Randomly odd things you believed as a child and possibly beyond...

[Elmo230885]

I live this type of thread...

(I'm not talking about believing in Santa or the tooth fairy)

I'll start. I had a cousin named Stephen and he had the middle name Dean. For some reason he used to switch and go by either name. So as a child I believed that Dean was short for Stephen in the same way Bill is used for William.

Oh and that the author Enid Blyton was called Eeny blyton.

@JustGetThroughTheDay I thought she was called Gnid Blyton, because that's what her signature looked like on the cover!

[quote easythatsfragile]**@JustGetThroughTheDay I thought she was called Gnid Blyton, because that's what her signature looked like on the cover![/quote]
It actually does!

Whenever I flew across the International date line I used to think by looking out the plane window I would see a line in the ocean

One of my friends believed that when the got married, you had to have the wedding march played.

I remember musing once, not sure how old I was but it would have been before year 6 sex ed (maybe quite soon before actually and that was what made me wonder): I knew men had willys and ladies had boobies (im not sure why I didn't consider women's bits as i was never shielded from nakedness or anything) and I knew that sex was a thing, I just didn't know how. My theory was that willys and boobies had to meet and thought it was very unfair that either the lady would have to be down the bed under the cover with her legs sticking out or the man would have to be halfway up the wall to accommodate. I have since figured the logistics out!

I also used to think that the raisins in Alpen were spiders, I still can't eat it.

I had a Jerry (as in Tom and Jerry) nightie when I was about 7 that I loved. I was still wearing it when I was 10 and thought it had grown with me. Suddenly remembered years down the line that my mum had one too so must have just passed it on to me and binned the too small one!
Genuinely secretly believed it had grown as I did!!

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4021413-T-shirt-top-sizes-have-I-been-wrong-all-these-years-feeling-a-bit-silly
Hope this is a clicky link when it posts and hope I'm allowed to do this... OP kinda fits in with this thread!

That if I had a bath after eating I'd get stomach cramp and drown.

My very sensible mum used to tell me this if I wanted a bath after eating she always said I should wait a an hour to let my food digest. Into my twenties I would always wait exactly an hour.

That wearing dressing gowns in bed was unhygienic - another one mum told me that has stayed with me. Even now I don't like wearing a dressing gown in bed as it feels grubby.

DH’s grandfathers were called Albert and Herbert, both known as Bert. DH therefore grew up believing the affectionate name that all grandmothers used for their husbands was Bert.

Oh and it was only two years ago that he discovered that the ‘mould’ in blue cheese is actually, y’know, mould.

@SummerOfComedy

I thought that if you kissed a boy you could get pregnant.

And that babies were born through your belly button.

😊

Until about the age of 7 I thought babies came out your elbow 🤣

I’ve only just discovered this thread.

Was anybody else confused by films set in the past? I used to think while watching Grease on TV (late 80s/early 90s): “If John Travolta was at school in the 1950s [or whenever Grease was set], he must be nearly 60 by now! How does he still look so young?” not realising that the film was only made in the late 70s and John Travolta was probably still in his 30s.

My mum used to talk about former colonies having been “under the British/French/Spanish”. I used to think they literally lived under the ground below Britain or France or Spain, and wonder how they’d managed to get out. I imagined the land on top sort of sliding off and the people all coming to the surface for the first time.

And I thought if you picked up a guinea pig by the tail its eyes fell out, until my then-infant school age child corrected me.
This made me choke on my cocoa! Hilarious!
And the one about clouds bumping together being thunder: my stepmother told me that and I have no doubt she believed it; made sense to me: bang 2 cushions together they make a faint noise, and clouds are so much bigger & so would be consequently louder; then I said it at school as an answer to what makes thunder....lets just say schools in the '60s were not kind...

I thought my great grandad was a deity of some description. He died before I was born but all the houses I went to (nan’s, aunt’s etc) had the same picture of him looking like a fat Buddha with a (fake) sunset background. I was always really confused when I went to a friends house and didn’t see that picture.

I can't remember why, or how, but as a child I believe/was told, that there was a Giant Clam living in a certain part of our village, who whould clamp you if you stepped into their territory. Needless to say, I loved running free in the village (as we were allowed to do in those days), but I always avoided the Giant Glam's area.

itsnot that's reminded me about the shed in the corner of the playground when I was at nursery school - we didn't go anywhere near it because dangerous wolves lived inside

My mum told me when I was tiny that if I looked at a dead bird on the ground, I'd get fever. Probably to stop me poking at unsanitary things while we were out on a walk. I was about 16 before I stopped running past a dead bird with averted eyes in case it 'got' me.

Just came across this thread and I love it so much!
It reminded me when I was a small child of around 7 my dad was fixing the TV, he took the front screen off the TV - I was panicking as he had said that the people were in the TV! I watched as he carefully took the screen off every slowly (I know now it was to avoid dropping it!)..when he finally got it off I was disappointed that there was ANOTHER screen behind it! He laughed and said that well of course there is another screen there because it was to stop the people escaping! I was so disappointed....

I watched a Christmas play at school when I was even younger...there was a puppet display as part of the act. I tried to stay behind at the end of the show to see if they would come out and I was hoping to get a glimpse of them milling about. But my parents pulled me along with them and I was disappointed not to see them..

I used to think that the channel tunnel was in the ocean not under it. I was an adult when it was built.

ummmm… it’s under the sea bed?

I didn’t know that!

Yep. I actually thought you would be able to look out the windows into a giant aquarium.