Tell me my teens aren't the only ones lol

[Srepmum1984]

I am growing more and more gobsmacked with my teenagers common sense and I wanted to hear some other funny stories.

This week alone, son has toasted bread with butter already on it because he couldn't be bothered to wait and it smelt like the house was on fire.

Was feeling ill, so made him a Lemsip. He poured it (literally) straight into his mouth then screeched he didn't realise it was hot. He watched me make it from the kettle.

Today he is working with me over his college half term in the office for some extra cash. Blew his nose, then proceeded to try and open my free standing air conditioner fin part as he thought ' I had a fancy Japanese bin'

Please tell me I am not alone😂😂😂

I was a pretty sensible kid/teenager/young adult but still had plenty of gormless moments. Laundry was one of the areas where I'd never had a lot of practice - in our house our dad did it all, so while we might be asked to hang a load of washing out to dry, we weren't ever really tasked with washing clothes from start to finish. I went off to uni with the blithe confidence of an 18yo who obviously knew best and figured that this whole separating whites and coloureds business was overblown nonsense. Ended up with a lot of murky grey clothes pretty sharpish.

I was also fairly convinced that as you use a towel to dry yourself when you're clean from a shower, that you don't really need to wash towels. After a term or so of trying that, I finally accepted that no, you really do need to wash towels at least every now and then.

That's not so out there. Ireland introduced a postcode system 4 or 5 years ago (Eircodes) and every property has its own code. It has revolutionised having things delivered to our remote, rural home. No more standing in the garden with a crackly phone signal saying 'drive up the lane until you come to the house with the green door... no, if you've passed the church you've gone too far.. Oh sod it, I'll walk up to the main road and wave at you!'

Admittedly Ireland has a much smaller population than the UK. To do individual postcodes in the UK they'd probably need to be about 10 characters long.

This.

I'm reading this thinking, isn't this down to your parenting? Like teach your children these things? My parent did.

I remember a certain someone, who, as a fully functional adult and a medic, who wanted to make her DD's 13th BD special. So, in their basement, with an ice cream cake at her mercy, this person lit 13 sparklers. NOT sparkler candles, because she did not know they existed. Real, live sparklers. Chaos ensued, and the cake did not survive, though the funeral was spectacular! And bright. And loud.

Made that birthday one to remember for sure, and hopefully the birthday girl will someday forgive the sparkler lighter. It's only been 33 years, so we're hopeful.😬😳😇

People saying these teens can’t be very bright… here are a few things I remember other (and otherwise very bright!) students doing whilst I was at Oxbridge 10+ years ago:

• Multiple people in freshers week bamboozled by how to turn on the washing machine because it wasn’t the same model as at home even though it was all clearly labelled
• melting the cheese in their toastie by laying it on top of the toaster and running the toaster with the slots empty, the cheese dripped in and caught fire
• Pouring grappa into a wound because alcohol is a disinfectant
• washing a duvet in the shower so they didn’t have to carry it down to the laundry room, it took over a week to dry
• And, in a postgraduate house (!), someone trying to cook a piece of salmon from frozen by putting it in the oven on a plate. The plate cracked from the thermal shock before the salmon even defrosted. I saw the same person drop an egg on the floor and just leave the puddle of egg there because they didn’t know how to clean it up

There is a man on FB/TT who is compiling a book about "Texts from Teens". A couple that made me laugh was "Is Jurassic Park based on a true story?" "When does my SSN expire?".

@Sugargliderwombat - oh I agree it needs to be hot but this was way too hot. The tortilla would have been black before any heat hit the cheese and there was way too much oil in the pan, in fact maybe it would have melted the cheese as it would have been swimming in the oil and near enough deep frying itself. I've shown both kids how to make them numerous times as well and I've even told them how to do it in the air fryer now. We have an extractor fan that wasn't turned on too, the window would have also been acceptable. I'm just surprised the smoke alarm didn't get triggered from it. 🙈

At my teacher training college, I was in a residence block where five of us shared a small kitchenette. The one who tried to boil an egg in the communal kettle never owned up, but we all suffered the shock of the explosion, the awful smell and the lack of a kettle.......and this young woman was on track to take daily responsibility for thirty-odd youngsters at a time.
But I have my suspicions that it was the same one who found out the hard way that heating up a fruit yoghurt does not produce a tasty hot pudding but a curdled mess.

Oh, to be perfect and never ever to have made a mistake or done something thoughtless. Particularly at a time where you might be studying for exams in 10 different subjects, dealing with hormones and growth spurts, being at one of the most self conscious time of your life, trying to separate from your family to be a young adult while simultaneously being very reliant on them.
Tell us, oh wise one, how DID your parents mould you into the flawless person you are today?
I’m mean I say flawless but you appear to not have actually developed a sense of humor … or empathy…

I knew a fellow student ( now an imminent neuroscientist) in our 1sr year who had a crush on a girl and was waxing lyrical about her. One of her many attributes was that he watched her, in the communal kitchen, make an AMAZING soup out of nothing other than vegetables, herbs and water! Oh, the sheer genius of this girl…this talented goddess
He was genuinely surprised to hear that’s HOW vegetable soup is made.

A few years ago now, I could hear one of mine squeegeeing the shower dry, all good you might think, except they were still in the shower with it running. They said that they were trying to save time and do it while they were letting their conditioner sit on their hair.... 🙄

Not just teenagers unfortunately as grown adults do some pretty stupid things! Professional adults at my work putting foil in the microwave causing it to catch fire, continuing to use an already blocked to the top toilet…

In fairness, I once asked DH to peel potatoes so I could make mash when I got home.

Got home to very brown, peeled (and uncut) potatoes in a pan with no water in it.

Apparently he didn't know that you were supposed to leave them in water to stop them from going brown. He was 45!

I very much blame his mother for that one in the beginning but now shoulder a lot of the responsibility for not forcing him to do more cooking!

Another time I asked him to peel and cut the potatoes into cubes so I could do my air fried roasted potatoes. He's had them multiple times so knows what they look like. Walked in and found him cutting the potatoes into the smallest cubes! Literally about 5mm square (they were quite precise and even!). He was most insulted by my "what on earth are you doing?".

At least he was putting them in water this time though, so he's learning - one mistake at a time!

(No, common sense is not his forte!)

I love a hapless teen. I've got 2 of my own. I hate the Mumsnet sector that insists they should leave home at 16 able to cook to cordon bleu standard, wash and iron like the Swiss laundry etc etc etc. I'm all for letting kids pick stuff up as they go along, with a few blunders, because you should let them live their own life, and have a few laughs as they grow up. No one taught me how to cook or clean or wash - the fun of life was learning this for myself.

Ffs, get her a bedside table. They cost less than a pair of glasses.

The thing with teenagers you can show or tell the HOW to do something but you can’t anticipate every ‘adaptation’ that they might come up with in their head!
So although my DS can ably do the laundry, when it came to what to use of there’s no detergent left and mum has expressly told him to wait for clothes to finish, put in drier AND put another load on before he could go meet friend…. Well, he got creative.
Rather than suffer my wrath or go to the shop and by more, he found another way… sort of.

And in no lesson regarding doing the laundry did I ever think to say to the kids ‘ oh but the way, if you ever think you should pop Fairy washing up liquid in with the clothes - please don’t’.

Nope, you're not the only one with DC like this! FWIW, I HAVE taught my kids how to do the household chores, the basics for maintenance/cooking etc and that it's not a magic fairy that does the cooking, shopping, laundry, cleaning or takes out the rubbish. BUT....despite being taught, they (one a teen and one a tween) still sometimes act like this stuff is all a bloody revelation. I only hope that eventually what I've taught them will actually stick. It did with me and my siblings!

Ah, yes of course. My teen has one, and yet somehow his glasses often end up o free floor too…

And has he broken them by standing on them three times since January because he's blind?

@tilypu

She HAS a bedside table! And multiple glasses cases. She's just a knob who thinks it's a good idea to put her glasses on the floor. She also has PDA and absolutely will not be told anything, and most definitely not by me. I am a glasses wearer myself and I put mine in the same safe place every night. I also remove my glasses before getting dressed and undressed to avoid damaging them if I'm pulling T-shirts and sweaters over my head. AD1(17) has worn glasses since she was a toddler and she STILL pulls sweatshirts over her head every day while wearing her glasses. She has been told repeatedly by her ophthalmologist, her optometrist and me. As I say, she is a knob of the first class order.

My 15 yo has recently got into cooking, probably thanks to TikTok, which is fine and good and he is pretty good at it but he painstakenly fries one slice or bacon or one piece of chicken at the time and it's absolutely doing my head in. When asked he just says he is following the recipe. I don't make a big fuss of it and think the penny will drop one day. The bacon however is annoying as it stinks the kitchen out. (All the rest of us do our bacon in the microwave)

Not enough to get the landlord in touch or lose the security deposit. I'm good.

What u need is sideways toasters clearly😄

Asked daughter, then aged 13, to put the washing on the line. Omitted to say use clothes pegs. Ten minutes later they had fallen in the mud and had to be washed again!

Sorry to be that person…I don’t know if this has already been mentioned further down but I didn’t want to lose your post without mentioning this. You really shouldn’t do this anywhere else other than your own home. Lots of people have life threatening milk allergies and they wouldn’t expect a kettle to have had anything in it other than water. A good rinse would likely not be enough to remove all of the milk.