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.

I was always disappointed when the conductor shouted "Elephant and Castle" on the bus going to my Nans as I saw neither elephant nor castle.

Didn't stop me looking though for years - thought I was too slow!

Ashamed to say but until fairly recently I always thought the sound of thunder happened when the clouds crashed into each other. Wasnt until I was explaining this to DC and DH literally took a double look at me then fell about laughing, that I realised I'd got that wrong.

@Latenightreader I believed that the belly button got its shape when the doctor or midwife tied a knot in it. I thought that the type of knot resulted in the shape, and outies were because they’d messed up the knot. I confessed this to my mum recently and she fell around laughing and asked when I’d realised. I had to confess it was when they didn’t knot my daughter’s cord (I was 40 when she was born).

Errrrr - what???? They don't tie a knot?!?!? 🙈🙈🙈🤣😳😳😳

I was also worried and still now, that if I was to lean against a car door while riding as a passenger, if I leaned too heavy the door would bust open. It sound silly now. But hey

I never read pygmalion or saw my fair lady but I remember the rain in Spain bit.

I saw it written down "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" and clicked that it doesn't mean that you only get rained on to and from your Spanish holiday because its set in a time when people didn't do that!!! I believed that we'll into my 30s

That my mother was 'chewing her tongue' when she was really just scoffing a treat she didn't want to share.

Giving my dd some of the facts of life last week and she truly believes you can only get pregnant if you want pineapples - hmm might need to go over the facts a couple more times!

I used to think that whenever I was watching someone on the TV, they were actually IN the back of my TV. I spent hours looking down the back of the TV to see if I could see these tiny people presenting the news.

(Back when TVs were huge boxes not the thin things they are now)

Putting the light on in the back of the car when it’s dark was illegal

I wanted to read my book once it got dark but nooooo it was illegal according to my mum

@Cavagirl we lived not too far from a power station and every time we passed it in the car my Dad would point at it and say "look, there's the cloud factory".

@Soubriquet My parents told me this too! And that if I press the hazard lights the police would come, I was scared of pressing my hazards for years afterwards!

I think sex is very tricky to understand. Thanks to a cross-section drawing in our text books, I knew the penis went in, but didn't realise that any movement was involved.

I'm not going to admit to how old I was when I found out a man's penis pointed straight up when it was erect, and not, as I'd thought, at a right angle to his body.

The other one was that churches had allocated pews, so God knew where you were sitting. I was very worried when somebody else was in 'my' pew!

I was 17 on my first holiday with a boyfriend. I was terrified the hotel receptionist would realise we weren’t married and would tell us we couldn’t stay.
I had a very sheltered life.

My kids believed the hazard lights are actually an ejector seat button and they would fly out of the roof if it was pressed. The truth only came to light when we broke down!!

When I was very very small I once managed to get behind our big old fashioned ‘wireless’ to see the little people who were - quite obviously! - talking inside it.

Oh, the disappointment! Just wires and light bulbs. Not sure I’ve ever quite got over it. 😄

Because of a very persuasive Kennomeat advert on TV back in the 60's, where they showed the canned meat being tipped onto a plate and told us that 'Kennomeat gives your dog stamina', I believed that the jelly stuff you got around tinned meat was called stamina.

I still sometimes call it stamina (but only to myself, quietly, under my breath whilst making a sandwich).

As a child I used to believe that swallowing a chewing gum would kill you as it would stuck/get entangled in your stomach.
And that babies were born through a secret door on the front of your belly. I imagined it was like an actual door opening that would heal after the baby was out.
Oh and that you could die on the spot for drinking water that was too cold!

A friend and I tried to take the family tv apart to release all the people living in it

When I was a kid my grandad had a golden retriever.
One birthday I was given one of those battery powered toy dogs In a similar colour and I insisted on taking it for a walk with my grandads dog. We bumped into one of his friends who asked me if my toy was her puppy. I remember feeling such an intense feeling of embarrassment for this man and being desperate to get away quickly before he discovered his mistake and got embarrassed himself. For some reason it troubled me so much that I thought about it a lot and each time I felt the same embarrassment and awkwardness. Even as an adult I’d remember it when I was visiting my grandparents and walked past the same park. It was literally only last month (when I finally got a real puppy) that it occurred to me that the man was just making a throwaway jokey comment to some random kid.

I’ve just asked my eight year old and he says that when he was a baby, he thought that rain was ‘God peeing’.

That if I swallowed chewing gum all my insides would stick together.,

That people had 2 stomachs a main course one and a pudding one. Probably because even if I was full from the main I still wanted pudding

My parents were the same age and had birthdays that were only 2 days apart.
I thought that you had to find someone whose birthday was near to yours in order to get married. I used to look at the boy in my class whose birthday was nearest to mine and think "hmmm, I'm going to have to find someone else with a birthday nearer than that as I'm not marrying him." ( sorry Brian)

I thought moving house meant putting your house on the back of a lorry and taking it to a new place... I was devastated aged 6 when I discovered that wasn't a thing...

I thought it was illegal for a man to marry a woman who was taller than him and that's why my Aunty and Uncle had to get divorced.