Strange things you used to enjoy doing as a child

[DiamondsInTheMud]

As im doing the housework, i remember how much i used to enjoy cleaning the toilet when i was little... Used to beg my mum to let me clean it, she didnt always let me, which im guessing was guilt as it shouldnt really be an enjoyable job??

Did anyone else find weird things enjoyable/a treat when you were little?

@Mammyloveswine did you used to try and climb over the door frames 😂

My bedroom window used to have a child lock on it so it would only open so far, but there was enough space for me to get my legs out of it, I used to love sitting on my windowsill dangling my legs out in the cool air. My parents would have gone ballistic if they had known.

I used to sit in the dark cupboard under the stairs to read newspapers and magazines.

I always hated eating my lunch at school, I would get very embarrassed about eating in front of other people. By the time I would get home my sandwiches would be completely squashed, and I was ravenous and would devour them. To this day, I still squash my sandwiches down until the bread is almost paste like, before eating them. It’s the only way they taste right.

Pulling out mums shoe collection to find the flat knee length boots to wear with my batman costume and launching myself round the living room using the sofa cushions as crash mats.

Big handful of raisins. Put them all into pairs. Eat the spare. Put the pairs into pairs. Eat the spare. Carry on until one pile is left!

As a young teen I would light a candle and melt some wax in a teaspoon over the flame then put it in my arm and pick it off when cold. Only when my parents were out.

I also did the pin on skin thing too.

I also had a phase when I was about 8 of using my mum's old typewriter and writing up a story about Pompeii. The same story. Many times.

Doing ballet moves in front of a door length mirror..never went to classes..mum didn’t take the hint

Washing clothes by hand in the sink...usually dad’s socks...one day I washed my hand knitted cardigan...and did my first felting...mum was furious

Colouring in. Loved it. Was very careful not to go over the lines.

'Whittling' - ie carving everything with a penknife, this included sticks, all my wax crayons (wax crayon chess set anyone ?)and random furniture in the house.

Sliding down the stairs on my tummy. Sliding down the stairs on our backs lying on top of each other ('doubles')

Me and my sister used to play 'don't fall in the sea' whereby we had to get round a room stepping from one piece of furniture to the next and not treading on the floor.

Yes to 'perfume' (mashed up rose and other flower petals in water) we would put it into little bottles then sit at the end of the drive and attempt to sell it to passers by. Very few takers.

Putting on 'shows' for my parents (mainly consisted of stuffing clothes up our jumpers to look like a huge bust, clothes down the back of our trousers to look like a huge bum and singing 'I'm a little Dutch Girl' - apologies to any Dutch readers - no idea where we got that one from !)

Seeing how long we could pull each other hair (not tug, just exert a downward pressure) the pullee would sit on a chair pony tail danglin over the back and the other sister would pull hair downwards, until neck bent right backwards and back arched, then we timed it to see how long the torture could be tolerated, then we swapped.

Looking over that we were quite strange children I think.

I once whittled a chair for a doll I had, not a toy doll just an ornament one. Pride of place.
Until ddog ate it.

Being thrilled if there was a downpour on a warm summers day, because I loved running around naked in the rain.
Spending hours rubbing various coloured rubbers so that you got those little bits that came off, and collecting same bits in a tin. I remember many happy wet break times with school friends building up this disintegrated multi coloured rubber collection. Wierd.

Ok this is really rank....I hate pickled onions texture-wise, but I love the taste, therefore I used to suck all the juices off em, and pop them back into the jar

-I used to collect lots of different things; erasers, keyrings, leaves, conkers etc. and keep them in little labelled trays/boxes.
-Also used to sometimes catch beetles and keep them in jars and was fascinated watching woodlice in the garden.
-Used to try and sneak downstairs or hide on the landing so I could earwig my parents conversations when I was supposed to be in bed.
-Tapping out rhymes on my fingers and counting them out in my head.

"Basting" - climbing up behind the sofa, over the top, and plopping down into the seat of it.

Another typewriter one: I noticed that full stops tended to emboss the paper and leave a bump you could feel on the other side, so I tried to use it to write Braille, having learned about it at school. Of course, I had to type the whole thing in back to front. But I didn't know any blind people to test it on!

I was regularly to be found sat on the toilet reading the phone book.

I still love to flick through one if I find one

Looking back I was a very odd child.

In the summer my parents used to build us a teepee out of bamboo canes and old curtains and blankets and it would stay out all summer. There was an old rug for the floor and I used to lie on it and roll over and over until I was co cocooned in the middle. Then when I felt I was in the verge of suffocating i would unroll myself.

When I was a bit older, about eight or nine, I used to have trouble sleeping. So I would rinse my nightie in cold water, put it back on and stand by the open window until I was freezing, then get back into bed and let myself warm back up. Even now when I can't sleep i throw the duvet off and get a bit cold.

I also liked sitting in wardrobes and under beds.

I also had Mandy and Bunty comics every week and I kept all the copies. One of my favourite activities was putting them in date order, sometimes separately and sometimes alternately.

My primary school didn't have homework but I was desperate to do some. So I'd make my mum tell my friends I was doing my homework and couldn't come out if they called round and would invent my own homework tasks. Saddo.

I was also obsessed with this one tiny baubel on the Christmas tree. I think it was the colour (a kind of metallic pink). I would just stare at it for hours. One year I took it off the tree and buried it in the garden (still not sure why to this day). So that was the end of that.

Eating Bonio dog biscuits with my friend next door in their garage.

Eating Custard Creams by eating the top part of the biscuit first then the cream then giving the bottom half to the dog.

Doing handstands against my bedroom wall ... until one fatal day I caught my foot in the chain of my cuckoo clock weights and came crashing down ripping the clock off the wall.

Worst part was having to explain to DF what I'd done so he could fix the hole in the wall and fix the clock back up

^ this was at the height of my gymnastics career aged 12. It never quite recovered after that...

When I was really small, I found several tins of custard powder in the bottom of the wardrobe in our spare room. I have no idea why it was there - Mum and Dad must have got a job lot from a factory shop or something and had nowhere else to store it. Why they would have wanted it is another mystery - we didn't even eat much custard. But I digress!

I used to love sitting there putting my hands in it and rubbing it between my fingers. It smelled so lovely, and it felt strange-but-amazing when I touched it, almost like feeling a squeak. In my defense, I must have been really small - that room became my younger brother's room when I was about 2.5, so I could only have been a toddler.

I didn't actually eat custard until I was in my 20s, probably because as a child I thought that made-up custard was so disappointing compared to the powder.

Podding peas - I probably ate more than I podded for mum!

Filing - mum & dad both very organised types who kept ALL paperwork (still do) and I was fascinated by how they stored them. When they felt I was old enough they let me put the paperwork in the right folders (there was one for instruction manuals, one for guarantees, one for utility bills etc) I loved it weird kid

Yes to Pva glue "skin" too.

Bro used to do the pins in loose skin thing until one time he was doing it and someone surprised him and he jumped n stabbed himself! Pratt! 😂😂

He also made us play Star Wars and made my sis be Han Solo as she couldn't do her hair in Leia donuts but I could 😂

He also made us all play superman - how there weren't more broken limbs than there were I don't know!

Mind you we made him play groom for all our pretend weddings which he hated or if we played hospitals we made him the porter (he hated this more 😂).

Buttmuncher - we must be about a decade older, for us it was krypton factor "assault courses" in the park, stopped for a while when we tied a scramble net too tight and neighbour kid got trapped & freaked out! So the parents banned it for a while.

Bipbopbee they're NOT opal fruits they don't taste the same.

Scraping moss out of the gaps between block paved areas with a stick. I did this at school and neighbours driveways!

Rose perfume
Mud pie cafe
Pretending to teach my soft toys and marking their exercise books
Washing and blow drying my dads hair and putting clips in it ( he must have been mad to let me do that bless him!)
Having gymkanas and netball competitions where I was all of the competitors
Climbing a tree and reading a book normally famous five
Lying in the top bunk of our caravan ( which never went anywhere other than the drive!) and reading whilst listening to the rain hammering on the roof
Making treasure maps with tea bags to make the paper brown and burning the edges on the gas ring!

Happy days!