To ask what weird/stupid stuff you did as a kid

[Bantameggs]

I think I was a bit of a strange child although maybe I’m not the only one.

One of my favourite things to do aged about 5/6 was to steal a bar of soap and some scissors, find a corner to hide in and shave wafer thin slices of soap off until there was nothing but a big pile of soap flakes. I got into trouble every time but it didn’t stop me.

Our family car had two rear facing seats at the back and if I was sitting there I used sit dead still and make blank-faced unblinking eye contact with the people behind for as long as possible. I think I managed it for about an hour once.

Once aged about 10 I set out to drink as much water as possible just to see how much I could drink. I managed a few litres (I’m aware now that I could have killed myself)

I brought a large dehydrated dead fish I’d found on the beach to show and tell at school when I was 7. Unfortunately it was the last day before the summer holidays and I accidentally left it behind. I think they had to get someone to come in in the end to deal with the terrible smell.

When I was 12 I coloured my entire face in with bright pink lipstick. It took about two days to get rid of completely.

Was anyone else a little weirdo? I think I’m pretty normal now btw!

fully believed that all my stuffed toys "woke up" at night and had their own lives.

I used to imagine them all being awake and active when I was asleep and I would be half in love with the idea of waking up to find that they had come to life and half afraid that they might not like me. I had read an awful lot of Enid Blyton so that's my excuse. Which lead to my nocturnal escapades:

I used to get up in the middle of the night and creep about the house. I'd sneak into the kitchen and take sample sips and nibbles out of various sweet & savoury foodstuffs. I'd also do homework that I'd "forgotten" to tell my parents about as they'd have made sure I did it correctly so I'd just write down any old rubbish and hand it up in school. It used to cause so much bother at school as half my homework was neat & tidy and correct and the other half a scrawled "4+4=9" affair.

I was a solitary child so was constantly looking for hidey-holes around the house. I usually got discovered in the cupboards in my brother's room or the fitted wardrobe in my parent's bedroom but they never discovered the seat/locker in front of the dressing table. It was big enough for me to lie down in with a forgotten fluffy bathrobe for padding so I'd be in there for hours with some books and a torch.

There was a large wood behind my aunt's house by the seaside which I used to fantasise about living there in a hollow tree. Any time we took a walk there, I'd be searching for the ideal location to move to. The practicalities of surviving in such a scenario never entered my head. For years it was my "Calm blue ocean" when I'd tune out completely from school or family life and imagine myself in that sun dappled wood instead of the boring reality.

I used to love any car journeys after dark when I'd pretend that the car was either a spaceship or a submarine and would be extremely disappointed to reach our destination and it was all over.

I used to be able to sort of sleep/meditate when I was in primary school. It's hard to explain but I could completely tune out everything and go into a sort of trance - everything would sound like it does when you're drifting off to sleep - voices sound like they're far away and a feeling of weightlessness etc. My vision too would be blurry, like looking through frosted glass. Yet, I'd be aware of what was going on and, if the teacher asked me something, I'd be able to answer them correctly. It used to make the school day go a lot quicker as an hour would pass in about a third of the time, or so it felt to me. I could do this pretty much at will up until I started my teens when it disappeared.

@Hairynick - I forgot I used to do something like that. I didn't sew my fingers together as such, but would sew a few stitches into a finger or my thumb. I can feel the thread pulling through my skin just thinking about it!

DS2 sucks flannels :o

DS1 makes himself burp in the shower

DSis and I used to both pretend we had "children" which were tiny people like Borrowers. My sister's favourite was called Grugglewump (we were Roald Dahl fans). When we were on motorway journeys I pretended that they were sitting on the street lights waving at me. Also, with the old sodium lights, if you looked from one to the other quickly they would make like a "tongue" which I liked.

We had this really long running game for years that we were best friends who went to boarding school. In this school they had a swimming pool which had gymnastics equipment in it and you had to do this special exercise called "Gymming", which was gym underwater.

I was scared of the street lamp outside my bedroom window because it was a different shape so my mum named it "the friendly light" and after that I liked it. It was the same shape as those powdery Swizzels lollies, so I decided they were friendly lollies too.

I was definitely a wierd wierd child...

A flannel sucker here, I also used to eat soapy bubbles Til I got caught. And as a toddler I’d crunch the side of small china plates because I liked it. Got bollocked and didn’t do it again.

As a small child I forced my twin brother to play mermaids with me, this involved putting both legs in one legging hole and our crochet blankets as our ‘long flowing hair’ we had a gorgeous brown furry sofa and used the pillows as our ‘rocks to bask on’ not sure he was really into it but as the Alpha mertwin I made sure he joined in.

We also played the ‘the floor is lava’ and balloon tennis. We were lucky to live in an old barn conversion and our hallway was the size of a tennis pitch - balls were banned after our Dad’s antique bookshelf glass was broken so balloons made a brilliant substitute.

As a wierd family we all laughed about the cat dying (?!) because she would sleep with all four legs in the air. One morning I realised she was cold and stiff in said position and it took me all morning to convince everyone to pay enough attention and not laugh when I pointed at her and said ‘the cats dead’

I used to imagine myself dying all the time, in a kind of Jesus manger style coffin. I was quite obsessed and used to plan my funeral all the time.
I then had my first crush on a young boy I went to school with, who hated me, so I imagined he was dead instead. I even remember having strange visions of him lying dead in the Jesus manger and then HE DIED!!!! Sudden death syndrome at I think it would have 8/9 years old.

Terrified me right out of the death obsession.

Not wierd as such, but on holiday I was looking in the ‘tat’ shops and my mum wouldn’t move along so I could see more so I began shoving her as hard as could, and really ramming into her. I looked up when she wouldn’t move and realised it wasn’t my mum at all but a lady in the same fleece - that my mum wasn’t even wearing that day my mum was stood a few feet away laughing at the entire thing.

I always seemed to have an affinity with elderly folk - they just seemed to beam at me without me doing anything, although I was very polite to them all. One neighbour gave me some sweets and a comic because she loved me so much, which I repaid by lobbing all the flavours I didn’t like over the bushes back into her garden. The rain took the colour off so it was like lots of white soft mints scattered in her garden. My brother and I laid in wait to watch her discover them. Wee bastards we were.

Our chimney made a shadow on the kitchen curtains in summer which looked like a giraffes neck, we would scream with delight at ‘the giraffe’

And my last very outing story 🙈 I told this just the other day but it’s amusing. My brother and I used to swear at the sky (flick the v’s) and tell God to ‘fuck off’ or ‘piss off’ and laugh about it. There was a huge storm afterwards and we cried that we’d pissed God off. Did it again a few weeks later and another thunderstorm happened !

It had everything to do with God and obviously nothing to do with wierd summer weather 😂

Not wierd as such, but on holiday I was looking in the ‘tat’ shops and my mum wouldn’t move along so I could see more so I began shoving her as hard as could, and really ramming into her. I looked up when she wouldn’t move and realised it wasn’t my mum at all but a lady in the same fleece - that my mum wasn’t even wearing that day blush my mum was stood a few feet away laughing at the entire thing.

I remember burying a multipack of crisps in the shopping trolley (because DM would never notice through the check out?!) then looking up to a complete stranger smiling at me, whose trollet it was. Wandered off...

At around 9 to 11yrs my favourite things to do were take notebook and pen and write down names on gravestones at cemetery, sit at the side of main road and write how many cars in each year of registration or sit in trees ticking off names of birds I saw .

Weird, solitary child I was!

@pinkbluestripes

Ahahaha I feel like I have done this as well!!?

I was only about 4 yrs old but would only answer to the name Gillian. (my names not Gillian). Also, I regularly used to bite the plastic beads off my purse and they would get stuck in my teeth. I would get hauled off to the dentist to get the bead removed.

I would spend hours sitting at the top of the stairs reading “The Reader’s Digest Family Heath Guide”.

I used to love the Reader's Digest Family Health Guide! I liked the pages with a picture of a person with all their bones and organs and stuff on show. I think there was a man and a woman on different double page spreads?

I used to rush home after school (primary) for a slice of white bread soaked in vinegar.
I would only eat blue sweets (very rock n roll in hindsight!)
As a young teen I would take one of every pair of my mum's earrings and hide them if she was being awful to me! (I never confessed. I don't know now what I actually did with them)
I pretended to school friends that i had a sister who was poorly so didn't go to school. One friend came to play so I shut my mum's bedroom door and pretended she was in there but not to mention her to my mum as mum would cry. Spent afternoon on edge incase she found out I was lying
Made 'poison' using nail varnish remover and salt and shampoo and kept it in my school bag to pour in my bully's drink. I never did it.

Who could resist biting the tiny beads off purses?

Just me then?

I still do the PVA glue thing. It’s very satisfying peeling it off.

I used to deliberately rub salt or pickle juice into any cuts or my cracked lips to feel the stinging. God knows why. I’m don’t get any pleasure from pain now.

My 4 year old DB once carefully took a rake and poked regular holes in our new garden hose (this was the sixties and my parents had saved green sheild stamps for years to get it). He then attached it to the hot tap (again, this was the 60s so the immersion only went on once a week - hot water was a precious commodity back then) and ran all the hot water through the leaky hose and down the garden. When my bewildered dad asked why he had committed this expensive act of wanton vandalism all DB could do was sob that ‘it had seemed like a good idea at the time’.

Biting beads of purses was a joy as was plucking the threads/wicks out of candlewick bed spreads leaving a pattern of tiny holes. And also carefully sliding a finger nail under a paint bubble and gradually peeling all the paint off a door or skirting board.

I also preferred to read sitting on top of a step ladder for some reason.

Some chocolate bar wrappers from when I was a kid were paper rather than foil and I used to eat them when I'd finished the chocolate.

We ducked under bridges but that was more because we were told to....

I used to lay on my top bunk with no pillow. Spit in the air and feel it land on my face. Weird kid me.

Me and my sister used to empty all the shampoo, toothpaste etc into one bottle and mix it up then wait for the next person to use it. Nothing was ever said about that though so who's the weirder person!?

Biting beads of purses was a joy as was plucking the threads/wicks out of candlewick bed spreads leaving a pattern of tiny holes. And also carefully sliding a finger nail under a paint bubble and gradually peeling all the paint off a door or skirting board.

Me too! And picking the wood chips out of wood chip wallpaper.

I used to collect the paper wrappers from ice-cream van ice lollies. One summer I got quite an impressive collection.The pink panther strawberry milk lolly was my fave!

I read way too much Helen Forrestor as a kid and used to imagine feeding the family magnificent hearty meals

I used to eat raw sausage and bacon all the time, my mum didn't see this as a problem

I often pretend to be kidnapped, I used to roll myself up really tightly in my duvet and pretend I'd been kidnapped

I used to spend ages swinging from the beams in the garage

I used to read a Housekeeping book for hours in end, shame I didn't learn anything from it!

We also used to shrink crisp packets lots of fun

Oh yes I remember baking crisp packets to shrink them and then putting a safety pin through them to make badges!!

Anyone sit in a sleeping bag to slide down the stairs?

Ate rubbers (as in erasers to rub out pencils)

Threw stones in cow pats and rated them for splat-ness

Sucked water out of flannels

Kind of @green21, my older brothers used to put me in a sleeping bag head first and push me down the stairs.