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

Oh yes a few more....

Drink the vinegar out of the pickled onion jar

Tomato soup - sliced white bread. Peel the crusts off dunk and eat. Tear remaining bread into small bits the squash and roll into solid balls, drop in soup, eat.

Eat dry weetabix with butter and marmelade on

Wind hair round fingers then run between my lips. Everyone thought i was sucking it but i wasn't.

Apparently you shouldn't drink bathroom water as dead rats could be floating in the tank......

I'm another one who had to be properly wrapped in quilt - used to roll back and forth to get it wrapped, tuck it under feet and grasp with hands under my chin.

My brother would eat the dog treats that looked like little wedges of cheese.

I used to rip leaves into dinosaur shapes.
I used to rip the corners of pages and eat them.
I used to eat raw bacon.

On car journeys I would imagine a horse galloping along beside us, keeping up. Clearing hedges, etc in the fields by the roadside.

In my head I'd draw a line between the corners of objects, or four wheels on a car. To make a square. I'd join the dots, one, two, three, four. And then I'd have to reverse it to take the line off the object.

I used to put my dad's spare specs on then jump off the arm of the chair. The ground would rush towards me and I'd pretend I was landing after a parachute jump.

Some strange things on this thread! The idea of sucking a flannel goes right through me.

I used to put individual pieces of sherbet or sugar in my hair them pretend they were nits so I could find them and squish them.

And I dip my toast in my coffee

Clearly I am the only kid of the 70s that didn't sew my fingers! However I had long and strong finger nails and I would pierce them with pins and attach earrings to them as I wasn't allowed pierced ears.
My mother was very strict and I wasn't allowed sweets. However I used to go to a youth club once a week. There was a tuck shop there and I would buy a packet of m&ms. I'd smuggle them home and then line them up on the radiator so the chocolate would melt.

I had to make it back to bed before the toilet stopped flushing or the ghost would come out of the airing cupboard.

Now this is gross.

I used to ask my mum if I could pick out the dandruff/ dry skin eczema stuff on her scalp by scratching it with my nails.

I still love picking at people though. She doesn't suffer with it now but darn it hurt trying not to pick my kids cradle crap off.

I had/have OCD. I was and still am just one big quirk.

Oh god i have a few:

Making a small hole in a bag of crisps, squashing them into tiny bits and then eating them with a spoon while chewing chewing gum.

Inused to wonder my crisp eating was so noisy but my siblings could do it silently.

Count the steps as i walked

I used to walk under a large road sign and had to close my eyes, cross my fingers and count to three so bad stuff didn't happen.

HAD to start the stairs with my right foot.

Eat uncooked spaghetti. A lot. And raw potatos when mum was making chips. And frozen peas. And have a spoonful of black treacle when she ws baking (eeeww!)

Get under my quilt and try to fltten myself into the bed and wait til my parents realised i was 'lost'

Eat paper cake cases - so mum made fairy cakes, eat the cake then chew and suck on the case.

Yes also to sucking the bathwater out of the flannel.

Dear god i'm sure there are more.

Oh yes lay in bed and do leg movements kind of wiggling and tensing, over and over.

ROFL @ the tricycle hedgehog cemetery

Rocking back and forth in bed - quite exuberantly - for up to half an hour before going to sleep. Called it 'rolling'. My family would yell up at me to 'stop rolling' if the bed was creaking too much.

Thought I was the star of my own film (think The Truman Show) for about two years. Honestly, I truly truly did. Thought everyone was looking at me and admiring me!

Viscounts were good for that.

Have we had smoothing out foil chocolate wrappers yet? Tunnocks tea cakes were the best. KitKat also good.

Another flannel-sucking book-eater here.

And dog biscuits. I used to love ... what were they called? Spiller's Shapes? With the triangles and circles and bones? I refused to eat breakfast but I would steal a few of these to eat every morning at school. Sneaky crunch crunch crunch at the back of the class.

And pencils. I used to eat wooden pencils constantly. Not the lead though, that would be silly.

Just remembered another one. When we had Shepherd's Pie for tea, I'd re-arrange everything into a farming landscape with mash mountains, mince fields, carrot farmhouses, pea fields with mash sheep in them, gravy rivers - every one was a work of art. Of course, the dinner was cold by the time I'd finished and eventually ate my creation. To this day, I really enjoy cold Shepherd's Pie. :)

At around 6 years old, I spent weeks being a dog. I walked on all fours, pretended to cock my leg on the furniture and even had an enamelled tin pie dish for my water bowl, that I would lap water from. I have no idea what my Mum thought of this - but I doubt she was surprised when I got my first dog in later life. lol

I used to put two pence pieces in my mouth. Disgusting to think how dirty they must have been. Did it in bed once, started choking, ran out the bedroom straight into my dad and vomited on his hand! Very proud.

My brother did the bogey behind the bed thing and he ate snails, the really tiny ones that stick to wire fences.

I used to rock back and forth. I did it so violently when I was wee I knocked the pram over. I remember doing it until I was about 12, it was a comfort thing.

It bothered my mother hugely, she read somewhere it was a sign of a disturbed child.

I used to love spreading a layer of copydex over my palm with the little red plastic spreader, letting it dry and peeling it off carefully which had to be in done in one piece.

As i grew up in the '60s/ 70's by the Thames, i used to regularly hear the flood sirens, they scared me witless, so i always kept a bag full of my favourite teddies/ clothes/ shoes in case we had to evacuate.

'Knock down ginger' why was it called that?? knocking on doors then running away..

I went downstairs at the wrong moment and saw that bit of Poltergeist where the doll pulls someone under the bed at the tender age of seven.

Cue me becoming terrified of my own doll but because I was too afraid to throw her out I kept her in a quality street tin in my wardrobe.

Then I was afraid that she would get out of the tin so I tied it shut with my dressing gown sash.

Then I became afraid that a chocolate tin and dressing gown cord would be no match for the supernatural devil doll. I hit upon the obvious solution. Every night at bed time I would steal my mother's hair mousse and squirt the foam all around the wardrobe door. Then I could sleep soundly.

No one ever noticed the sticky mess or (eventually) the peeling paint. My mum certainly never noticed the rate at which her mousse was vanishing.

We moved house when I was fourteen. The doll stayed in the wardrobe in her tied up tin and probably scared the bejeesus out of the new owners!

I used to steal a spoon of brown sugar every day after school. One day I figured if each sweetener was like a spoon of sugar a spoon of sweeteners would be even more lovely. I was very very wrong.

Ah yes, the nasal pleasures.

And also peeling off great quantities of sunburnt skin, especially when it had little holes for the hair follicles. And foot skin, yum.

And using the neighbour's guttering for air rifle practice with DB. Only found months later when he had a leak...quite what my DPs were lettung us play unsupervised with guns for though...

I was a dreadful nose-picker still am when no-one's looking and used to absent-mindedly watch TV while wiping my bogies on the underneath of one of my parents' armchairs. Till one evening they discovered what I had been up to. I don't know how or why. But I was dragged out of bed and made to clean the snot-encrusted underside of the chair with a wet cloth till it was bogey-free. So in future, I wiped my bogeys under the sofa, figuring they wouldn't think to check. And they never did!

My walk to school in the morning was in such a direction and at such a time that the morning sunlight shone across the road from the left (east) casting long shadows from everything. These shadows had to be jumped over. And that included the shadows cast by oncoming cars. So I would dance and caper along like a loon, avoiding these shadows (if a juggernaut came along, it was game over the shadow was too long for me to stay airborne as it passed). Then my cousin moved nearby and walked to school with me, and he started doing it too! Our walk was over a mile, we must have burned off loads of calories every day might try it now--

The converse of this game was played between me and my sister on night-time car journeys. The headlights of the oncoming cars were 'demons' and we had to duck at the last moment as they came toward us in order to avoid being caught by them. So we spent whole journeys bobbing up and down. Used to drive our parents mental, we never told them the rules we were following, so it must have just seemed that we'd gone out of our heads.

I used to eat book pages and loved licking match boxes -the bit you strike the match on.!
I had forgotten all about sewing my fingers...so addictive.

nomorecrumbs yes they were easy to push out - surprisingly, and i remember it being so sastifying as each one popped out. an added bonus was that we could spy on the neighbours :o

i remember we painted them after wards with nail varnish :S

mrsbucket LOL i cant believe i have found someone else that did such a random thing :o

Oh another one!

My mother used to have a frameless mirror balanced on the bench in the utility room. I would spend ages walking round the house holding this mirror and looking down into it, pretending I was walking on the ceiling.

Oh I've got loads! I was such a little weirdo.

I would rip apart my parents garden making 'outfits' out of leaves and petals for my sindy dolls.

I would sew my fingers.

I would make paper mache things out of loo roll and spit.

I would stick an earring stud between my two bottom teeth and pretend it was a piercing.

There was a jug in the bathroom used specifically for rinsing hair. Drinking cold water out of it in the middle of the night was particularly refreshing.

The best one though was back in the early 90's when the opening credits to TV shows was all soft music and serene smiles from the actors. Whenever I dashed down the stairs I would always pause at the bottom and do my best smiling at the camera and would then be on my merry way.