. I had a Ankylosaurus birthday cake when I was two. Also, I used to walk around doing two-fingered T-rex arms and announcing that I was a T-rex, then switching to three fingers to be a velociraptor.
I liked Allosaurus — the un-Tyrannosaurus. When I asked my father which one would win in a fight, he explained that they hadn’t lived at the same time. That was a new and exciting concept to me.
I really liked dinosaurs too. I, of course, was the little dinosaur freak who could rattle off dinosaur names and what they meant. I have had a Pterodactyl, Stegosaurus, and Protoceratops cakes over time.
I was partial to Pachycephalosaurus, myself.
Pachycephalosaurs are awesome, not in the least because you can call them “buttheads”. Although, my favorite pachycephalosaur is Dracorex hogwartsia.
When I was five (most of my childhood memories come from that age), we had borrowed my grandma’s car because ours was being worked on. I decided it would be fun to draw in permanent marker on the back of the seat in front of me. When my parents discovered that I had done this, I blamed it on my then-three-year-old sister.
They knew it was me because she couldn’t draw that well.
Sorry…draw in permanent marker. If some gnomes would be nice enough to get that for me…*holds out choklit*
Thanks for the choklit
— Rosanne
When I was a little kid … I was looking at one of my birthday cards, one that had some cute pictures of squirrels on it. I asked my father who it was from and he said “your cousins.” My brain translated this to mean that I had cousins who were squirrels.
I thought it was incredibly cool that a human could have squirrel cousins! I don’t remember how long it was before reality dawned. A year or two, I’m guessing. But I still think of squirrels as cousinish.
I’m sure you enjoyed the albino squirrels at college then
I did. I loved my albino cousins.
An albino squirrel has taken residence at my friend’s bus stop. My cousins look a bit squirrelish to me too.
When I was a little kid, I thought that people got mispronunciations like ‘pasketti’ from the Junie B. Jones book, which I loved. Of course, I mispronounced things, too, but those were unique things (soupcase, festibal, ordament, etc), so I never made the connection. Certainly it never occurred to me that Junie B’s many irrational behaviors could be modeled after those of most 5-year-olds rather than the other way around.
SOUPCASE? I DID SOUPCASE TOO
( in CASE we have SOUP.)
My sister said “buhsketti”.
My word was “meef”. I am still not sure whether it was a mispronunciation of “meat” or “beef”.
I didn’t read the Junie B. Jones books, on account of the fact that my mom wouldn’t let me. I was more into Magic Tree House.
I liked Magic Tree House, too, but that was a bit later. Why weren’t you allowed to read Junie B. Jones?
According to my mom, the word “stupid” was used too many times.
My parents didn’t let me say “stupid” a lot because it’s a strong word. I kind of see what they meant now- if you overuse words, especially insults, they lose their meaning.
The trouble is, though, that kids can take the idea too far. I mentioned in 1st or second grade the fact that I wasn’t stupid, and they were appalled that I used a ‘bad word.’ (I’d been taught that it was only bad when you call someone stupid; apparently they’d been taught something different). This is quite ironic, as I’m probably now the only one of them who never has cursed.
Ditto. That’s why I wasn’t allowed to watch Rugrats either; they said too many “not-nice words”.
I wasn’t allowed to watch Rugrats either! High five!
Neither was I, actually.
I don’t think I was either.
I wasn’t either.
My brothers used to say “headcake” (headache) and “bixplode” (explode).
“Headcake” is an excellent way to describe a headache, if not necessarily one that young children ought to adopt.
I once turned on every tap upstairs and flooded half the house. And then there was the time I laid out my Halloween candy in specific patterns to see if I could get the ants to march around in formation. I was a very troublesome child.
I mean, it’s not like I ever stopped being a troublesome child…
Re: Santa: I knew Santa didn’t exist as of fifth grade, because of basic logic, but I kept believing just so I would get more presents.
Then I PROVED Santa didn’t exist by overhearing a conversation where my dad detailed how he got something on ebay that was supposedly from Santa.
From there, I decided that I needed to prove the nonexistence of these beings, so the last tooth I lost (6th grade, actually) I didn’t tell my parents about it and secretly put it under my pillow. Of course I didn’t get any money. NONEXISTENCE PROVED. For the easter bunny I caught my mom making a basket.
When I learned to tie my shoes in first grade, I tied them the normal way. There’s video evidence of me proudly showing off my shoe-tying skills. At some point (I don’t even remember when!) I regressed back into the bunny-ears way. I can’t tie my shoes as well the normal way now.
Wait…the bunny ears isn’t the normal way?
I just remembered something. I am really into life-on-other-planets, and when I was little, I used to make detailed maps of the foodweb on planets I would make up.
I’ve always tied my shoes the normal, non-bunny-ears way.
When I was little I wrote a song with my sister called ‘Here Comes the Icy Bits’ about the ice patches on the ski slopes and how they scratched our skis, made us fall etc. We still have the illustrated book somewhere.
Oh, and once I thought the sky was white (understandable, seeing as the pollution levels where I live often reach unbearable). I think that day was a particularly cloudy one.
I probably have so many more of these. My parents have a word document of funny things my sister and I have said over the years. I’ll go peruse that and get back to you guys with more stories.
I thought that my soul–my spirit, that which makes me me, regardless of circumstances–was in the sole of my left foot. (Soul = sole. Ah, homonyms.) I was very frightened of stepping on something sharp, because I thought it would open a hole in my foot, through which my soul would escape and I would die.
I’ve always been a child who blends practical logic with fantasyish ideas that make Normal People look at me askance. Also, I’ve always been very interested in words.
The first book I picked out to buy for myself was about etymology.
That is marvelous. I don’t know what the first book I chose for myself was, but my earliest memory of reading is of a story about Johnny Appleseed.
When I was little, I wanted to be pope. It started out with the fact that all the girls my age wanted to be princesses. As far as I knew, there were only two ways to become a princess: either you were born one (and I wasn’t, I even asked my parents if I was adopted) or you married a prince, except that that would mean waiting around for him to show up and that seemed like a boring career plan. Queens were boring as well because they were like princesses only old.
But if you were pope, you got to live in a castle in Italy and wear red shoes and robes, which would be close enough to princess dresses if you put a sash round the middle and big hat = crown anyway. All I had to do to become pope was to be good and pray a lot and then God would pick me as pope and I’d get miracles and all. I prayed every evening anyway because you got to ask for everything you wanted as long as you said that you were thankful for the day and for the food (the latter more to make mom happy, I suspected).
It sounded like an awesome job and I’d own all the pretty churches and I could fire the stupid Kindergarten religion teacher who was mean and when you were pope, you were pope of the whole world while princesses only had a country and were much harder to spell.
Of course, when I was six, I went to a catholic elementary school and found out that I couldn’t be pope. Upon further questioning, I found out that I couldn’t be Bishop, Cardinal or any of the other members of the clergy I’d learned about; I could only be a nun or a religion teacher and the latter didn’t really count- and all this because I was a girl. I think this was the point where I stopped believing in God, or at least decided that I wouldn’t pray to the God who promoted that kind of unfairness.
Ouch. I’m sorry for you.
I wish I could like and squid the same post.
When I was about 5, I asked my mother if I could take ballet lessons. She said she would look into it. I got so excited and I knew that a ballerina dances on her toes, so I started walking around on my tip-toes. All the time. It took until about 5th grade for me to start walking normally again.
((SFTDP – FYI I didn’t actually end up taking ballet lessons.))
I never wanted to be a ballerina and I still walk around on my tiptoes. All the time.
I wanted to be a ballerina too! My room was ballet themed and very, very pink, and I actually did take ballet lessons, and had a couple of performances on stage.
I did ballet when I was four. We had this performance at the end with about a trillion over ballet classes going before us. Most of the routine involved turning, and I messed the whole thing up by not knowing right from left. They had us wear about an inch of stage makeup, and it ITCHED. It is the reason I still don’t wear makeup.
I did ballet, too! I thought it was super fun. My aunt was a professional ballerina for some time, until she had to quit after her toes got ruined. One look at those toes was enough for me not to want to do pointe at all, so when we were supposed to “graduate” at 12, I quit. Eight years of dancing, all a waste! Although it probably improved my sense of rhythm, which helps with music.
I did ballet from the age of 3 up to the age of 13 (I think I stopped the month before I turned 14). It was very hard work but a lot of fun, and I still sometimes miss doing it. I would have continued but I didn’t have any time for the four classes a week, including early mornings Saturday and Sunday.
When I was 5 or 6, I took ballet for a year, and after my recital, I kept getting into my costume. I didn’t stop that until I was 9 or 10, but at that point, I was only attempting to squeeze into it to a) annoy my sister, or b) make my friends collapse into hysterics.
When I was little, I really liked dressing my Barbies up and playing with their clothes, like a lot of other little girls I’m sure. So I would strip them naked, put them in “prison” aka the box where they were kept, and make them fight their way out against monsters to get their clothes back.
…I’m still not that worried about the effects Barbies have on girl’s self image. After all, I made mine cage-fighters, not that I knew what that was back then.
I never wanted a figure like my Barbies’, what I was jealous of was their perfect dancer’s feet, which seems to curve naturally. I wished I could have feet like that.
Recently, I heard that Barbie’s used to be based on a (imaginary) women who was 6 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds. I’m not sure if that’s true, however.
When I was little, I would have nightmares about this black snake. I would be sleeping or in my bed and suddenly see this big black snake and scream and it would disappear. Then my mom would come in and I would tell her and she said that it was my guardian angel. Actually I am pretty sure that I misheard her and she was telling me to pray to my guardian angel. I had a dream once that my dad was eating leftover macaroni and cheese with the snake wrapped around its arms and telling me to try it, that it wasn’t scary at all, in the same voice he used to make me try new foods. I refused because I was scared of the snake, but also I didn’t want to eat the mac and cheese.
I had a dream about a snake too! I don’t remember it was black, I just knew it was enormous and tried to convince me to let it eat me. I ran away and hid with my parents, but they told me I couldn’t stay for long. Also, the snake had a sort of conveyor belt like in airports inside its mouth and it showed me pictures of the people it had already eaten and that they were better off for it and had thought it was a good idea and that I couldn’t escape anyway…
It took me until fourth grade to realize that I should probably stop singing the bunny-ears rhyme while I tied my shoes. And then I forgot how to do the knot and had to go around whispering it to myself.
Fantasyfan- god, you would not believe some of the things I used to do to barbies. My friend Allosaur and I were/are both very anti-gender-roles, courtesy of our crusading feminist mothers, so we would shave the barbies’ hair off and make shorts for them instead of dresses. Once I decided to try to re-shape the barbie into something more realistic- I believe my exact words at the time were, “I don’t wanna be corrupted by idealized female figures! Are there any more cookies?”- so I microwaved it until it was sort of pliable and then tried to squash it down. Needless to say I ended up with melted plastic all over my hands and a horribly deformed barbie, which I then praised for its originality and unwillingness to submit to social pressure.
Oh, and the Care Bears… Allosaur and I would make up elaborate death scenarios for them and then act them out in the canyon near her house. One particularly fun one involved a malfunctioning parachute as the bear was dropped off the cliff of the canyon near her house. Consequently, at the bottom of the canyon right next to the river, there is a neat row of tiny Care Bear graves.
Bottom line: I was always like this.
Barbie-melting and Care-Bear ursicide? Sounds fun!
Also: our public library has sliding doors and when I was little I thought there were little red faced cartoon characters at the top of the building who would pull on these huge levers whenever someone walked in or out.
When I was about 11 or twelve I used to invent families and houses. I would draw up the architectural plans for their houses and think of how they might live. It was really fun! I still love houses.
Okay, I was a really weird little kid who did a lot of really dumb things, so I have quite a lot of these…
– I called trenchcoats “crime-criminal jackets”.
– I thought there was no such thing as treatment for burns. If any part of you touched a flame, you would catch on fire and your whole body would burn to cinders. Needless to say, I was very freaked out the first time I saw another kid wave their finger through a candle flame.
– I thought people went to the moon all the time, but nobody talked about it anymore because it happened so often. (There was a grain of truth to this, I guess…)
– I knew China was “across the ocean”, and an ocean was a big body of water, and at this one park we went to, there was a big lake that you could just see a church steeple on the other side of, and I thought I was seeing to China.
– I learned that the sun was a star pretty early, so I sometimes drew stars as little suns (circles with lines coming out of them) in school and other kids made fun of me for it.
I could do another whole post about the things I was afraid of and all the funny situations my various fears caused.
Oxlin’s post reminds me that I loved continuing “The Game of Life” after that first generation. When kids got added to my car, I’d write down names for them and keep track of their ages from then on. (one turn = one year) Once they turned 18, they got their own car and peg and got launched down either the “Career” or “College” path, just as though I was starting a new game. The whole thing went on and on for generations and generations – my record was probably five or six of them, and that’s a lot, especially when you get down to a dozen or more members in a generation! I had to make up all kinds of new jobs and salary cards to satisfy all of these “players”. A lot of them had personalities as well, which goes back to what I’ve said in the past about personifying playing cards.
Another thing that I remember, especially from elementary school but on rare occasions from middle school, is that I had alter egos. According to a document I just found on my computer, dated September 2006 (6th grade, so they were already “when I was little” at this point), I called them “Spiritual Connections”. Here’s what I wrote then, plus my notes from now in parentheses. (For reference, my name is Gail.)
Gail is a human who lives on Earth. She’s very smart and isn’t afraid to speak her mind.
Liag usually speaks in Balonian and lives on Thrae [sic]. She’s kind and is also outspoken. (Intended to be either my twin in some ways, but also my opposite. At first, this just entailed speaking backwards [my school friends and I called this “Balonian”] and living on “Htrae”, but I remember later in middle school that our group was having an existential crisis because, unlike the rest of us, Liag was succumbing to peer pressure and the desire to be popular and have a boyfriend.)
Gaila is a magician who lives on Magiciana. She loves playing sports and is a fierce competitor. She is still working on her magic skills, but knows quite a bit already. The currency on Magiciana is 1 Magiciana Magic to 5 US dollars. (Super awesome sorceress. In restrospect, she looks a lot like Dark Magician Girl. Her planet is full of bright colors and cool architecture. She’s the tough one in the group, and I always “brought her out” when we were playing sports or when I needed someone to toughen me up.)
Running Deer is a Maidu Native American and is very quiet and loves nature. She may be quiet but she’s also an awesome horseback rider. (The Maidu are a tribe that we studied in elementary school. I made up this name on a field trip. Running Deer continued to come out every time we studied Native Americans. I think she later fell in love with the chief’s son, and they were going to get married. This was another version of the “growing up” theme that they helped me address in middle school.)
Those were the main ones, but there were also these at one time or another:
Mimi is a former slave, and that makes her quieter, but still as stubborn as the rest. (We were clearly studying African American history.)
A shadow person, Pepe loves shadows and shade and can usually be only seen on sunny days.
Gbraing is the newest addition to the gang and is a virtual computer genius. She lives online, at [made-up “gbraingshome” link]. She is a wiz when it comes to computers and often helps the others, especially Running Deer and Mimi, navigate the net. (Gbraing is the username I historically have used online.)
Each spiritual connection has a necklace with one bead on it for each connection, labeled with their name. We could all meet up in some blank room-like space and chat, or we could go to each other’s worlds.
When my sister and I were little, we had a cardboard box once from shopping or something, big enough to fit the two of us. My dad played the Rite of Spring and we imagined wild galloping horses out to get us as we hid, sitting in the box.
Also, when I was really young I thought there was a giant-type creature the size of a small hill who would come out from where he hid every (my age + 1) years – the frequency I assigned to it helped explain the fact of why I’d never actually seen it in my lifetime. I remember dreaming about this at least twice, and one of them was very vivid – I can still remember my dream self hiding under the table. I also once hid on my bed between the wall and a row of stuffed animals.
Hmm… my grandmother is German, so we spend Christmas Eve at her house and open presents then. On Christmas Day we’d open presents at our house and then truck over to my paternal grandmother’s house and trade presents with the big family. (My only maternal family in the states is my Mamu; the rest live in Germany.)
My sister and I call our grandma Mamu and our grandpa Babu. So as a child it always bugged me when children called their gramma Nana and thought they should use a more sensible, normal name, like Mamu. They mostly raised Amanda and I spent my toddler years with them, since my mother and father both worked at the time. My mother quite when I was 4 to raise the two of us.
So when I was a few months five (Manda was eight) we went to Mamu and Babu’s house as normal. By this time Babu was bedridden strapped to oxygen, and we were in that room visiting him when we heard a thump on the roof. Me, Manda, and Dad all ran out and out in the backyard there was the red wagon filled with toys.
The most intriguing thing was, I had seen the wagon earlier (we “find” the toys outside then bring them in to the tree, which is bedecked in pretty Thuringen ornaments) and it had been empty. I had also not seen any of my family leave my sight since then.
Very mysterious…
Of course, this prompted a lingering half-belief to Santa.
But then in May Babu died, and I have some awful stuff about that.
You see, I was to sing at the funeral, and int he middle of my song I broke down crying, because I understood that the people would want to see that and that was the appropriate reaction. I never felt truly sad about Babu’s death, even though he was my Babu and I understood that concept at an early age, certainly at this point. I just didn’t really care. Everyone else was so torn up about it, especially Mamu and Manda. I was kind of glad I didn’t have to keep so quiet while at their house anymore.
I really haven’t been able to fake tears since then.
I keep around this little stuffed dog we got at one of his hospitals and sort of try to make myself feel better when I feel like a bad person, and half the time it makes me feel worse.
AND THIS IS MY CHILDHOOD ANGST.
I used to make up cultures, too. And civilizations, which were mostly centered around being divided into three sort of cultural groups of them.
Every year, my brother and I, as well as leaving stockings up to be filled, would leave plain paper bags. These were for the Tomten who lived by our house in the weird little stone house shaped thing and would give us “Tomten gold” (flat-ish marble like things) and small presents in the bags.
I wanted to do Little League when I was younger. Unfortunately, the Little League in my area didn’t allow girls. I was so mad.
I also used to have these dresses that were some color and white striped. And I used to wear mismatched socks with these dresses–one white, and one the other color.
I remember those. Land’s End dresses, weren’t they? I loved those.
Indeedy. It’s a pity they don’t make them anymore.
When I was little, I had this misconception that there was a time when everyone in the whole world spoke Latin and then the language somehow broke and people went away to live in other places like Canada and that all the bits and pieces were the modern languages and that it was kind of like a big puzzle (I only knew English, German, and a few words of Spanish and French back then and since my dad quoted Latin with a German accent, it seemed very plausible at the time). Enya sort of refuted my beliefs with Gaelic, but I figured she just made that language up because no-one really spoke it (to me) anyway.
When my parents started doing Yoga, this led to some interesting interpretations of the songs. For example, there’s this song/mantra that goes “Om namaha Shivaya” (Something about how awesome Shiva is). Since I disliked the sound and mom thought it was awesome, I figured it must be french; “O même un cheval” (But only a horse).
So for me, the song was about this guy who really, really wanted a horse and then his wife started singing that she’d also like to have a horse and then the whole town started to sing that all they really wanted was just one horse, please, and to me it almost sounded like they were whining. I was pretty proud that I’d figured out the translation- just because I hated french didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it, hah! At some point, I told my mom I had better things to do then to try to do stupid positions for hours while people whined about not having horses and then she explained the whole language thing to me.
‘Om namah Shivayah’ literally translates to ‘ultimate consciousness worshipful Shivah’ (which I’ve always thought sounds like a video game), but basically, yes, means something along the lines of, ‘Shiva is a really cool dude who can blow stuff up with sheer willpower. ‘ He was always my favorite god after Ganesha (who everyone loves because you can worship him by eating sweets, and because his patron animal is a rat), on account of the whole Destroyer thing.
</Hindu childhood
When I was a little kid I used to wonder how the ants that powered the printer managed to paint so fast.
When I was a little kid I though that if I left my mouth open my thoughts would float out of it and they could read my mind. I also thought that adults never slept.
Once I got mad at an older boy, so I decided to show my rage/intimidate him by running in circles around him.
Once I accidentally flipped an older boy into a doorway. To be fair, he was only a year older than me, and I didn’t mean to rage/intimidate him.
Once I bit someone as a joke and ended up intimidating him.
In preeschool, one of I friends and I had a “biting contest” (don’t ask why, I don’t remember). We would pretend to bite each other, and one time a acually bit him (she? en? I don’t remember). I got in so much trouble.
In first grade a group of boys was playing tag or something on the rooftop playground, and I was walking across to use the bathroom because I really had to go, and one boy started chasing me even though I wasn’t playing, and he grabbed onto my arm and wouldn’t let me go and it really hurt and I really needed to use the bathroom, so I bit him. He let go, and I was able to go to the bathroom, but I got sent to the principal’s office for the first and only time in my life (for something bad, anyway).
I remember what I was going to put now! There used to be a stump in my  backyard, and whenever I went in the backyard, I would go stand on one foot on it. Then when one of my parents walked by, I would say to them, “I’m waiting for Sue Ellen.” I have no idea why. In fact, I remember wondering why at the time; it was just something I’d done for as long as I could remember.
I used to make up these elaborate stories about a chicken named Betsy and her mean older brother, Ducky (she was adopted). Then I invented an alternate version which I called the “original version” despite it coming later. In the “original” the characters weren’t as anthropomorphized, and they lived on a farm.
Later on, I pretended that my Polly Pockets were superheroes. Their names were Kelly, Polly, and Melissa, and I made up a little theme song thing for them. But then I got a new Polly Pocket, and I had to tack her name awkwardly on the end. “Kelly, Polly, and Melissa! …and Marissa!” I made a not-actually-original version of this, too, which centered around the team’s leader before she joined the others. It was either Kelly or Polly, I can’t remember.
I should’ve mentioned- sorry you were a mean older brother, Ducky. xD
My mom and I made up stories about Greenie, the vegetarian flamingo who was green from eating grass instead of shrimp. He had a best friend named Pinkie. I don’t remember any of the actual stories, just that we had fun with them.
I also thought that the name ‘Dust Buster’ was hilarious, so I made up a theme song for it and sang it whenever I cleaned with it. It was supposedly based on the Ghost Busters’ song, except I didn’t know the Ghost Busters’ song, so it really wasn’t.
Being a twin leads to a bunch of funny stories growing up…
– I once looked in the mirror and yelled out my twins name, which creeped out my mom in the other room because he was supposed to be away with my dad
-When we were babies my sister would have to tell us apart because our parents could only tell because of the large freckle on my stomach
-This same sister took pleasure in pulling our little legs while we were sitting on the couch so we would thump onto the floor
-We have constantly, by at least 10 different people, been asked to switch classes for a day or so and see if the teachers noticed (they would)
-My sister still thinks we’re identical instead of fraternal because we have never been officially tested and she doesn’t believe the doctor’s best guess. (She is going to major in Biology, so she might be able to test later down the road)
-My brother wears glasses and I don’t, but once when he was about 10 (not exactly little, but still…) getting new glasses he said to me, “Here, try these on so I can see what I look like”
-We’re also somewhat notorious for thinking and saying the exact same thing every once in a while.
Oops! Something must have gone wrong with ending italics! Now if only I could find a gnome. Choklit worked for Muselover, so maybe…
*goes off to bait a gnome with choklit*
Where are they supposed to end?
The only thing that was supposed to be italicized was thump
Aha. Begone, gnomes! This choklit is for me.
Two of my friends are identical (girl) twins, in our grade (I can tell them apart, though). In 8th grade, towards the end of the year, they switched classes for a day. One of them was in my science class, and the day they switched a lot of the students knew – so one boy asked her what it was our science teacher did most days in class before it started. She didn’t know, obviously. (The correct answer was that she’d stroke someone’s pencil case, which sounds weird, but it was a cute turtle.)
Related to that, they were both in a class with me once, and the teacher (who was a bit of an idiot) didn’t know they were related. Which is ridiculous, because they are identical twins and look alike.
I have two friends in band who are identical twins. They have AP Bio and Calc together, and when I asked them if the teachers ever call them by the wrong names, they said, “no, we’re not sure they even know we’re related.” Which is ridiculous, because they look almost exactly the same, except that J’s face is a little pointier and M’s is a little flatter and she usually looks more tired. Maybe it’s possible though… who knows?
There’s a set of identical twins (also girls) in the grade above me, and they have three classes together this year. Last year they had the same Chinese teacher, but during different periods. Apparently their Chinese teacher was wondering for a whole semester why one person was coming to class twice in a day.
Freshman on my soccer team: “Yeah, I have a twin sister!”
A teammate: “Cool! How old is she?”
One of my best friends is my “twin.” Some mutual friends thought that we looked exactly alike (which we don’t, at all, except for the eyes) but our personalities are so similar to the point that it’s a little creepy sometimes. Two of said mutual friends are identical twins, but one has short hair and the other has long hair, so it’s very easy to tell them apart.
Oh, I have so many things to add to this. I’ll probably add more as I think of them.
-When I was very young, I knew a lot of big words but couldn’t say them properly. My mom’s favorite was “Mommy, I’m refrigerated!”. I actually was saying I was frustrated. (This was around the same time my younger sister started being able to crawl around and knock over my complex building-block communities.)
-I refused to read books until I was about four and a half, when in a moment of exasperation my mother got out her copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerers’s Stone” and started reading it to me. When she had to go cook dinner, she left me with the book, and returned to find I had read three chapters without her.
-I found out that Santa didn’t exist when I was exploring our newish house’s garage (there are various little interesting nooks and crannies in our garage, and I was in my phase of ‘brave adventurer’) and found the box for the skates that ‘Santa’ had given me for my first Christmas in said house, with a large sticker on it clearly announcing it had been ordered by and shipped to my dad at our house. I confronted my mom about it, she called my dad once I had run off again, and when my dad got home he took the box and hid it in his car so that when I dragged him out to show him it wasn’t there and he tried to convince me that I had imagined it. My reaction? Angrily bursting into tears and yelling “IT WAS THERE! I SAW IT!” and running out into the woods behind the house for two hours.
My dad didn’t tell me that he had actually hidden the box until two years later, two painful years of constantly doubting everything I saw.
-In third grade, I was a crab for Halloween. My best friends dressed up as seaweed and a seahorse.
-I used to take my dad’s old chess pieces and imagine that the two different colors of chess pieces were two feuding families. The kind and queen would be the heads of the family, and the rest would all be the kids. All the pawns were toddlers and babies, or sometimes grandchildren. They would have gruesome battles and fearsome arguments and they would all end up “dead”, lying sideways all over the ground in a mess, except for two pawns, who would then grow up and reproduce and it would happen all over again in a cycle that would go on until I got too bored–often several hours or even an entire day.
-My sister and I had these little multicolored multisized beads that we imagined were enormous families (different colored beads of the same type were different ‘outfits’). I still have a few beads that I’m quite attached to, especially one that I named Ruby for it’s fascinating translucent crimson color. It’s strange to be emotionally attached to a bead, I know, but I was and to an extent I still am.
-In third grade I invented this game called ‘Magic Cellphone’ that spread throughout the entire school and lasted a few months. Basically we all had these cellphones that were magical and there were all these different buttons that could do anything you wanted. The sheer chaos and insanity of our games were brilliant. One spectacular game of Magic Cellphone that I still remember vividly included someone ‘discovering’ (inventing and adding to the game) a button that turns you invisible. We all turned invisible and crashed a random birthday party. One person used a button to make a grenade and put it in the cake. Another person invisibly picked up the cake and we made the first graders enact the terrified people at the party as a ‘flying cake’ smashed into the face of the supposed birthday kid and then proceeded to literally explode in ens face. Meanwhile invisible people were tripping over each other because they couldn’t see each other, newer and more bizarre buttons kept being ‘discovered’, and several people were accidentally trampled into the mulch.
I was a brilliant child. XD
Oh man, I need to introduce this to the kids at Youth Group. (I’m homeschooled, so the church youth group is really my only social event.)
The Magic Cellphone game, I mean.
When I was super-little I’d constantly insist that my mom would tell me Cara (me) and Beaky (imaginary duck) stories. The characters also included Beaky’s ducklings and Beaky’s Daddy, who was as big as a house and was really noisy. These were very elaborate.
I used to have my babysitter tell me stories about A and D, 2 fishes who made had various adventures with various animals, the various animals going in alphbetical order.
My imaginary friend was named Collin Z. I already knew two kids named Colin and Collin, so I somehow figured Collin Z. was a logical extension of that.
Shouldn’t it have been Colllin?
No, no, Collinz. Like Mike.
Mike? Who’s Mike? Should I know?
The third Apollo 11 astronaut, who stayed in orbit around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed.
I had four consistent imaginary friends: Dorothy (of The Wizard of Oz), Cathy/Kathy, and the stepsisters (of Cinderella). I would draw houses for them, which would always have about thirty rooms because I wanted to take up all the space on the page.
In all my pretend games, the bad guys always won because I felt like it was more fun that way.
I ran around the play structure singing “Colors of the Wind” at the top of my lungs.
When I was six, I had already figured out there was no Santa Claus. There was another girl in my class whose parents were the type of Christian who think Santa Claus is blasphemy (or something along those lines, I never really saw the girl after first grade.) So we went around to my entire class telling them there was no Santa Claus. My teacher had to sit us all down and tell us all it was okay to think whatever you wanted about Santa as long as it made you happy.
I could spell “information”, and I was under the impression that this made me the coolest kid in kindergarten.
My brother promised he would teach me magic, like how to make potions and cast spells. Then he never did, no matter how much I bugged him. It was the great disappointment of my childhood.
I had an elaborate plan to catch the Tooth Fairy, which involved putting under my pillow these things: paper, a pen, a digital camera, possibly a laptop, and my tooth. It was a good plan.
When I was in fourth grade, I got one word ‘wrong’ on a spelling test because I spelled ‘harbour’ with a ‘u’. American school… I was quite upset.
My year 4 teacher in England called me a twit for spelling a word the American way. xD I don’t remember which word.
Ah, we had the opposite problem! My teacher didn’t call me a twit though, she just took the point off.
When I lived in California, the school librarian (who happened to be my mom at the time) taught us all how to spell “Schwarzenegger”.
Sch like school! War! Zen! Egg! Er!
I’ll never forget how to spell it.
My favorite color was orange, and my favorite animal was the giraffe. I still have a plethora of giraffe plushes on top of my bed.
I was the same with pandas. All of them were still around until this summer, when I parted with those from whom I could bear to be parted. I still have a lot of animals around, but not nearly so many pandas.
I liked purple because it had both red and blue, and I collected a bunch of bunnies (I do not recall any pink ones). They…vanished…when I went through the 5 districts in 9 school years thing (including one in another country).
For some reason, I thought all angels were female.
I also thought all cats were female, and all dogs were male. Perhaps all cats were angels.
Me too on the cats and dogs part.
I thought all angels were female, too. So for a while, I thought Gabriel was a girl’s name.
I never thought all angels were female, but it was obvious that Gabriel, at least, was–look at her hair! The fact that en was always played by a girl in my church’s Christmas play helped, I’m sure.
Same with the cats and dogs as well. Now I don’t think that anymore, because I have a male cat and a female dog.
For a long time I was convinced that everyone but me was a goblin, and was wearing a sort of mask that made them look human. Not to trick anyone, it was just really, really impolite to let other people see you without it on. And no one knew I wasn’t actually a goblin too. And I was convinced. I would walk loudly into rooms so if anyone was alone in them they would know they needed to put their face-mask back on. I was half-terrified someone would find out I wasn’t one too. I’m not sure what I thought would happen to me. I very nearly confronted my friend about her goblin-ness one day, even though it was clearly a taboo subject since no one ever brought it up.
I’m not really sure when I got out of that phase. This period would have been when I was still in daycare/afterschool program (which I went to up to 2nd grade I believe)… so this was maybe 1st grade? Sometime around then.
So how did this idea first get into your head? Because it’s awesome.
I have no idea. I can’t remember any books I read that would have left this imprint on me, and I wasn’t allowed to watch tv really (and when I did it was discovery channel). I just remember being absolutely convinced. Even my parents were the goblin-things and they could never find out I wasn’t.
I had a master plan to catch Santa Claus. Since we don’t have a chimney, I figured he’d have to come in through the front window, so I hooked up a motion sensor that made a little motor turn that would flick a string that I ran all the way up to my room, where it would disrupt the little circuit I had and cause the alarm to go off. Then I would know to sneak into the office and watch the computer screen, which was connected to a camera downstairs.
It worked insofar as that I woke up and crept into the office in time to watch my dad nearly knock over the Christmas tree.
Did you save the video? How did your dad trip the alarm (assuming, of course, he didn’t climb through the window)?
When I was a toddler, I a) wanted a barbie and b) liked the color purple.
This means that by the time I was six, my toddler self was someone I wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole, except possibly to shove her away from me.
Though to make up for it, when I finally DID get a barbie, the extent of my “playing” with it consisted of ripping its head off and replacing it, wrapping it in leaves, spray-dying its hair neon orange, and using it as a Halloween decoration wrapped in dead leaves and with its head a few inches away.
Purple was my first word.
Mine was toast.
My professor’s was batman.
I really need to ask my parents what mine was.
Batman?
Yup.
Mine was “Stop”. So many questions…
I like to joke that it was “Hubble”, but my first word was actually “hot”.
You probably were trying to say ‘Hubble’ but it just didn’t come out perfectly enunciated and ended up sounding like ‘hot’.
Mine was “kitty.” No one I know is surprised by this.
One of the stranger ones: a friend’s first word was “breeches.”
Mine was “bread”. My brother’s first word, however, was “beer”.
I don’t know what my first word was. It could well have been “kitty.” I grew up surrounded by cats.
I do know that I was slow to start talking. My parents were beginning to worry about me. When I finally did talk, though, I spoke in complete sentences and asked so many questions that they wished I would shut up. No doubt many MBers have heard similar stories about themselves.
That’s exactly how I worked too. For a few years I didn’t say much at all–if I needed something or had a question, I’d talk, but that was about it. My parents apparently asked a doctor about it just to make sure I was okay. But one day when I was about four I just started talking and didn’t stop for about a year.
I started talking before I could walk and I never shut up.
Me, too! I was a year early to talk and a couple of months late to walk. I was also about 7 years late to run properly, but that’s another story…
I started talking quite quickly, actually. it worked just like normal except much sooner. My brother has an interesting story, though.
When he was 6 months old, he sang, “Old Ma’Dona–“. My parents were delighted and shocked, but apparently they must have been so shocked he misunderstood their reaction, because he didn’t speak again until just a bit before the normal age.
It makes you wonder how slowly people would learn to talk without all the positive reinforcement they get.
Then again, it may be important that he must not have known what the words meant, just that they sounded nice.
I said my first word when I was about 15 months old, and then shut up almost completely for the next year. My parents were really worried. Then, when I was nearly three, my mom put my hair in a topknot with a barrette that hurt my head, so I said, “I have a topknot. Topknots are for little babies, but I like topknots. But this one is uncomfortable and I am going to take it out now.”
I was an extremely quiet little kid, though. My parents didn’t realize I could read until I sat down on a newspaper, stared at it for a moment, and asked what a prime minister was (this was when Helen Clarke took office in New Zealand).
…O.o Holy cake…
Heh. That’s like my cousin. He was obsessed with trains as a kid and learned to read rather young.
Him, age three: “Dad! There’s a model train convention in town! Let’s go!”
My uncle, thinking: I never should have left the paper out…
Dunno if the sentence that I attributed to either of them is quite accurate but I do know that my cousin saw the newspaper and read about the convention and then really wanted to go.
Yup, that’s about my talking story. Apperently, I didn’t start walking until much later than I was supposed to, because to, because I spent so much time talking. According to my parents, if someone commented on my shirt, I would explain where I got it and everything I had ever done in it, then I would my on to my other shirts, then my other clothese, than everything in my room, then everything in my sister’s room, and so on unless someone shut me up.
My mom wrote down entire huge monologues that I’d say to her when I couldn’t go to sleep at night. I love them. I’d bring up everything that had to do with a topic or word. “Speaking of motorcycles, I have a motorcycle on my place mat. What’s so funny?”
My brother’s first word was “beer”
I have no idea where that came from.
Banana.
First word I ever read was “zoo”, in the book “Put Me in the Zoo”.
Mine was “Dadda”. Great Space Squids, I feel so normal. *runs away in shame*
Shame? You already knew about famous art movements!
Not “dada”, “dadda” as in, the little kid’s way of saying “dad”. Though that particiulare art movement happens to be a particular favorite of mine…
SFTDP.
That was supposed to say, “Though that particular art movement happens to be a favorite of mine.” Sorry, I don’t know how that sentence got so messed up.
I was joking.
Yeah, I realized that an hour after I posted my response. Should this go on the Fail thread now?
Also, I would never let my mother buy me a Halloween costume because I thought (and still do) that storebought costumes look stupid. Instead, I would tell her what I wanted to be and we’d make the costume together.
Mine was “Book”. I’m so proud.
Mine was “book”.
mine was too, actually, but I used that same word to mean practically everything: Mom, food, pumpkin, Tomas the tank engine…
Mine was as well.
Mine… was actually my dad’s name. I was the first child, and it took until I started talking that they realized for me to call them “mom” and “dad”, they’d have to call each other that. So I started calling them by their names, and they had to re-train me.
My first word was “Up.”
My parents tell me that after “mama” and “dada”, my first word was “star”. Except I pronounced it “dar”.
One of my preschool classmates tried to force me to like the color pink. (My favorite color was purple at that point.) She colored on one of my drawings with pink marker, and gave me a lecture about how wonderful pink was. Thankfully, she gave up when she saw that it wasn’t working.
When I was really, really young I pronounced ‘absolutely’ as ‘as-a-loo-ly’. This was at an age when most people don’t even know the word, though.
I pronounced “terrible” as “tebble” (rhymes with pebble).
I said pine needles were “pine noodles”.
When I was little, I called Cheerios “baby bagels”.
I don’t think I even saw a bagel until I was in high school. They weren’t common in supermarkets where I lived.
I liked Cheerios, though. Still do.
I basically thought of bagels as salty doughnuts.
Two summers ago, I was a councilor at an ocean-science-themed camp, that was held in this old maritime museum with a fake boat for kids to play on in the back. Some of the kids played their own version of ‘Deadliest Catch’, but with “sea donuts” instead of crabs. It was adorable.
I thought of doughnuts as really sweet bagels. I still do, actually, but then again, I’ve never actually had a doughnut before.
When I was little, I used to make my people orange-skinned because most of the people I knew were tanned. I never was properly sure what color to do people: I knew I was “white” but I wasn’t white and I wasn’t really pink either. When I got to first grade, our teacher asked us to draw ourselves our our families or something like that. I was the only one who had an orange family* and was teased for it until I started drawing pink people like everyone else.
*My class was completely caucasian- this sounds strange but 90% of the population is ethnically caucasian so it wasn’t really a shocker.
Ohh, trying to figure out what color to color people was the worst. Especially when you only have primary colors.
I had similar difficulties trying to figure out what color to color my hair. Red wasn’t right, and neither was orange, and trying to blend the two with brown never worked.
I drew people as yellow a lot.
Kind of related: in first grade, we had to draw “self-portraits”, and I had a cold sore on one side of my mouth at the time, so when I drew my face, I included it, which the teacher thought was strange.
I just found the CD-ROM of Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze, which was my favorite video game when I was around seven. I want to play it again, but I doubt it would work properly on the latest version of Windows. (The system requirements say 95/98/Me.)
If I could find Detective Barbie 2 again, and it worked on my computer, I would play it in a heartbeat. Because I never won, so I never found out who did it!
I wish I could get Carmen San Diego: World Adventures to work. Somehow, I always got stuck in Japan because some sort of event was supposed to happen and never did (I think Carmen was supposed to steal some sort of wood carving but that never happened for me even though I went everywhere!). But my favorite game was Zoombinis.
Oh god, Zoombinis. We played that during Computer Lab in first grade sometimes. I could never get past the bit where you have to make a pizza for the two talking trees.
Zoombinis! It sounded vaguely familiar when I read it in the RC bar so I looked it up, and we had those on the computers in primary school too! I never really liked it, or saw the point of it. I always preferred reading instead.
I’ve played that, too! I remember playing a lot of Math Blaster at school and Reader Rabbit, ClueFinders, and Backyard Sports at home.
ClueFinders! I did up to “5th Grade Adventures” the summer before I entered 3rd grade. (That’s not to say I knew all the answers. I just liked the games enough to brute-force my way through the questions I didn’t get by trying every available option.)
ClueFinders was one of my favourite things ever.
I played ClueFinders! I remember looking at the back of one of the boxes and seeing the 6th grade one and thinking that was so far away, though as I recall my parents bought several at once or close together.
We played Zoombinis too! From first through fourth grade my favorite day was Wednesday because that was the day we went to the computer lab.
We had that too, but it was at my home. You know who was really obsessed with it? My mother. She actually managed to get all her Zoombinis from the island to Zoombiniville or whatever it was. She is the only person I know who has done this.
Oh my gosh, it was SO hard, and I could never figure out the gate thing with the shapes. I never understood the game nor why everyone wanted to play it so badly. I liked Kid Pix.
Oh, Kid Pix…
Kid Pix was the best. I loved all the sound effects the tools made. (But our computer teacher wouldn’t let us use the “dynamite” tool to destroy our work and start again, because she thought it was “too violent”.)
ZOOMBINIS! I loved that game! I got so many tribes/brigades/whatever they were called to their home-safety-place that they started making villages and having parades and being generally happy. It sort of reminded me of the Shire.
I also really liked “Lemmings,” which was a computer game that came on a series of floppy discs. ALSO SCARAB OF RA was such a good game! I really liked puzzle-based games with lots of problem-solving and not a lot of speed or coordination required. Those were the best.
I remember Zoombinis! I took that game with me to China and played it from there, too! I always found them so adorable, I loved how they created their community in that place they went to (whatever its name was.)
I bet I would beast at Carmen Sandiego games now that I actually know geography.
There’s this site called the Virtual Apple II Archive or something like that, which has all these old games on it. Including Carmen San Diego. You do need to know a little history to beat the version on there though, since it’s from the 80’s.
I will have to check that out.
Also, with my current knowledge of the English language, I could beat Reading Blaster Mystery really easily and give that stupid jerkhead Dr. Dabble the beat-down he had coming…
Zoombinis! And Carman San Diego!
So much fun.
ZOOMBINIS! The hotel…The Shady Tree Hotel?…was my favorite. The Ferry was hard.
Zoombinis!! I loved that game! (I still do, actually. I have this dream of actually beating it someday. I always got pretty far in the game, up to where all of the paths turned red and it was really hard, but then my family would get a new computer, and I’d have to start over again.)
That always happened to me, too. But I think the starting number of Zoombinis isn’t a multiple of sixteen. Are you sure it’s possible to win?
I actually worked it out, the number of Zoombinis is a multiple of 16, plus one more. My brother and I have this theory that the last one is a Zoombini called Fleemburt, who is described in the game manual as “the wise and famous Zoombini explorer.” and that a party that contains him doesn’t need 16, because he’s an explorer and stuff. So that way if you had under 16 Zoombinis left at the end of the game, you wouldn’t be stuck.
I actually let a few be sent back to the island on purpose (by the pizza thing) so I could get the right number of Zoombinis to the first stop thingy. I once managed to clear the island, but the computer broke shortly thereafter so I never completely finished.
I had to play zoombinis a lot at my school, but the computers didn’t have any sound, so we could never hear the instructions. Some of it was easy to work out, but I spent forever trying to figure out what I was supposed to do for half of the things.
When I was little, I didn’t know how to use tissues, so i would just scream, “I HAVE A BOOGEY” until someone helped me. Oh, and my mother made me believe that the word “fart” did not exist and they were called “bloops.” You wouldn’t believe what a scandal it was when I found out otherwise.
There’s a tree in my front yard that has berries on it, and my mom used to tell me that they were called “yuckies” to dissuade me from eating any.
When I was around 3 (or 2 or 4) I thought policeman ran on treadmills to keep TV’s running. (I have no clue where I got that idea!) An dwhen I was 7 or 8, I annoced that I was now obsessed with the letter A, and the next year I would be obbsessed with the letter B, and the year after that C, and so on. That lasted about 4 or 5 months.
I did that with animals in a certain book. I would go in order from animal mentioned first to the one mentioned last. The first was sponges. I never got past them; they were so fascinating! (I didn’t limit myself to a year; I just figured I’d change eventually). Coincidentally, tardigrades are on the same page of that book, although I don’t know if they come immediately afterward (and I swear it was a coincidence; I gave up that idea many years ago, and I’ve had all sorts of obsessions in between sponges and tardigrades that weren’t even mentioned in the book–yet it’s strange).
I referred to needle-nose pliers as “hummingbirds” because I always thought they looked like them.
They do, actually…
My parents told me that my first word was “backpack”, because I loved being carried around in the little baby-carrying backpack thingy. Apperently, I would yell “Backpack! Backpack! Backpack!” until someone carried me around in it.
I used to imagine I was in a story book and provide narration for the world around me. Out loud. Usually in the form of muttered ‘she said’s after I finished talking.
It drove everybody crazy.
When I was little, I would, of course, read a lot of little-kid stories where animals could talk to people. And, the kids in the stories would always be surprised to meet animals who could talk, which I thought was really dumb. “They’re in a story, of course animals can talk! Why do they act like it’s weird?”
I decided that if an animal ever started talking to me, I wouldn’t act dumb like those kids, I would go “Well, if animals are talking to me, I must be in a story, so of course animals can talk”, and not act as if it was strange at all.
I did the same thing, but in my head.
I still do the same thing in my head.
I constantly do this. It’s nice to know I’m not alone. Usually it quickly gets really meta as the me in my head realizes he’s narrating his own thoughts and then start’s thinking about that, and so on.
Actually, I think I tend to think about my life in general as though it’s a story. Do most people do this?
I do.
Yep, I do this sometimes.
Yes, I think I started doing that after I read Laura Ingalls Wilder and I never stopped. When I started doing that I thought it might be weird and I worried that I’d never be able to stop thinking that way. But now when I think about thinking my brain hurts, so I just think.
Maths Lover was somewhat relieved that her fellow MBers did the same thing.
When Bibliophile was a little kid, she pretended monsters were always begging her to tell them stories. She didn’t want to make them up, so she took the easy way out and mentally narrated her life to them by thinking of the 3rd-person words for everything she did. One day, however, everything changed. Something slipped out!
“‘More milk, please,’ she said,” she said. Her mother and brother in the room with her were confused.
“Are you making up a story in your head?” her mother asked.
“Yes,” she said, “But I didn’t mean to say the ‘she said’ part out loud.”
“Oh,” said her brother, “I thought you meant to say, ‘I said,’ but didn’t.”
From that moment on, she still narrated for the monsters, but she made a real effort to keep it all in her head. It worked, too. They eventually went away because they realized she was stubborn, wouldn’t turn out one of those people who had to write stories because of the voices in her head and eventually became really good at it because she was just too lazy. She didn’t realize for years that that was the purpose they had served. By then, she had friends who wrote for such reasons, and it was now clear to her that the ‘monsters’ of her childhood were actually gifts meant to help give her motivation for writing. Delighted, she signed up for NaNoWriMo. However, it was too late; the monsters had gone. She had abused their gift, and now it was too late; they gave no second chances. She despaired. She tried hard to bring them back, even peering with interest at an article on seances at one point. But alas–all failed. The monsters are gone. They now refuse to force her to write stories.
Same. I remember accidentally saying “…I said” aloud once.
I did that too!
MY SISTER DOES THAT~~~
Like, really poetically and everything. She would be a really good writer if she could write (she’s dyslexic — she uses Dragon Dictate occasionally, but it’s a bit headachey with all the misunderstandings and stuff).
There are programs intended to teach dyslexic kids to read and write- has she tried any of them?
I used to be pretty severly dyslexic, until Mom figured it out and acquired one of those. It worked really well.
Yes, she’s tried a lot of different ones. She’s not just severely dyslexic, she’s severely severely dyslexic. We keep trying all kinds of different programs — she’s almost eleven and we’ve gotten her reading skills up to maybe a kindergarten or first-grade level. The dyslexic brain thing means that she’s very talented at a lot of other stuff, so my mom thinks it may turn out to be an advantage in the long run, but so far we haven’t really found the key to “fixing” her reading disability.
Ah, I see. I wish her best of luck!
When I was a little kid I drew pictures of princesses being boiled in pots.
Your little kid self sounds quite interesting.
Well, okay, and they somehow ended up looking more like armadillos.
I thought that way too! On an unrelated note, my first word was “hat”. The first word I read was “zoo” on a street sign. After that was “brachiosaurus”.
When I was little I said “mingo” instead of “tomato,” I played with Duplos (they’re like giant LEGOs), I loved the mirror in my parents bathroom, because it was one where the image reflected itself over and over and over, and I lived in 4 different houses, though I only remember the 2 later ones.
At first, I thought you meant you lived in 4 houses at once.
Oh, I loved mirrors like that, too! I could stare at them for hours pretending that I was like Alice in Wonderland.
I used to be terribly afraid of pineapples.
I was (and still am, a little bit) afraid of smoke/CO alarms. Because my mom asked me to test one when I was really little, so I pressed the button, but I didn’t know that it would make a rather loud noise when I did. The noise scared me out of my wits, and for years after that, I thought that the little flashing light on it was an eye, and that it was watching me, waiting to scare me again.
Popping balloons. I couldn’t be in the same room with a balloon if there was anything sharp.
I hated that, too. Mine wasn’t as severe as yours, though.
Well, I could… but I would cover my ears, and if anyone threatened to pop said balloon, I would cover my ears and run away.
I’m sorry; I can really relate to that. I was terrified of vacuum cleaners and blenders; I’d have to be warned before they’d come on so that I could cover my ears and run away or else I’d do those things and scream. I can be in a room with those things now, but I still prefer to be warned about them.
There’s a kid in my grade (11th) who won’t be in the same room as balloons, period. We were both working at freshman orientation this fall, and whoever was organizing the activities for the freshmen forgot and was going to have balloons at the closing assembly. There was a huge rush to stuff them into trashcans and side rooms before he and his group got back to the gym.
Same with my sister. One time one her birthday, we got balloons, and put them in the back of the car. They got too hot, since they were next to the car heater. It scared her like crazy, and she couldn’t stand balloons for about 5 years.
When I was really little, I was scared of Alton Brown. I have no idea why.
I was scared of popping balloons too. And asparagus, because I’d ended up with a cut from one once. And the basement. I would not go into our (unfinished) basement by myself. It was so dark and creepy.
You got a cut from asparagus? How does that even work?
Hey, I got a cut from bread. Asparagus is way more dangerous than bread.
Hey, they have sharp leaves. It’s not impossible.
Was the asparagus cooked?
No, it wasn’t. We were actually preparing it for cooking by snapping off the ends, when one of the leaves slashed my finger open. I refused to eat any of the asparagus that night. And for the next several years.
Heck, that never happened to me and I STILL refuse to eat asparagus, because it tastes NASTY.
That just means you’ve never had good asparagus.
Or she’s never had glazed asparagus, which is the only form of asparagus which I find edible.
Asparagus tempura is delicious.
*prepares for getting yelled at by people*
Sounds delish to me. I like roasted asparagus best, but probably only because I haven’t had it in tempura.
I like asparagus. I like it raw. I like it steamed. I like it roasted. don’t much like it cluttered up with sauce, but I don’t run into that kind of cooking very often nowadays.
I shall concur. But then again, maybe I’ve never had good asaparagus. The kind we used to get was frozen first, which would tend to make it soggy.
When I was really, really little, I broke one of those store mannequins. I think I was trying to climb up and sit on it’s lap, or move it, or something. (It was a long time ago. I don’t quite remember.) The next thing I knew, the mannequin was on the floor shattered into little pieces, and my mom was apologizing to someone from the store. I had this terrible sense that I had done something wrong…
I smashed a lawn gnome once. It was an ugly little thing…
When I was five through the time I was seven, I would often spend long car rides wondering if different people saw colors differently. I would wonder if, were I to get suddenly transplanted into someone else, I would find that the way they saw the color blue was the way I saw the color green, or their purple was my red, or so on. I actually can’t remember a specific time when I stopped wondering this, but I remember it gave way to wondering if a marathon runner running as the crow flies could beat a car to a destination if that car had to drive conventionally (i.e. on roads and around houses and such).
The answer to your first question is yes. In addition to synesthetes, a small but significant percentage–I think maybe 15%, but I’m probably wrong–of females see more colors than normal humans. You might be one of them, and even if you’re not, you probably know at least one. People don’t realize that they see more colors, though; they have to be tested for it, because it doesn’t affect them, and they’re used to it.
That isn’t precisely my question. I wondered (and still do, just not as frequently). I meant that I wondered if every single person sees colors differently than every other person. For instance, if we both looked at the same shade of blue, we would both say it’s blue. But if somehow we could swap our vision apparatuses, we would no longer recognize it as blue because how I see that shade of blue is how you might see a different shade of blue, or even a different color entirely.
Neuroscientists looked at the brain and the eye and discovered that in general, that’s not the case. I don’t know how exactly they figured it out, but apparently they did. Like I said, though, “15%” of females have something extra in their eye that lets them see shades other people don’t–2 blue things might be identical to one person, but not these people; they do see 2 different shades. The differences just aren’t picked up by normal people. It’s not every single person, though, and these people see the same way as each other.
This was from the book Incognito that Swapping Senses in October’s Muse was taken from. It’s quite fascinating.
I read that as “Females aren’t normal humans”
I used to wonder that too! (About the colors) I think I was a bit older though. I also had this theory that everyone’s favorite color was really same one, but no one realized because we all saw the other colors differently. Then I realized this didn’t work at all. I was crushed.
How did you disprove it?
Well, some people’s favorite color is black, and since black is pretty much the absence of light it doesn’t really make sense for people to have different ‘versions’ of it.
I still wonder this. It’s quite mind-boggling.
You needn’t. We have the technology to look at the signals the brain is getting when you look at something, and we can tell when people process it differently. My previous post is the answer to the question–although it is a rather mysterious answer, as we–well, females, anyway–can never know whether or not we, personally see things differently.
Thanks. I saw a BBC documentary recently that talked about colour, and they did an experiment with a tribe in Africa (shame on me, I can’t remember which country) and they couldn’t perceive the difference between green and blue that would be obvious to us, but they could perceive the difference between green and a slightly different shade of green which would not be obvious to us at all.
I read a book like that this summer called “Language Through The Looking Glass”. One of the studies that I remember was about how Russian speakers perceive the color blue. Their language has two different words for what we would call “dark blue” and “light blue”. As it turns out, native Russian speakers are able to distinguish between shades of blue faster when they are on opposite sides of this arbitrary division of the color spectrum. It’s really cool.
If anyone’s interested in learning more, that’s a good book to read, or you can search for the “Russian blue experiment” and come up with a lot of information.
I wrote about how language can effect people’s perceptions of the world for one of the bonus questions on my Anthropology midterm.
Neat! What did you write about?
The example I used was that people who speak languages with feminine words for “key” are more likely to describe keys as “beautiful”, and “delicate” that those who speak languages with masculine words for “key”.
What did you talk about in your answer?
That’s fascinating! I’d be interested in reading that. I’m glad people are thinking about that. For some odd reason, there has been very little study in the area, but not only that, many theories on the subject (like that the idea of animals’ consciousness can be disproved because they ‘don’t have words to think in’) seem to have formed largely because people either didn’t know the facts that obviously disprove them or just didn’t make the connection.
We can’t even prove other human’s conciousness, so I doubt we’ll be getting to animals any time soon.
Agreed. However, some people are saying they can prove that animals aren’t conscious. All the arguments I’ve read for that are illogical. Of course that doesn’t mean animals are conscious*; I could make up infinite arguments for things I know to be true that are completely ridiculous (The sky is blue; the sky and jeans are both matter; therefore, jeans are blue). What it does mean is that people have a lot of illogical theories about consciousness. Animal consciousness was just an example, though, actually; people think illogical things about human consciousness as well.
*I expect most vertebrates and some others are, incidentally, but that’s not the point at all.
When I was about three, I remember my mom serving corn relish: canned Mexican corn with a dressing of cider vinegar, oil, pepper, and sugar. It is VERY vinegary, as inferred by the fact that vinegar is the first ingredient in the dressing. Now all I saw was corn, and I knew that I LOVED corn. So I asked to try some. My mother sort of looked at me and said, “Okay…” She gave me a spoonful, probably imagining me spewing the stuff across the table. But I took the spoonful, gobbled it down, and said, “Can I have some more?”
And thus the knowledge that I am a vinegar lover was revealed. Corn relish is still one of my favorite salads.
One time we were at a Chinese restaurant, and my parents had ordered this very spicy noodle dish. I naturally asked to try it, and they told me that it would be too spicy. So little 4 year old me searches her vast knowledge of quips, and comes up with “How do you know I won’t like it if you wont let me try it?!” (quotation from my favorite book at the time, Bread And Jam For Francis)
The end of this story, however, is that I didn’t like it very much at all.
One St. Patrick’s Day when I was in Elementary School, our teachers told us there were leprechauns in the school. I fully believed this, as did all of the other kids. When we were dismissed, we saw muddy footprints by the door that hadn’t been there at recess.
All of us were convinced a leprechaun had made them, never mind that it was muddy outside and other classes had recess at different times.
I thought “awesome” was spelled “ossum,” but I could spell “pumpkin” and was very impressed with myself. In fact, I used to write books about a girl named Pumpkin and then put them in my kindergarten classroom’s book nook for future rereading. I was quite a prolific author.
I also used to give my teachers (including specialists) hugs every day and would measure my favorites by if they hugged me back and if so, how enthusiastically. My main teacher was therefore my favorite. My art teacher didn’t hug me ever.
Also, once in preschool a boy told me that if you touched bricks you’d get poisoned and die. I believed this for a few weeks and burst out crying when I accidentally brushed the side of the recreation building. Luckily, my mom convinced me I would live. Darn old Benjamin.
I was very proud of myself for being able to spell “museum,” but I thought the @ sign meant “about” and used it as such.
I thought it meant not to get seperated from your mom when you went to the library, and for the longest time I had the image of a five-year-old (I was five at the time) wearing a suit and bowtie, wandering among the shelves of the fiction section while a woman a few shelves down called for him.
When I was a little kid I wanted to be a doctor because I heard that they earned lots of money. Then I wanted to be a teacher so I could get lots of apples and gifts. Then I wanted to be an author and write about pigs. Then I wrote lots of books about pigs.
I approve.
I distinctly remember looking at the spines of the books of poetry on my parents’ shelves, and reading “poetry” as “party.” I thought Robert Browning’s Poetry was a book about all of Robert Browning’s friends giving him a surprise birthday party.
There should be a children’s book about famous poets having a party, with really cute illustrations.
I would read it.
Emily Dickinson baked a cake for everyone.
When I was little my grandparent’s had a book of Phantom of the Opera piano music and I was terrified of it. I would avoid looking at the piano in case it was there and if they showed it to me I’d scream.
I probably would have done the same thing.
When I was a little kid, I was very afraid of dying and cried pretty hard that time I accidentally swallowed gum and thought it would kill me. I was deathly afraid of black widows and sometimes when lying around in bed, I would seem to feel a “bite” and start freaking out because I thought I felt myself losing my ability to breathe and was dying. As far as tornados go, I would be scared if the air was sticky and I would cry if the wind seemed to be anything remotely to a funnel, even if it was just a plastic bag blowing around in a curvy shape. Grey weather or thunderstorms depressed and frightened me too because I was always scared that I would get hit by lightning and that grey weather would turn into thunderstorms that would attack me. I was a pretty troubled little kid.
Yeah, me too actually. I have a bit of a free floating anxiety thing, I think, that manifests itself as worrying about my heath, even when I was little and before I learned what it was I used come up with ways that anything could kill me and worrying about them. I never told anyone though. I guess I was a pretty troubled little kid too.
I remember once when my mom was sick, I wondered what it would be like if I was dead. Even if I went to heaven and/or continued to exist and watched everyone else live their lives, I’d just be watching-maybe. Even if heaven was prefect, I’d get bored eventually. I’d be there for two thousand years… but that wasn’t true, the world was older than that and there was no reason that it should suddenly disappear. At first, people would remember me, my family, perhaps if I had kids someday, and they’d tell their kids about me, but eventually they’d die and then there kids would die and their kids’ kids would die and everything would change and no-one would ever remember that I existed, no-one would ever think and be exactly like I was and even if someone in the future was exactly like me they wouldn’t know that I’d been thinking the exact same thing as they were. The world would go on for as long as it had existed and even longer and longer and longer than I could ever imagine, perhaps someday people would even be gone like the dinosaurs and I’d be gone and unable to do anything…
It was just this staggering feeling that I’d never felt before and I almost fell into the bookcase that lined the wall outside my parents’ bedroom. I was confronted with infinity and mortality and whenever I try to think about it, there’s this mental blocker in my mind that stops me. For a while, I wanted to become an actress or an author so that people would remember me.
That really scared younger me too. The thought of not existing freaked me out, and so did just continuing forever. Just like then, whenever I get existential, it takes a while to shake that feeling.
The thought of not existing still scares me.
How do you feel about the 13.7 billion years of the universe’s history before you existed?
That doesn’t scare me even close to as much.
It doesn’t bother anybody at all.
When I was a little kid I felt sad for the Santa sitting in the department store – he had to sit there all day! – so I bought him an M&M cookie.
…I was a very empathetic child.
Awww…
For some reason, I didn’t see the point for reading when I was little. My mom started to teach me the alphabet when I was about four- I refused to learn it because I didn’t see any reasons for all the letters to be in that order or any order for that matter. Of course, I wasn’t really that defiant, so I learned the song to make mom happy, recited it and took pleasure in forgetting it the next day. The pattern continued the next year when my mom wanted me to learn to read. The only books I cared about were the ones she read aloud to me anyway. I memorized important words and all the street signs by thinking of them as images.
When I entered first grade, I was able to read simple sentences- if I had too. I did it when forced too, but refused to practice and only when there was no way out of it. I have no idea what caused my wild hatred of reading- I suppose it was because I had to do it and all the responsible adults were hounding me about it. Also, the first-reader stories were insipid and shallow. On the other hand, I was a somewhat rambunctious child- why sit still and read when you can use the barstool to climb onto the countertop and scale the doorframe from there? Or build something?
When I was seven, homeschooling started for real and my mother bought me some “special” early-reader books because now I was going to read and there was no way around it, period. One of them was interesting and I skimmed it on the tram-ride home- I actually flipped through all of them. I was fully capable of reading books at that level, but of course I couldn’t admit that after I’d spent three years unlearning to read and there was only one that was more interesting that riding the tram yet again. I only learned to read properly when my mom’s friend J. lent us the Narnia books- suddenly, I could read. I even read faster than both my parents within a week or so.
This incident was replicated when my mom bought peppermint patties to reward me whenever I finished two pages in my workbook- that was usually all I managed in one sitting. Of course, she eventually towards the end at page number 6 and raised the number to five patties per page and the grammar textbook didn’t count (we never even bothered with math- those textbooks had been a success and already finished four years prior). That dampened the mood, and as soon as the patties were gone, it was three pages at best again. I usually just stared into space and chewed my pencil- adults were always doing boring, stupid things and trying to get me to do boring, stupid things too.
Unsurprisingly, it took until about 8th grade for my parents to figure out I had above-average intelligence. I may’ve been late as far as reading concerned, but my laziness was par none and I didn’t really attend some (compulsory) classes I found completely pointless and could get away with (but that’s another post and a very good story- in case you were wondering, I got an A anyway).
Both my sister and I learned how to read before anyone even realized it. No one tried to teach us or anything, we just picked it up somehow. In kindergarten the teacher recommended that I start on chapter books, though I found the choice of books a bit dull. I was rather less adventurous than you as a child. I was fine with reading. Apparently I would even ask my mom if I could take naps, in stark contrast to my sister’s eternal refusal to sleep under any circumstances. Anyway, I’ve always been a reader. When I was little, I’d go to adoration with my mom once a week (sitting in a dim chapel for an hour). She’d pray, I’d get the big, thick, heavy Bible and read it, even though I was six or seven years old. It was much better than the cheesy “children’s adaptations” I’d been forced to read.
As far as I can remember, I was mostly annoyed by adults when I was little. They were all inane and condescending, treating me like a little kid. I wanted to be treated more like an adult, and I don’t think that was such an outrageous demand, considering I was already smarter (or at least more logical) than quite a few adults I knew. They were all intrusive and dense–in retrospect, I don’t know if any adults quite understood me at that point, even my parents. (Well, my dad still doesn’t get me, as he’s told me himself several times.) I think most people see all children as very average and don’t allow for the possibility that a 7-year old could be thinking on a much higher level than most other 7-year-olds. I don’t know if there’s a remedy for that.
I read more than anyone when I was little. Our school had a program for kindergarten and first grade where you read fifteen books, wrote down the names, had your parent sign it, and then turn in the form and a little card with your last name on it moved to a higher stop on the wall outside the cafeteria. My mom had to limit the ‘early reader’ books I could read for that because it only took me about one or two minutes to reach each one.
I started reading chapter books in first grade (I fondly remember Magic Tree House).
I still remember the first book I ever read by myself–it was called “Old Bear” and it was about an old teddy bear that got put away in the attic, and the rest of the toys go and rescue him out of it, so that he wouldn’t be stuck in a cardboard box. I had taken it off the shelf in the book corner in my nursery school classroom, and started to read it, when all of a sudden I realized that my entire class was behind me, staring at me. And I heard this conversation:
One of my classmates: What’s she doing?
Teacher: She’s reading.
Classmate: She’s not reading! She’s not moving her mouth!
Teacher: Yes she is, you see how her eyes are moving across the page?
So then I had half the class scramble around me and stare into my eyes to see them moving.
When I was around 2 and a hlf, I aked my mom to point out the word she was on when she was reading to me. A few days later, she realized I was following where she was reading. And when I was around 3, I am amazed my parents by getting a Henry and Mudge book, and looked at it (I was acually reading it, they thought I was looking at the pictures), and then asked a question about a word I saw in it.
I learned to read at 3, so I had a tendency to use words larger than most kindergarteners, especially scientific ones about animals. In kindergarten, we had to pick an animal that lived in the arctic to research and make a diorama about, and I picked the moose. When we were presenting our projects, this happened:
Teacher: “Kai, what does your animal eat?”
Me: “Mooses eat vegetation.”
My mom tells me this incident was mentioned at their next Parent-Teacher Conference.
I was really into dolphins at that time, too, so I read a lot of books about them, went as a dolphin for Halloween, and had a stuffed dolphin almost as big as I was that I carried around. (Which I rather unimaginatively named “Dolphiny”.)
When they found out there were dolphins at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, my parents took me there as a treat to see the show. I took Dolphiny with me on the ferry and into the aquarium. I really loved the show, and when they asked for a volunteer, I waved my hand around in the air and was shouting “Oooh! Ooh!”
So the trainer lady said “Yes, the little girl with the dolphin!”
And I just about exploded inside with excitement. I ran down to the tank, still holding Dolphiny.
Trainer: “Well, I see you really like dolphins.”
Me: “Yeah! I love them!”
Trainer: “Do you know what special thing dolphins can do to see underwater?”
Me: “They have echolocation.”
The trainer did a double take.
Trainer: “Yes, that’s right, they have echolocation- they see with sound.”
When I was six (I think…) I was in a day camp, and had swimming lessons every day. One day I told my instructor that I floated because I displaced as much water as I weighed.
I drew my E’s like fine-toothed combs with as many lines as I could fit in the middle of it.
I also drew o’s and l’s together so they looked like d’s, and it took me a while to stop drawing my D’s backwards.
My people were stick figures that I drew clothes on top of. Each hand and foot had ten digits because people have ten fingers and ten toes. The result was some hairy looking feet (my toes were little lines; often I had to move to the bottom of the foot to fit them all in) and hands that looked like little pom-poms.
My noses were triangles and the hair always had little black lines going through it.
I did the same with my “E”s.
I did my E’s like that, too!
I think most little kids draw their E’s like that — my sister and I both did too. I think the thought is “Three is ‘multiple’, so I’m going to make the lines as multiple as I can!”
I thought “several” was a synonym for “three”, because the first place I saw it used, the number of things being discussed was indeed three.
I kept seeing “several” used that way, and it confused me because I knew the actual definition. A lot of the time, “several” actually does seem to mean “three”.
The actual sentence, I remember, was “There are several species of wild cats that live in the United States.” (Lynx, Cougar, and Bobcat. Apparently, they weren’t counting the small Jaguar population in Arizona.)
I asked my mother if that meant I would ever see a cougar, maybe even in our backyard, because I was really obsessed with big cats at the time and I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to see one that wasn’t in a zoo.
We lived in the suburbs at the the time.
My mom said she didn’t think so.
Er, only one “the” in the second-to-last sentence.
I thought that “several” was a synonym for “seven.”
That was my original impression as well. I remember being confused by a word that sounded like “seven” but usually meant “three”.
I used to think “several” meant “seven or more,” because the words sounded similar, and so I thought they were from the same root.
I always thought that several was six or seven and a few was four or five, becuse they started with the same letter.
I thought that “several” meant three, five, or seven, and “few” meant two or four.
I didn’t draw my Es that way; it’s almost the only error I didn’t make with letter shapes. I thought “several” meant a multiple of seven, also assuming they were from the same root.
“Few” has always meant “three” for me, probably because it has three letters. Several meant “seven or more” because it has seven letters and “some” meant “four or five or six” for similar reasons. One and two were easy enough to count without those prettier words.
I remember very clearly that at one point, I was told that a few meant a couple, so I was convinced that “a few means a couple, and a couple means two,” so a few must mean two. Later, I changed my mind and started thinking of it as 3, probably because I heard it referring to 3 things and thought it was wrong and mentioned it and was corrected, although I don’t remember.
It reminds me of the Troll base four counting system in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels!
“One, two, three, many, lots…”
“Sound off!”
“One! Two!”
“Sound off!”
“Many! Lots!”
“Sound off!”
“Er… what?”
Somehow, you could tell it had been written by a troll.
Thud! was a tour de force.
IT MOST DEFINITELY WAS.
I love the books about the Watch.
In first grade I didn’t talk to my now-best friend for nearly three years because she called me a ‘missy prissy’ and I called her ‘Elizabeth’.
…Her name’s not Elizabeth.
I caught onto reading really, really quickly. In kindergarten, I wasn’t reading much that was more advanced than Junie B. Jones, but in first grade, I read The Secret Garden (not an abridged version) and became obsessed with it. It was my favorite book in the whole world that didn’t have fairies or unicorns in it. The church I went to gave all the third graders Bibles (easy, NirV versions), and each Bible had a section you were supposed to read every day, starting in Genesis and going all the way to the end. I didn’t see the point in skipping all the sections in between, so I didn’t. I only found out later that we weren’t actually expected to even read the daily sections. Most people didn’t. That’s not to say I understood it all, though; I had a major tendency to take it literally, like everything else. For about a month, for example, I decided I wouldn’t eat grapes or cut my hair because I wanted to get strong like Samson; I only stopped because I realized it wouldn’t work because I had already done both before, when I was younger, which must count, because I was no stronger than before. And by third grade, I’d gotten my obsession with zoology, and I was reading coffee-table books about it. Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World’s Wildlife was quite possibly the book that has influenced me more than any other. I think that was the year I decided I wanted to become a conservation biologist/ethologist combination when I grew up. I haven’t changed my mind. I did the science fair every year; my kindergarten project, which won school and district for my age group (I wasn’t allowed to move to state until I was older), was called “All About Birds And Why They Are Wonderful.” From then on my life has been a series of animal obsessions; usually, they’re endangered; tardigrades are the exception, not the rule. I believe before that it was Vancouver Island Marmots; I still have a version that I made out of yarn.
As for handwriting… ugh. Just ugh. I couldn’t figure it out; my Js were backward and had the tittles in the wrong place; my Ns were backward… Everything was wrong. And I was trying. In first grade, if you weren’t done with your classwork at recess, you had to stay in and finish it. I often had to stay in. Missing recess didn’t bother me–I hated it, anyway; I didn’t have any school friends that year, so I had to just walk around the balance beam over and over singing hymns, which was boring–but I still hated it because the only other people who stayed in were the ‘bad’ kids who never paid attention or tried to finish their schoolwork; they’d been talking and doing the wrong thing, and this was their punishment, but I had to do it, too, and it wasn’t fair. Everyone said I’d get quicker at it in a year or so, but I didn’t. My problem wasn’t solved until just a few months ago, when I just somehow magically figured out how everyone managed it.
I liked the adults in my life, though. They were nice. I think they did notice I wasn’t like other 7-year-olds because like KaiYves, I made it kind of obvious–not on purpose; it just was. That’s not to say they understood me, exactly, but they liked me, at any rate, so interactions went well. Except sometimes they’d get annoyed because I wasn’t looking at them, so they assumed I wasn’t listening. This may have encouraged my habit of always raising my hand when I know the answer to a question; otherwise they’d all still think I never listened.
Apparently I made this list back sometime in elementary school (2nd or 3rd grade I’d guess):
Series [oxlin] has started:
Narnia
Wrinkle in Time
Dark is Rising
Chrestomancy
All of a Kind Family
Saturdays
Hee!
According to my parents I started reading at age 4, just before kindergarten. I skipped easy readers and went straight from picture books to chapter books as easy readers had boring words.
When I was 2 years old I read Charlotte’s Web and became a vegetarian.
…and I thought 7 was young, at least for someone who’d only vaguely heard of vegetarianism and never met any actual vegetarians or anything like that.
I started reading when I was three and never really stopped. I mean that very literally. Once I learned to read, basically my entire life started to focus around books. I somehow finagled my preschool teacher into bringing me a book of fairy tales during naptime, so while all the other kids were sleeping peacefully, I was reading. While other kids were playing with balls and puzzles and the sandbox, I was reading. Most of what I did in kindergarten and first grade was read every single one of the teacher’s I Can Read books, or the books she would read to us, over and over.
In second grade we were finally allowed to read in class, and I was so happy! It was really annoying though, because a) we had to read aloud, which was boring because I was quicker reading silently anyway, and b) we had to read aloud along with the class, and everyone else was ridiculously slow. In second and third grade, I usually just ended up reading the entire story and a few others in the time it would take us to read one story.
In fourth grade we finally got to read on our own! It was the best thing. Except then I applied for the lunch library pass every single day, so I pretty much read all day instead of, you know, having friends. This was around the time I started sneaking books into class to read beneath the desk, because I’d already read all my teacher’s books. This was the time that I read all of Harry Potter 5 in a single day.
Fifth grade I had a social life, aside from at one point reading the entirety of Lord of the Rings in a single day (it was Read-the-Day-Away at school, and everyone was required to come in pajamas and read all day) but sixth and seventh grade all my friends were in B Lunch and I was in A Lunch, so I went back to my old ways of reading all lunch. I must have read every single book in the middle-school library.
Now that I have a free period, I’m spending most of it working through all the Neil Gaiman in the high school library. (Unless I have undone homework, obviously.)
Oh yeah. Whenever we read aloud I’d always go ahead and read some other story. I read so many stories in my english class books because of that.
I had a couple classes that I entirely read through, such as Trigonometry where I had a bad teacher and would read under the desk. I loved homeroom in Jr. High (the purpose of which was to read) and in 5th grade when we’d have 20 minutes of reading time every day.
I used to read sometimes in science when we were being taught things I already knew. The teacher found out. When she saw me reading, she’d take my book away. That was reasonable, but then the people at my table started telling her I was reading in class even when I wasn’t. She always believed them even when the book was on the table, closed Apparently, there was no reason for me to want the book with me if I wasn’t at least planning to read it, but that wasn’t true. It helps me not be anxious if I have a book to hold and look at, but I didn’t know how to say that then; this was elementary school; I didn’t even entirely realize I had an anxiety problem. I just knew I felt better when I had a book in my hand, even if I couldn’t read it.
When I was a little kid, I always mispronounced “pronunciation.”
Oh, the irony…
I could already read before I went to kindergarten, and my favorite author at the time was Doctor Seuss.
When I was six, I:
-Thought that “a couple” meant two, “a few” meant three or four, and “several” meant about seven, give or take a number or two greater or smaller.
-Thought there were five seconds in a minute (I misunderstood my school teacher).
-Briefly wondered if when the next mass extinction occured (taking humans with it), dinosaurs would come back. I quickly decided that instead, when that happened because of changes to the environment the animals that filled the gap would be entirely new creatures I might not even be able to imagine.
At one point I also thought that five seconds was a minute.
I used to think that “a dozen” referred to an unimaginably high number, akin to “a zillion.”
That’s adorable.
When I was a little kid I named one of my goldfish Tapir.
When I was a little kid I once started crying because I swallowed some bubble gum on accident and thought I was going to die. Luckily my mom and a family friend made me sit still and told me stories to calm me down.
That happened to my sister! We usually never had gum, but this one time we were at someone’s house, and they gave my sister a piece of gum – she didn’t know what to do so she swallowed it and we started freaking out.
Solution: mandatory gum education in school.
“Oh my gosh, I’m going to be late for gum class!”
“Augh! I’ve forgotten my gum clothes!”
“I can’t believe the school makes us take gum class! Nobody learns anything! It’s so boring!”
This results in basically no interest in chewing gum in classes. “Who chews gum? I mean, outside of gum class? Eew.”
Therefore, nobody sticks gum under desks, which means teachers have less time wasted yelling at kids for having gum, which means higher test scores…
We must create a school together sometime.
Agreed.
Re: Reading
I started reading fairly early, when I was about 3 or 4. I went straight from little easy reader books to Magic Tree House. Cat’s Eye, I was the same as you: friends? Who needs ’em! I’ve got books!
I still sometimes get in trouble for reading under the desk when I should be doing schoolwork or listening to the teacher. I’m on most of my teacher’s good sides, though, so I usually get away with just a warning.
Same here with reading under the desk, with one exception. Last year I was reading Jane Eyre for the first time (loved it!) and I was on of those “I will only stop reading when the class has started” runs. The class I was sitting in was one of my hardest classes, so there was no way that I would read my way through it. But when the bell rang the class engaged the teacher in a discussion that had nothing to do with the subject of the class, so I just kept on reading, keeping half an ear out for when the class would actually begin. Then the teacher’s voice cut through my thoughts.
“What did I just say?”
I went red. I knew that the class had not started yet, that this was just part of the discussion.
“I don’t know,” I replied. She asked again and I repeated my reply as steadily as I could, despite the fact that my eyes were tearing. Basically, the teacher seemed to feel that the discussion we were having was of importance even though it had nothing to do with the subject of the class, so she gave me a good sounding for reading under the desk. At the end of the day, I will agree with her that reading under the desk during class is rude, even if in my view the class hadn’t started yet, for after all it was her classroom. I forgave her.
I hate it when that happens. It happened all the time in elementary school and I always ended up bursting into tears. Therefore nobody liked me and I was avoided at all costs.
I always read when I’m finished with whatever I’m doing. Last year my teacher gave me permission to read during some parts of math units.
ENVY
Was it because you already knew the material? (I ask this because it’s the only semi-plausible, good reason I can think of). Because I just ABHOR having to listen to teachers define, say, ecosystem every. single. year. How do you forget something like that? I’ve literally had ‘matter’ defined every year since first grade; that is INSANE. Admittedly, the first grade definition turned out to be completely wrong, but that just makes it worse! And–sorry. I’ll stop now. But AURGH!
How did they define matter in the first grade?
“Stuff”, maybe?
“Anything that takes up space and has weight.”
*facepalm*
But then nothing in microgravity could have mass.
How would you define “mass” for first-graders?
“Amount of stuff,” maybe?
…density times volume?
…I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t even been taught how to multiply yet, let alone about ‘density’ and ‘volume.’
How would you define “density” and “volume”?
Density: Amount of matter/stuff in a certain amount of space/volume.
Volume: The amount of space an object takes up.
Yes. That works. I think for teaching kids, examples are everything. For example:
A brick and a sponge, both the same size. The brick is heavier than the sponge because if you cut through it, you’ll see nothing but solid brick. The sponge, however, has lots of little holes and therefore has less stuff in it than the bowling ball.
I don’t see why “the amount of matter in an object” wouldn’t have worked just fine–or “amount of stuff,” if you’re really worried.
Here’s what I don’t understand, though: If that’s what mass is, the amount of matter in an object, then saying all matter has mass is saying all matter has matter in it–which is obvious. Is there anything that takes up space that doesn’t have mass? If not, I think one might as well just call matter “anything that takes up space” and define mass later.
Ah. I was actually still getting that in the fourth grade.
Every social studies textbook I ever had, from 1st grade until 11th, defined “archeologist” in the first chapter or thereabouts.
Nothing against archaeologists, but I always found that insulting. Can’t we be expected to retain information like that after a while?
Why would being insulted by that mean you don’t like archeologists? I want to BE an archeologist and I’m insulted by that.
When I was a tiny human, I would dance to my favourite music on really loud, and when my parents turned it down I would just turn it up again.
I thought that food co-op was picking up groceries that you forgot to get from the grocery store.
My favourite book was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein and I had two copies of it, so I gave one copy to my friend. In fact, this book was the book that showed me the joy of reading. (:
I remember reading an interview in National Geographic Kids (It was already Kids by that time, although I’d been reading it since it was called World) with a guy from the Guinness Book of World Records. He was talking about how important it was to document an attempt to set a world record with good, clear photos, and he said something like “We get a lot of pictures of people with their heads cut off.” (As in, their heads are out of the frame because the photographer did a bad job.)
Now, at the time, I took that to mean that people were beheading other people and sending him photos of the bodies. I believe I had several nightmares about this scenario.
I always assumed that any TV show/movie I hadn’t seen was inappropriate. One time the kindergarten teacher showed us ‘A Bug’s Life’ and I asked to be excused because ‘My mom won’t let me watch this’. This continued up to the third or fourth grade.
Also, my mom wouldn’t let me watch SpongeBob or most other cartoon TV shows and my dad has been trying to make up for it ever since.
Typical conversation in our house:
Me: “We’re going to watch Doctor Who now.”
Dad: “What about iCarly? Or *insert other Disney or Nickolodeon show here*? We have them on the Netflix que…”
Me: “… No thanks, we’d rather watch Doctor Who.”
My mother was a “Disney kid”. When I was little, she tried to make me one too. As a result, I hate almost everything about Disney.
I would hope the Tomorrowland space specials are part of the “almost”…
Bububut…
Lion King?
No?
I recently found a ton of books that I wrote back in kindergarten and first grade, as well as some I dictated to my parents. I’ll run through all the ones I can describe off the top of my head:
What to Do in the Civil War: A guide for if you ever happen to find yourself in the American Civil War. Highlights include the “good” North and “bad” South, the drawing of a steam engine underground to represent the Underground Railroad, and characters that would frequently be trying to turn the pages for you. I planned to write other books in the series, including “What to Do in a Fire” and “What to Do At the Mall”, but I don’t think I ever got around to them.
Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie: I wrote this one for an assignment in the accelerated reading class I took in kindergarten. My teacher complimented me on its originality, even though I took basically the entire story from Calvin and Hobbes. Basically, Hamster Huey’s family gets caught in a bunch of goo (including his dad Hamster Herman), but Hamster Huey does the Happy Hamster Hop to make it go away.
Those are the two that I wrote by myself. Here’s some that I dictated to my parents:
Little Miss Muffet and Toe: I have no idea where this came from. Little Miss Muffet is sitting on her tuffet, and then Toe comes to see her. (Was Toe actually a giant toe? Was he a spider named Toe? The world may never know.) A scrawled last page gives the ending where Little Miss Muffet is very scared. I seem to remember writing that final part in kindergarten when I realized that the story didn’t have a proper ending.
The Story of Drawers: A little boy’s dresser drawers come alive. Notable for the supposedly scary lightning bolt drawn on the cover.
Cookie Monster Book: This was a book where I put all my random one-shot stories. In addition to various stories about Teletubbies, Sesame Street characters, and Blue’s Clues, there was a picture labeled “My House”. The picture consisted of a house with a speech bubble coming out that said, “GET DRESSED!”
I had such a weird mind at that age.
When I was little I put pennies in my mouth (they tasted good… XD ) and drank bathwater. I did both of these things rather frequently, and without any adverse effects, as far as I can remember.
I would put pennies in my mouth too. Not other coins so much. I liked the coppery/metallic taste. Later when I would purposely put a broken toy in my mouth and feel the electric charge from it (not enough to really be a “shock,” more like tingling) I discovered that electricity tasted like pennies as well.
I uh, did that second bit repeatedly. It tasted good in a weird way.
I drank bathwater, too–actually, I did that for a while after I stopped being little, too.
And I still get the urge to put my metal necklaces in my mouth… I love the texture…I ate sand. I liked how it was all hard against my teeth.
I ate raw spaghetti, for similar reasons.
I still eat raw spaghetti.
I thought that “guerilla warfare” meant fighting like a gorilla– beating your chest and all that.
When I was very small, I heard my parents say they were going to “Sears, Roebuck” (the longer name for the department store now usually called “Sears”) and assumed it was a store that sold robots. I found the idea scary but wanted to see them.
Between that, the comics, Prussiania, and wanting an X-15, you sound like you were a pretty cool little kid.
Don’t forget the “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovoncanoconiosis” song.
When I was in the fourth grade, I sat next to this kid who had brought a Nintendo DS or some sort of similar portable game system and was playing it under his desk. I did not know the names for any sort of game console, having been raised to believe that video games were strictly for “bad boys”, the type who went to the principal’s office every day. Naturally, I told the teacher (who had zero control over the class) that he was playing video games under the desk.
Me: *raises hand and waits for teacher to realize that somebody has their hand raised*
Teacher: AL, can you wait till the end of the lesson?
Me: But he has an Xbox under his desk! Can you ask him to stop? Because it’s distracting me…
Kid: It’s Not An Xbox!
Me: But it’s… a videogame!
Teacher: It’s not an Xbox. Now be quiet and let me finish my lesson.
I never figured out what exactly they were so angry at me for. Then I realized that Xboxes hooked up to a TV and were not the type you could play under your desk.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t like movies. Thus, I’ve never seen any of the “classic” Disney films.
I also cried and griped over things. A lot. In front of other people. This stopped in February or March of fourth grade, because Oma (my grandmother) died, and maybe I just ran out of tears or something.
I had this reoccurring nightmare about a stick man that would chase me down the stairs and I’d go slower and slower until I was stuck on the landing of the stairs in our (old) house.
I was one of the few kids in my class in elementary school who loved the class visits to the school library but had no idea what to do when we went to the computer lab.
JLynn’s first phrase was “Charge it” while handing a cashier a credit card in a mall. She also taught herself to read at age 2 with her mother’s copy of Romeo and Juliet.
Really? I’m sorry; I can’t tell whether you’re being serious or not.
Neither can I.
When I was in kindergarten, I did a science fair project called “All About Birds and Why They Are Wonderful.” It won first place for my grade level in my school and district. (Kindergarteners weren’t allowed to advance further than that). I won science fairs in the future, too, but none had such memorable titles as the first one.
I thought that men who didn’t have beards were biologically incapable of growing beards, because you were either born with the “grow beard” gene or you weren’t.
When I first watched “March of the Penguins”, I thought that they had actors dress up as penguins to be in the film.
When my brothers were little, we visited Atlantis Marine World Aquarium a lot, so one of them spent a while thinking “Marines” were people who worked at aquariums.
a few years ago, I wanted to be a GAPA.
Good choice! It’s very educational.
When I was a little kid, I liked to chomp on balloons. I also liked to pretend to be baby Jesus. My brother pretended to be my/his twin brother.
When I was a kid, I was afraid of, among other things:
My mother tells me that she could always tell when I was worrying about something because I would look up at the ceiling and wring my hands.
-the screen door (I thought the handle was covered by an invisible ball of spider webs, and that if I touched it, it would stick to my hand and we’d have to go to the hospital and have it surgically removed)
-my parents’ bathroom (I thought it would flood the house. I was fine with the other bathroom though)
-repairmen (for dishwashers, specifically. I don’t know why).
-small white cars (thanks to recurring nightmares about a scary man who drove one, which I still have occasionally)
-a certain park a block or so away from our house (I don’t know why, I just have memories of being VERY ANXIOUS about it for some reason)
…Yeah. I was a very worried child.
When I was little, I had a ton of irrational little superstitions/fears including:
– There was a certain room in my house that I refused to be in without both the door open and the light on. (It had no window, and I was convinced that if the door was closed, the light would be supernaturally turned off, and vice versa. There was nothing really sinister attached to this, I just didn’t want to be alone in the dark.)
– I never looked at the blinds over my windows for too long of a time. (If I stared at them for too long, I started seeing colors and patterns over them. It was sort of like looking into a light. For some reason, the patterns always seemed to end up forming a monster face, which I believed would come to life an attack me.)
– I was terrified of getting into/out of elevators. (Due to a recurring nightmare that I sincerely believe was a memory of something that actually happened. My mother denies it, and I haven’t had that nightmare since I was five or six.)
I sometimes feared things without knowing why, so I sort of subconsciously made up reasons. For instance, vacuums scared me (still do, to a lesser extent) because of my sound sensitivity, so I thought they were going to suck me up. (Horns effect, I guess?)
What was the nightmare about the elevator, if you don’t mind telling us?
When I was younger, the monster in all of my nightmares was the Count from Sesame Street. I remember most of them, but the one I remember most particularly was one where I walked downstairs to the playroom and his head was poking out between the gap in the curtains and I ran into the bathroom and he chased me yelling “Eat eat eat!” only it sounded like “Veat, veat, veat” with the Transylvanian accent. Apparently this fear is so ingrained in me that over the summer, when I was looking through a book about the makings of Sesame Street, the full page glossy picture of the Count scared me. I felt like he was about to jump out of the page.
-I used to be terrified of my house burning down and all my stuffed animals dying. It never really occurred to me that I could get hurt, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to carry them all out at once and my mom probably wouldn’t allow me to run back into a burning building three times.
-I hated the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen machine and those toilets in malls that flushed automatically. The first two were too loud and the latter always freaked me out (usually, I’d stand back, cover my ears to block out the noise and flush the toilet with my foot, but those just suddenly flushed without warning).
-This wasn’t a fear, but when I couldn’t fall asleep I’d spend unspecified amounts of time holding up my wrist in front of my window, and then focusing on the window behind my wrist with my eyes (you know, those optical illusion tricks) because then suddenly my wrist looked skinner, as if I could see through part of it. This fascinated me, and I figured that if I practiced enough, I could develop x-ray vision (I never did).
I hated self-flushing toilets too because as a kid I was shorter than the motion sensor so I was always afraid it would flush and then suck me down the pipes (I’ve had dreams to that effect). And they are way too loud.
YES! I had a phobia/general uneasiness about self-flushing toilets all the way through middle school! It started because of the loud noise (I didn’t like public toilets at all, especially ones that might startle me), and kind of stuck around.
Also, in first grade, I went to a tiny rural school, so when my mom told them I was scared of the loud fire alarm, they let me come in during the summer and see what it was like.
LBK – I was in an elevator with my (IRL) little sister. She was a toddler at the time, and in a stroller, so I couldn’t have been younger than four. My mother was outside the elevator talking to a grey-haired man. She was so caught up in her conversation that she didn’t get into the elevator before the door closed. That is what I remember as having actually happened. In the nightmare version, two details were added; my mother looked straight at me as the doors closed, and as soon as they closed, the elevator immediately started to move.
bookgirl and Kitty – I also had a fearful superstition regarding toilets, but it was much more ridiculous.
It’s funny how your ideas of what you want to be ‘when you grow up’ change so much. I remember when I was much younger wanting to be a marine biologist for a while, and at one point an astronomer.
Right now I don’t know exactly what I want as a career, but what I’m hoping to study at uni is very different from either marine biology or astronomy (although I continue to find both very interesting).
What are some of your past dream careers that may or may not have now changed?
When I was in preschool, a paleontologist came to the school and we got to go outside and dig for some dinosaur bones in the sandbox. I then developed an obsession with become a paleontologist, but partially succumbed to peer pressure and decided I wanted to be a paleontologist by day and a pop star by night.
I was a bit of an oddball.
Not by MuseBlog standards.
I have a similar story. When I was six, my dad gave me a book about dinosaurs and I decided I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then in eighth grade (by which point I was no longer a little kid, but whatever), I did a research project on dung beetles that required me to interview an entomologist. I actually ended up talking to the chairman of the entomology department at the California Academy of Sciences, and I saw the specimen vault. I teetered back and forth between entomology and paleontology for a year, but finally settled on entomology.
It helped that when I was in elementary school, one of my hobbies was to catch crane flies in clear plastic containers, sketch them, write down any observations I could think to make about them, and then set them free.
Have you considered paleoentomology?
My dad actually found a piece of a jawbone in our yard with the rototiller–we looked it up and it looked like it came from some sort of plesiousaur, judging by the teeth… I brought it to show-and-tell, but now I can’t find it at all…
Well, I’m an atheist now as opposed to pope… I wanted to become a cruise-ship captain at some point too, but that’s another story.
you know I’ve told that pope story to like 3 different people
it’s like the best childhood dream ever, I can’t get over it
just wanted you to know that
Every time I read that story, I just feel so, so sorry for younger you…
For those who may have missed it earlier, here’s the Pope story.
In kindergarten I was told to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I couldn’t decide, so I divided the page into a grid and drew all of them. I wanted to be a paleontologist, an archaeologist, a clown, a ballerina, an astronaut, an author, a teacher, and/or a mother.
Yeah, that was basically me in second grade. I finally decided in third grade that I wanted to be a conservation biologist, though, and interestingly enough, despite everyone’s expectations, I still haven’t changed my mind. If anything, I’ve become even more enthusiastic about it.
That was an excellent solution.
Back in Pre-K, I wanted to be a mountain climber, I have no idea how I even knew that was something people did back then or why I wanted to do it, but I told the teacher that when she asked what I wanted to be. Of course, I don’t like heights, so it would have been a terrible job for me.
Later, I wanted to be a marine biologist and study dolphins and whales, or a terrestrial wildlife biologist and study lions and tigers. (But not bears, I was never interested in bears.) While I don’t want to do this anymore, I did fulfill my accompanying childhood dream of becoming scuba certified.
I had princess, paleontologist, and detective/secret agent phases like I think everyone does. I also had very brief periods where I wanted to be a Rockette, a cryptid/alien hunter, and an Olympic athlete, but I think that wanting to be SOME kind of scientist has been the constant for the majority of my life.
Oh, and funnily enough, although I wanted to be an astronomer for a while in Elementary School, I never thought about being an astronaut until much more recently– when I was little, I just automatically considered it beyond my capabilities.
When I was 4 I wanted to be Ringo Starr.
When I was very young, I wanted to be a basketball player!
As for now, I still don’t know what I want to be…
I actually once wrote a poem on the subject.
This is actually from a year ago.
When I was six, an astronaut was what I wanted to be
When I learned more I decided that space was not for me
I later said that medicine would be my field of study
But I have an aversion for all things gorey and bloody.
My heart was set, in fourth grade, on the lifestyle of an actor
I didn’t know my lack of skill could be a deciding factor.
Fifth grade brought a desire to make paintings and write a book
But the success rate’s very low; this idea never took.
By sixth grade my noveling aspirations didn’t stop, they grew
But I knew engineering was the thing I wanted to do.
In seventh grade I had a passion for sax and trombone
I also started doubling, learning flute and baritone
But engineering, I was sure, would be my true carreer-
I knew it. But in the eighth grade, my mind began to veer.
See, science requires math and algebra, which I do hate
But it had never been much of a problem, until late
I began to loathe the numbers with a burning passion
I had never hated anything in quite this fashion
With this in mind I then began to reconsider science
Dedcided music was my life and ditched math in defiance
However I know that I’d be more use to the world in the lab
Though playing the sax and writing books seems so much less drab
I’m indecisive now; I wish I could make up my mind
That math didn’t hate me. Can the numbers be more kind?
((This is a bit outdated, so I’ll add some more lines.))
In high school reality hit me hard and I then realized
Being a music major, for me, would not be a choice that was wise.
I wondered what life wanted me to do: my path seemed so unclear.
Surely there were options besides musician and engineer.
I looked into biology, politics, and psychology
But then I realized I would enjoy epidemiology.
I can remember wanting to be a marine biologist, an archeologist, a teacher, a concert violinist, an architect, a figure-skater, a linguist, and a long-distance runner (which in hindsight I find hilarious). Oddly enough, my mother says that when I was four, I decided that I wanted to be a journalist; I don’t recall this, but it’s what I definitely want to do now.
Out of all of those, I think architecture and journalism were the only two I had any talent in, but I definitely don’t have enough patience to be an architect. My concern with archeology was that, being clumsy, I would damage the artifacts I was trying to collect.
I’ve been pretty wishy-washy about the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up” question for as long as I can remember. The only career I remember announcing was that when I turned 14 I was going to sail on the ships at Jamestown. Which kind of happened, I ended up interpreting on them instead, and didn’t actually run away to sea for another 3 years.
I guess I wanted to be an actor too (and still kind of fantasize about that sometimes, and have been involved in theater here at school), and a touring musician, which might happen, but ehh. I’m not sure when I first thought it would be cool to work in museums, but it’s kind of stuck I guess, so I think I’ll head in that general direction for now.
I definitely wanted to be an astronomer (or something space-related, anything, really) a couple years ago, but knew that it was beyond my feeble math abilities. I also wanted to be a cultural anthropologist.
I’ve also always thought it would be really awesome to be an architect or graphic designer. Or a photographer, or an artist if I had the skills for it. I’ve also thought about joining the Peace Corps or something.
Most of these have been things I just think are really interesting and have wondered what it would be like to immerse myself in them, not actual career plans.
I have a feeling I still won’t know what I want to do as a grown up when I’m retirement age.
I’ve not idea what I’ll actually end up doing, but hopefully it’ll be exciting.
Also I’ve mostly given up on getting taller when I grow up, but that used to be an answer I would give to people because I didn’t know what job I wanted.
I thought of two topics I should share stories about here, but I’m kind of pressed for time, so it would be easier to do them separately. So which one do you guys want to hear first– the metal detector stories or the flying saucer stories?
It’s a cruel choice, but I’d have to go with flying saucers.
It just occurred to me that we could use the pies and squids for A-vs.-B polling, e.g., pies for metal detector, squids for flying saucer.
I think I remember something like that taking hold on the polling thread a while back.
The thing is, I’d prefer the flying saucers, but I pied Kai’s comment already before you posted that.
Okay, so the flying saucers have it…
When I was younger, I went through a lot of phases of being intensely interested in something for a few months and then dropping interest in it suddenly. One of these phases, when I was around 8 or 9, was flying saucers and Little Green Men and that sort of thing. I read a lot of children’s library books about the subject, although I don’t remember how deeply I believed any of it (certainly not very deeply after the second story here).
Anyway, at about the same time, the first airstrikes of the Afghanistan War were occurring, and at one point I was watching the news with my mom and they showed a photo of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. It’s a very unusual-looking plane, so people reported UFOs when it was being tested and thus it was in the books I had been reading. So I very cheerfully announced to my mother “That’s the plane that was in my UFO book!” I don’t remember how she responded, but it probably was amusing.
Also at the same time, although I can’t remember if it was before or after that incident, I happened to be reading in my room one night. For some reason, I looked up and at the window and saw a disk of yellow light in the sky over our yard!
Naturally, my thoughts were something like “HOLY CAKE ITS A REAL FLYING SAUCER OH MY KOKO EXCITING THINGS NEVER HAPPEN TO ME HOW CAN THIS BE?”
I ran up to the window to get a better look– and the disk disappeared! I moved around, trying to figure out what had happened, and part of it reappeared. Wait…
I tried moving around some more and waving my hands in front of the window, and sure enough, the disk was obscured just as I expected. I looked back at my room to confirm it– the disk of light had been the reflection of my desk lamp.
I hope I had the maturity to laugh at myself after this, instead of feeling embarrassed.
You and I are a lot alike.
I was very interested in outer space around that age too! (But still, maybe it was because my favorite cartoon character at the time was Marvin the Martian…)
I am still very interested in outer space… I just don’t find flying saucers interesting anymore.
Oh hey, I never told the metal detector story, did I? Well, here goes… I wanted a metal detector for a long time when I was little, because, you know, it seemed cool to be able to find nails and coins and who knows what else buried in the ground, and all of the commercials always made it sound like it was really easy to find amazing things. I finally got one for Christmas when I was in Middle School, and I used it in some local yards and parks and the yard of my aunt’s 110-year-old house. I mostly found coins and a few screws and nails, and one rusty paperclip, but at my aunt’s house, I found a belt buckle, which I was really proud of.
I put all of the objects I found in plastic bags and wrote down where I’d found them on the bags in marker (as an archaeology major, I now know I could have done more in terms of documentation, but all things considered, it was pretty good for a 13-year-old), and I liked showing them to people who came to visit, but everyone always said the same thing: “Have you tried using it at the beach? You should try using your metal detector at the beach.”
So I finally got the chance to take it along when we went to the beach one day. I went back and forth very slowly, like I’d practiced, all up and down the beach, but I didn’t hear a beep. Just when I was about to give up, I finally heard a beep and started to dig. I found a small dark sphere, about the size of a tennis ball. I couldn’t tell what it was or what it was made out of, but it looked dirty, so I went to wash it in the water and then showed it to my mom.
“Ew, Kai, throw that away. It’s somebody’s used tin foil that they wrapped food up in and then balled up when they were done.”
So I went and threw the tin foil ball in the trash. And after that, metal detecting at the beach never had very much appeal for me.
Kai – Your metal detector story is pretty cool, even with the somewhat depressing discovery on the beach. It seems you were always meant to be an archaeologist!
Actually, it kind of reminds me of how I would catch crane flies in clear plastic cups when I was little, sketch them, and write observations. As an undergraduate with a declared entomology major, I look back on that with a laugh at how incomplete my notes were.
Did anyone else think “bankruptcy” had something to do with bank robbery because “bankrupt” sounded like “bank robbed”? I thought it meant having no money because the bank you’d stored your money in had been robbed.
Once when I was little I wanted to make a meal for my parents. So I opened a can of spaghetti sauce and a can of pineapple slices. I poured the sauce into our biggest bowl and floated the pineapple in it.
I like to think I’ve gotten marginally better at cooking since them.
I’m just impressed that you knew how to operate a can opener.
I’m impressed and slightly worried your parents LET you operate a can opener.
That’s not an insult to ZNZ, it’s just that I remember never being allowed to touch can openers as a kid because of the potential to be badly hurt by the moving parts, and how it was probably for the better because of how clumsy my brothers and I were when we were little.
When one of my brothers was little, he asked our mom if burglars were real or just in TV shows.
I used to think circuses weren’t real.
I thought they just didn’t exist anymore.
When I was a little kid, a circus came to town (oh god that song is in my head now) and i won a ride on an elephant. And my sister got the consolation of mom either purchasing her a ride, or a photo op with a giant boa constrictor. She chose the boa constrictor.
Or maybe it was she won a photo op with the snake and I got the elephant ride as consolation. I’m not really sure. I just know dad flipped when he saw the pics of my sis with the snake. ((He’s afraid of snakes))
I remember when I was really little (like, about 4 to 5 years old, or something), I would think my life was a movie, and every time I had a birthday, a new series would begin. The movie of my life was watched by these three, three-eyed, green-skinned alien creatures, who closely resembled my dad, my mom, and myself, and lived in a parallel version of our living room.
I remember when a ‘series’ would begin, I would give a name to the new ‘episode’. “Katherine Circus” was one I vividly remember me giving the intro to, with the oven – which I could clearly see my reflection in – as the television screen I was broadcasting to.
I also took frequent commercial breaks, advertising things as my mom’s shoes. A few of my stuffed animals were for ‘sale’, among others I cannot yet recall.
This went on until my 6th birthday. That was when the series was ended, as the ‘dad’ alien was too busy with working his chef job (my dad was working as a chef at the time), the ‘mom’ alien was too busy sewing and working her garden (which were frequently things I found my mom doing) and the ‘kid’ alien died (…). So there was nobody to watch the series, and it was taken off of television.
Or, I grew out of it, but that’s the boring answer.
When I was about eleven, my family went on a trip to Nevada. We were going to see snow and before leaving, I promised my friends that I would bring snow back for them because they’d never seen it before. So we went to the mountains and freaked out (the people who lived there were looking at us like we were crazy. And you would too, if you saw three people playing in a pile of snow in the parking lot outside a small shop) and I emptied a water bottle and filled it up with snow.
We were leaving the next day, so overnight my mom put the bottle of snow water into our hotel’s refrigerator. By morning, the water had melted and formed into ice. We went to the airport and we were going through TSA security and the woman there took out some juice boxes my mom had brought along for me, yet she let me keep an unlabeled plastic bottle filled with half-solid, half-melted clear liquid that I claimed was snow.
Oh, the irony. Everyone on that flight was lucky it WAS snow and not poison or something.
They took away your juice boxes? Wasn’t this before the 3oz rule? Did your friends like the ice water?
Yep. If the 3 oz rule went into effect after early 2011, then yes. And I don’t really remember. I think I brought it to school and was really excited about it, but I can’t recall what their reactions were. I do know I was sad when I finally had to get rid of my snow water, though.
No, pretty sure the 3 oz rule went into affect quite awhile before that. *googles* 2006, it looks like. I think oxlin probably thought you were older–old enough that when you were a “little kid” it would have predated 2006.
I remember when I was a little kid, you were allowed as many liquids as you wanted on the airplane, you didn’t have to take shoes off at security, you could check 2 bags free of charge, non-flying friends/relatives could accompany you to the gate to see you off, you got free (albeit terrible) meals on flights that occurred at meal times, and they had phones in the backs of almost all the seats on many/most aircraft.
Of course, it’s been over a decade since I could really probably be considered a “little kid”. Depending on what age people consider as little, I guess.
I’m pretty sure it went into effect one of the summers I was at Spanish camp so either 2004 or 2006. I remember everyone getting confused and the counselors having to explain it in English. (It happened partway through either a 2 week or 4 week session and so I suppose some unlucky campers had to toss out their shampoo!) I guess I date myself by thinking of the phrase “when I was a little kid” to always apply pre-3oz rule.
In response to both of you- Oh wow! Yeah, no. I’m too young to have really remembered any of that. If it makes you feel any better, I’m almost fifteen…? *weak shrug*
When I was little I was dead-set on becoming a man when I grew up. The only reason was that I wanted to know what growing a beard felt like.
I found a thread like this on another site, which reminded me that I never told any of the stories about being afraid of things hinted at in my main post years ago…
So, as I mentioned above a few times, around age 8 or 9, I had a “001.9 reader” phase where I would read all of the books from that section of the children’s room of our local library. 001.9, as I mentioned on the main thread, is the Dewey Decimal System code for “Controversial Knowledge”, i.e. UFOs and little green men and psychic powers and monsters and people disappearing into thin air and that sort of thing. And of course, these books were written in a way that treated the subjects as absolutely real, which was exactly what an 8-year-old with an overactive imagination did not need…
I ended up afraid that there was a yeti in the hallway outside my bedroom and that if I didn’t run as fast as I could from the top of the stairs into my room and slam the door, it would grab me. (One of the books had this really scary sketch of a yeti on the cover and in the book itself, there had been a story about a girl getting chased by a yeti with an absolutely horrific illustration of THAT… you know, for 8-year-olds!)
Once I got into my room, I couldn’t be too close to the door or it might break in and get me. But I couldn’t sit too close to the closet, either, because there were ghosts in there because Disney Adventures had run that article on “real” haunted places in their Halloween issue with illustrations, and of course by 8-year-old logic those ghosts could somehow then come out of the magazine and haunt my closet.
So I would sit on my bed an equal distance from the closet and the hallway door so that neither the ghosts nor the yeti could hurt me.
Eventually that stopped, but I still think find things about Bigfoot and the yeti caking SCARY even though I don’t think they really exist.
Of course, you forgot that you also can’t turn your back to either the door or closet for more than two seconds, otherwise your heart and breathing rate will skyrocket and you have to turn around really fast to make sure there isn’t some werewolf/weeping angel RIGHT BEHIND YOU
(This actually still happens to me all the time. Can I even say that I’m not still a “little kid” anymore?)
Haha, you described my childhood to a T. Except for me, it was reading too many RL Stine books (yay goosebumps and fear street OMG the nightmares) and short horror stories. I was a very nightmare prone child, my parents banned me from watching horror movies most of my child hood as a result, but they never realized that the books I liked to read were just as bad.
And it wasn’t restricted to actual nightmares, no, it was paranoia much like yours during the daytime (but especially when awake at night). I was petrified of the basement, I was convinced the weird discolored paint area on the unfinished walls in the basement were monsters, if I had to go down there for osmething, I’d bolt back up the stairs as fast as possible, heart racing and panting. Especially if it was after dark, or if my parents weren’t nearby.
And monsters under the bed–I’d have to sit near the edge of my bed, debating for a long, long time before I convinced myself that, yes, I really did have to use the bathroom bad enough to brave dangling my feet down to the floor where the monsters could get me (even though there was SO MUCH stuff under my bed). I would bolt to the bathroom, and then lunge at my bed from the door, to try and avoid any chance of my feet getting near the under bed area.
For the longest time as a child, I was terrified of the under sink area in our kitchen, because of an RL Stine book about an evil sponge that lived under the kitchen sink, so I was terrified of our dish washing sponge for weeks and all other sponges, so basically every cabinet under a sink, anywhere. I remember a sink in the back room at the library at the public elementary I was in at that time (I must ahve been in kindergarten), and I was terrified of that sink for weeks, b/c of the cabinet and sponge underneath. It was awful.
Not too mention I was just afraid of the public restrooms in general at that school, b/c the toilets made terrifying noises when you flushed them. *shudder*
And I say as a child……With the exception of the sponge/cabinet thing and toilet thing, these are not a thing of the past. Or certainly not early childhood. These are a well into my early 20s, and still on occasion as recently as 24 (not so much in the last month since turning 25, but that’s just because it comes and goes).
I’ve just added newer things, too. Like being terrified of the (human) monsters under my car at night when I walk to it, convinced someone is lurking in wait, going to grab my ankle when I go to get in–I unlock it, lunge in, and slam the door and lock it as fast as possible, and then i momentarily freak that someone might have gotten in my back seat at somepoint and be waiting. *shudder*
and when I was parking over a storm drain on one of my externships, b/c that’s where an available parking spot was, I was petrified b/c I just knew someone (someTHING, you know, something along the line of Stephen King’s IT that likes to hang out in storm drains…..) was going to come surging out fo that storm drain and abduct me, or use it to easily hide under my car.
And cooking dinner in my apt kitchen, where my back is to my roommate’s door? When she’s not home, I’m convinced that any number of things oculd be lurking in her room, waiting to pounce when I’m distracted with cooking.
Aaaaaand, there we go freaking myself out yay. So anyway. Yeah. I’m still that terrified little child you describe.