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

[ConfusedPixie]

The hot chocolate thread got me thinking about this. For some reason, I used to tip a full glass of water onto the carpet, the same patch of carpet, every single day. No clue why. I was asked to stop, but I just did it anyway

I ate chalk too, like the chalk kids draw with. Both of these things happened until high school age?!

Anything utterly random and repetitive you may have done?

I would jiggle my bum cheeks alternately to get to sleep and roll myself completely in the duvet with just a little hole to breathe through, so that 'things' couldn't get me in the dark (because evil cannot penetrate goose down).

Before duvets, I used to suck the edge of the cotton sheet, my Grandmother made me a puppet out of terry towelling to suck instead, as I was ruining her sheets.

I also sucked wet flannels and drank from the upturned plug (I still drink out of the top of the toothpaste pump at night).

I ate everything that came from my body... snot, scabs, earwax .

I had a little tape recorder next to my bed and I would sing loudly to Diana Ross' greatest hits after I'd turned the light off. I have no idea where the tape came from, none of our family were Diana Ross fans.

If I went somewhere I really liked (like someone's house), I would secretly wipe a bogey somewhere (usually outside the front door), so that a bit of me could stay there...

This is what people mean when they say "kids used to make their own entertainment". I was a kid in the 1960s .

I ate books, sucked flannels and smoked dried grass.
Made perfume from flowers and harnessed my Staffordshire bull terrier into my little trolley of bricks so I could make her giddy up and be a horse.
Ate a whole string of poppet beads- my mum had to wait patiently for their, ahem, return.
Sucked smarties white and then tried to pick out the orange ones by taste.

DP told me today (more outing here) that he went through a phase of insisting everybody called him Rimkin (not his name) HAHA

I ate tissues.

We had a room newly plastered when I was a kid and I used to lick the plaster, loved how my tongue stuck to it, the same with terracotta

I used to love (and still do!) a lovely label on anything once it was soft and satiney like a ribbon, I used to rub it between my nose and top lip, still do it as a comfort thing if I tired. Dh thinks its odd, I'm not saying anything about him wagging his foot outside the duvet to make himself go asleep.....

My face is aching from trying not to laugh out loud at work at this madness.

Can't believe no one has mentioned giving themselves love bites, or "beefies" as we used to call them by sucking on their upper arm. Any one?

My brother and I used to make mixtures of food, one day we decided to make one to give to a friend of ours who was coming over. He was a little shit, he used to pick his nose and wipe the bogies everywhere even though we did this too he always did naughty stuff and blamed us and we got in trouble.
We made a mixture of food with toothpaste, hair removal cream, perfume and washing powder.
We put it in our favorite bowl so it looked yummy.
Unfortunately my mum found it before we could give it to him, she went mental about wasting food and attempting to kill people bla bla bla.
My brother muttered wished she'd ate it under his breath as we sat on the naughty step.

Oh, I've just remembered. When my cousins would come over, I'd make "salads" with lettuce, clementines and a mound of drinking chocolate powder in the centre. They were very nice!

We used to wipe our dirty hands on the dog, rather than wash them I'm still a minger.

Oh yes I gave myself lovebites too

Dh ate rubber bands and hot water bottles. MIL got rid of her leather suite when he tried to chomp on that.

At my childminders I used to go into the kitchen and make a pile of salt in my hand, cover it with vinegar and eat it. No idea how I came away without massive hypertension, I do still like loads of S&V on my chips but that was a bit beyond normal.

Another flannel sucking bedspread picker here - and my friend and I used to eat Pritt sticks. We did love a Pritt stick.

I also had an odd interlude of biting drinking glasses - I think I only did it 4 or 5 times before my mother convinced me it wasn't the best idea.

I used to bite most things until about last year I was older - it was another way of finding out what they were 'like'.

This thread is brilliant - kids are so fricken weird!

I had a bogey 'factory' on the wall next to my bed. I'd wipe a bogey on the wall each night then pick one dried one off and let it fall onto the floor, where I imagined a conveyor belt took it away somewhere.

I also had this strange thing where both sides of my body had to be exactly the same. It stemmed from my mum, who was a gym manager telling me that you have to exercise both sides equally, but it got totally out of hand with me. So if I whacked one ankle on a chair leg, I had to do exactly the same to the other ankle, or if something cold touched the back of one hand, I had to replicate the sensation on the other hand, etc.

Went on doing it for years and still sometimes have to fight the urge now.

Do you remember how your mum would tell you off for chewing your hair because it would make a hair ball in your intestines? Totally true it seems. My friend is a hospital pathologist and a while ago they had a hair ball taken from a woman's intestines arrive in the lab. She had chewed her hair into adulthood and it ended up as a ball!

My friend and I used to collect up the dried grass cuttings from the public verge outside the houses on our street, build it into what looked like a bloody ostrich nest, and pretend to be Mummy birds sitting warming their eggs. Bloody weirdo's we were!

It only stopped when I sat down in my nest one day, and got a shard of glass embedded in my knee.

I used to eat dried spaghetti, but only in geography lessons, until the start of year 9, when I moved to a new school that combined Geography with History and RE and called it Humanities. It tasted wrong in any other lesson.

I used to discard the crusts of my bread, and pick off bits of bread, and squash them till they were flat before eating them. I still do that now, when I have been ill...

I also used to mix squash with milk. Cheap, Happy Shopper blackcurrant squash. With milk. Yet when my DC's went through a phase of doing the exact same thing, it turned my stomach.

I used to have fountain pen eating contests with my classmates (we were made to write in proper fountain pens at both Primary and Secondary). The first to eat down to the cartridge would win. There were 4/5 of us that used to do it. Right up to about age 13. And yes, we WERE actually eating the plastic fountain pens.

(No, I'm not really here, I'm just a figment of your feverish flashbacks...)

Also used to make 'perfume' in old milk bottles out of tap water and my neighbour's rose petals.

And the 'bung everything in the bathroom in the sink to make a potion' one.

(Still not here)

I STILL tuck my duvet under my toes. Though this has got far worse since lying down in bed only to find a spider lying next to my pillow lifting its leg and fucking waving at me.

Thank you, Hazelbrowneyes for making me feel less weird for drinking vinegar.

(Might be slightly here)

I used to:

hide my Christening bangle, or lego or love letters to the Bionic man under the stair carpet nearly every day - every time my mother hoovered she would go mad.

Eat the dogs Bob Martin choc drops

Drink "ice magic" out of the bottle

Make jam sandwiches, lick the knife and put it back in the cutlery drawer after school (my brother used to do this too, possibly the same knife eww)

Lie under my bed or behind the sofa smelling the gloss paint heating on the radiator pipes.

I went through a phase of filling the toilet in the outhouse full of paper and setting fire to it, and flushing the chain to put it out. Until the heat cracked the bowl.

I ate the bath sponge!

OMG I wasn't the only sticker sniffer. Panini stickers were the only ones worth sniffing. They still smelt of joy and happiness and rainbows when my 15yo DD was about 7yo, but now they don't smell like that.

They smell of hospitals and disappointment...

Doesn't still deliberately paint both hands with PVA glue while crafting with the toddler, oh no..

Ooh so many!

Chewing damp flannels
Painting hands with glue then peeling it off
Poking pins through the skin of fingers to make little tunnels
Writing words in the air with a pointing index finger - still do that one a bit!
Making potions from flower buds & sugar
Eating Horlicks powder straight from the jar then shaking it to fluff it up so Mum didn't realise how much had gone - my Horlicks now so don't have to shake it

My brother ate the Good Boy chocolate dog treats