What mildly childish things make you disproportionately happy?

[Nocti]

I just had some chocolate milk and it was ace Ridiculously so.

What slightly childish things make you really, really happy?

I also enjoy hiding, actually running away and hiding from my young teen kids.
Generally it's a spur of the moment mucking about thing but sometimes it's a I don't want to have to get up and find the thing that is right under your nose hide.

Also climbing trees

If I can combine hiding in a tree then I'm in heaven.

Jumping in puddles or piles of dry leaves

Chocolate milk

petting zoos

haribo

animal biscuits (cadburys)

getting a Mr Whippy ice cream from the van

Adverts that have talking animals in them.

Oh and making snowmen and doing snow angels when it snows!

@drownininplaymobil

Adverts that have talking animals in them.

yes! I love the meerkat adverts and remember being sad when Egg credit cards went bust as I loved the talking guinea pigs!

I forgot to add. the smell of play doh. and playing with it. I started a few years ago using playdoh as a mindfulness tool for my DBT therapy I was doing. And playing with and smelling that stuff is something I find I still I enjoy! My mum tried to make us cheap play dough as kids out of flour- I remember trying to tell ehr that it just wasn't the same- didn't smell the same for a start., texture way too goopy. So as an adult I refuse to settle for flour based substitutes. I will not deprive my inner child of the play doh she wants

popping bubblewrap. especially the big bubble one. I am finding it harder to get that kind these days. :(

Getting things with my name on , such as a mug.
Stationery- different coloured pens and also highlighters
party bags- when dc were young I would pinch sweets out of their party bags

Farts.

Shirley Hughes books and pretty, socks.

Oh yes snowmen! too

Here's a niche one: I used to get really excited seeing car reversing lights coming on, and even now I smile when I see it. From a young age I was fascinated by the various lights on cars, and I loved helping my dad test them, which he did once a month. In the 1980s, many older cars still did not have reversing lights, so it was rare to see them. There were bonus points if I saw reversing lights on a bus; this was incredibly rare.

@imstillbreathingbarely My mum had a book "1000 ways to amuse children", which I studied long after the ideas in it were appropriate for my age. It had recipes for home-made play-dough (spelt that way too); the best of which was "smooth and wonderful" which used a whole pot of cream of tartar, and advocated it as much nicer than shop-bought stuff. My mum never made it though.

I'm a church organist, which provides a whole host of opportunities for embracing my inner child. When I'm practising (not possible right now though), I often do it when there's nobody else in the church, playing as loudly as I can: it's great to have such a powerful instrument at my disposal. Sometimes I get so excited about what I'm playing that I then run around. I also enjoy working out music to children's songs, and playing them. I've been known to play music after church services that appeals to children, to see if any of them recognise it: sometimes they do.

@letsgomaths I have a bit of thing about car lights as well. When we used to go on the motorway at night, I got ever so excited if an oncoming car had orange headlights rather than the standard white/yellow. And I still feel strangely soothed by the brakelights of a car in front. And I love bicycle reflectors too, the way they glow.

@mudskippa Glad to meet a fellow lover of car lights! On car journeys I wondered what it would be like if cars had other colours: violet, green... it's only now that lorries sometimes have little multicoloured lights on the front. I also knew by heart the colours of cats' eyes on motorways: red on left, amber on right, white between the lanes. Best of all were the green ones on slip roads, as they were less usual.

When I became a driving instructor later, I found it was hard work educating people on these colours, nobody liked them as much as I did. There's also a statistic that if you ask people what colour reversing lights are, 90% of them say... red.

@letsgomaths Oh yes, cats' eyes as well! I loved the green ones :)

Lots of great ideas on here!

I'm making my lists... pandemic & post pandemic!

I'm looking forward to Autumn, I LOVE Autumn

But I love summer too. I want to go and paddle at the beach! But a nice beach not a crowded 'seaside!' with millions of people!

Pictures of Sponge bob
Smiley stickers
Running out to the ice cream van

@FTMF30

Sticking my fingers up (once they've turned their backs) or mouthing "fuck off" or "dickhead" after conversations with people I don't like. Not mildly childish but VERY childish.

Not childish at all!

Bananas on toast. Boiled egg and soldiers.

Lego
Beans and mini sausages on Toast
Moomin books
Clumps

Not clumps ....FLUMPS

I've just had a two finger Kit-Kat. The ones that still come in sliver paper.

And yes I ran my thumb nail down the middle.it is compulsory, right?

Oh, playing Chubby Bunnies!

The game where you have to put a marshmallow into your mouth, one at a time, say Chubby Bunnies and the winner is the one with the most marshmallows stuffed in their cheeks and still able to talk!

I always win that one against my (adult) kids. I have cheek pouches...

Googly eyes stuck onto inanimate objects to make them look like faces. Makes me giggle every time - even when it's ones I've seen before.

I’ve got edible eyeball stickers (From Waitrose). It amuses me to hand over a slice of cake with eyes. I put them in fruit in the fruit bowl too.