Things that you used to do as a child repetitively and now think "WTF?!"

what to do with squares of foil from sweets and biscuits:

put a forefinger lightly in the middle of it to almost prevent it moving. use the other forefinger to move the outside round like a roundabout, pressing just enough in the middle to create a swirl like a satelite picture of a hurricane. Work of art. Impossible to throw away. even when you have 100's of them.

Yes to the biscuit wrapper flatteners. Kids today are denied the pleasure of biscuits wrapped in a bit of foil stuck to some greaseproof paper. I spent hours carefully peeling the two apart and derived huge satisfaction from getting them apart in one piece. Then I'd completely flatten the foil and wonder what to do with the result.

I do still occasionally attempt to open a packet of biscuits without tearing the wrapper but in this age of heat sealed plastic it's a lot harder than it used to be.

But you raw sausage and bacon eaters - you're all freaks!

Bread balls, bogies, raw pastry, skin, scabs, orange peel, apple cores, all delicious.

I wish I'd had a horse running beside the car; I had a metal boom thing sticking out the side of the car knocking all the lamp posts and telegraph poles over. I had to actively lift it to avoid flattening everything. Drove me bananas.

Talking of bananas, DSis and I used to peel off the stickers from bananas, put them on our noses, and sing 'banana skin nose, banana skin nose, DSis has got a banana skin nose' every time we ate a banana.

Had to be the last person at the table to use my knife. Could be quite limiting!

Writing on walls with grasshoppers

Multicoloured pasta was the cast and audience of a show. Green pasta was the male cast, red the female cast and plain the audience. They had to be eaten in order of appearance, audience last.

I used to apologise to all ski lifts and bicycles that had to carry me and had to chat to them the whole time I was on them, to be polite (self esteem issues)

And rather than a narrator, I had an observer living in my head and looking out from my eyes, and I would purposely go and look at road signs, letters etc so they would know where they were

Emoticon fail

I would record myself answering scripted questions (as a famous celebrity, shit American accent and everything) on my little tape recorder.

Then I would be Wogan and ask these interesting questions to the tape recorder, then press play, pause etc.

I'd honestly sit there with a pen and a clipboard and raise my woganny eyebrows at the insightful and fascinating answers I would give.

I wasn't even an only child [bludh]

For about two year when I was 4 I used to hide my twice-daily cod liver oil tablets down the side of the sofa. (Hmmm does this out my mother as being slatternly?!) cue moving day when I was 6, the removal men took the sofa apart, and HUNDREDS of these tablets poured out into the living room. Was quite impressive to watch actually. As I imagine was the shouting I received 5 mins later

I also used to take my mothers expensive candles (the ones that were so for best they were never lit) and lie them sideways on the radiator when the heating was on. I used to love watching the wax melt and drip all down the radiator. Denied all knowledge when confronted naturally

Ooh so many!

Chewing damp flannels
Painting hands with glue then peeling it off
Poking pins through the skin of fingers to make little tunnels
Writing words in the air with a pointing index finger - still do that one a bit!
Making potions from flower buds & sugar
Eating Horlicks powder straight from the jar then shaking it to fluff it up so Mum didn't realise how much had gone - my Horlicks now so don't have to shake it

My brother ate the Good Boy chocolate dog treats

Doesn't still deliberately paint both hands with PVA glue while crafting with the toddler, oh no..

OMG I wasn't the only sticker sniffer. Panini stickers were the only ones worth sniffing. They still smelt of joy and happiness and rainbows when my 15yo DD was about 7yo, but now they don't smell like that.

They smell of hospitals and disappointment...

I ate the bath sponge!

I used to:

hide my Christening bangle, or lego or love letters to the Bionic man under the stair carpet nearly every day - every time my mother hoovered she would go mad.

Eat the dogs Bob Martin choc drops

Drink "ice magic" out of the bottle

Make jam sandwiches, lick the knife and put it back in the cutlery drawer after school (my brother used to do this too, possibly the same knife eww)

Lie under my bed or behind the sofa smelling the gloss paint heating on the radiator pipes.

I went through a phase of filling the toilet in the outhouse full of paper and setting fire to it, and flushing the chain to put it out. Until the heat cracked the bowl.

Thank you, Hazelbrowneyes for making me feel less weird for drinking vinegar.

(Might be slightly here)

I STILL tuck my duvet under my toes. Though this has got far worse since lying down in bed only to find a spider lying next to my pillow lifting its leg and fucking waving at me.

Also used to make 'perfume' in old milk bottles out of tap water and my neighbour's rose petals.

And the 'bung everything in the bathroom in the sink to make a potion' one.

(Still not here)

My friend and I used to collect up the dried grass cuttings from the public verge outside the houses on our street, build it into what looked like a bloody ostrich nest, and pretend to be Mummy birds sitting warming their eggs. Bloody weirdo's we were!

It only stopped when I sat down in my nest one day, and got a shard of glass embedded in my knee.

I used to eat dried spaghetti, but only in geography lessons, until the start of year 9, when I moved to a new school that combined Geography with History and RE and called it Humanities. It tasted wrong in any other lesson.

I used to discard the crusts of my bread, and pick off bits of bread, and squash them till they were flat before eating them. I still do that now, when I have been ill...

I also used to mix squash with milk. Cheap, Happy Shopper blackcurrant squash. With milk. Yet when my DC's went through a phase of doing the exact same thing, it turned my stomach.

I used to have fountain pen eating contests with my classmates (we were made to write in proper fountain pens at both Primary and Secondary). The first to eat down to the cartridge would win. There were 4/5 of us that used to do it. Right up to about age 13. And yes, we WERE actually eating the plastic fountain pens.

(No, I'm not really here, I'm just a figment of your feverish flashbacks...)

Do you remember how your mum would tell you off for chewing your hair because it would make a hair ball in your intestines? Totally true it seems. My friend is a hospital pathologist and a while ago they had a hair ball taken from a woman's intestines arrive in the lab. She had chewed her hair into adulthood and it ended up as a ball!

This thread is brilliant - kids are so fricken weird!

I had a bogey 'factory' on the wall next to my bed. I'd wipe a bogey on the wall each night then pick one dried one off and let it fall onto the floor, where I imagined a conveyor belt took it away somewhere.

I also had this strange thing where both sides of my body had to be exactly the same. It stemmed from my mum, who was a gym manager telling me that you have to exercise both sides equally, but it got totally out of hand with me. So if I whacked one ankle on a chair leg, I had to do exactly the same to the other ankle, or if something cold touched the back of one hand, I had to replicate the sensation on the other hand, etc.

Went on doing it for years and still sometimes have to fight the urge now.

I used to bite most things until about last year I was older - it was another way of finding out what they were 'like'.

Another flannel sucking bedspread picker here - and my friend and I used to eat Pritt sticks. We did love a Pritt stick.

I also had an odd interlude of biting drinking glasses - I think I only did it 4 or 5 times before my mother convinced me it wasn't the best idea.

At my childminders I used to go into the kitchen and make a pile of salt in my hand, cover it with vinegar and eat it. No idea how I came away without massive hypertension, I do still like loads of S&V on my chips but that was a bit beyond normal.

Dh ate rubber bands and hot water bottles. MIL got rid of her leather suite when he tried to chomp on that.

Oh yes I gave myself lovebites too

We used to wipe our dirty hands on the dog, rather than wash them I'm still a minger.