What's the weirdest thing you ever did as a kid?

[Bayard]

Stupid may substitute.

I was an inveterate nail biter (still am if the situation calls for it). When I was a little kid, and my fingernails were nearly gone, I was still flexible enough to chew on my toenails.

You next.

[Arkansas Granny]

1. I used to chew the heads off burnt matches. Don't really know why,

but I seem to recall they had a salty taste.

[Lochloosa]

2. Nutrientent defincies. Like elephants eating clay.

[Arkansas Granny]

3. I kind of doubt that. My mom was always served lots of veggies,

whole grains, milk (we had cows) and we rarely had junk food or soft drinks.

[ret5hd]

4. Did you get phossy jaw?

https://goo.gl/images/EJmiip

[Arkansas Granny]

5. OMG. I've never heard of that.

[flibbitygiblets]

28. Same here! It was the first thing I thought of...except I only liked "raw" matches not burnt

I thought it was the salty flavor I liked too. Until someone caught me doing it, probably 6 years old I quit match-eating cold turkey.

[flor-de-jasmim]

6. When we lived in Las Vegas, I used to "slow race" -- bare feet on tar - who could take the ...

longest amount of time to cross the burning hot street in the summer. Or run across rock gardens barefoot.

[csziggy]

9. As a kid I'd walk across asphalt roads in the summer to toughen my feet

Against the sand spurs that grew everywhere.

Hot asphalt was a treat compared to getting sand spurs stuck in your feet!

A sand spur, close up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenchrus

[flor-de-jasmim]

11. youch! My exercise was also to toughen my feet, but I'd take rocks over sand spurs!

[CottonBear]

14. Ouch! We called em sand burs down on the Alabama Gulf Coast.

We usually wore flip flops in order to try and avoid sand burs while playing in my grandparents’ back yard.

[csziggy]

16. Flip flops don't save you when the sand spurs (or burs) are ankle deep!

We had a undeveloped lot behind our house that was seldom mowed, plus a swamp next to it that had been dredged to be a lake but also was seldom mowed. There were more sand spurs than grass and they would attach to bare skin. Most summers we spent mostly shoeless so the first couple of weeks after school got out we'd toughen our feet so we could run around in the unkempt parts of the neighborhood.

My feet still have tough calluses on the bottoms and will never been sleek and smooth like the ads on TV try to convince women we need. I've tried pumice stones, but if I wear down the callus the skin underneath is far too tender and prone to split to handle.

[CottonBear]

25. Yikes! We stayed away from the ankle deep areas!

Those little sand spur/bur devils hurt like the dickens! You are braver than me. I still don’t like to go barefoot, even in my own house! I have skinny, bony & tender feet! There’s no padding at all!

My feet are not foot model pretty either after years spent in riding boots and gardening boots. My poor toes have been stepped on by horses more than a few times.

[csziggy]

32. Not sure if I would rather step on sand spurs or be stepped on by a horse

My little right toe has been broken so many times I've lost count. Damn warmbloods - no matter how far out you hold their head, they can still stomp a toe!

I did wear shoes or boots around the horses, though it took until I was an adult to be sensible about that. My first horse stomped foot was when I was about five and the neighbor's horse stomped on my entire foot. Fortunately in the soft sand it just bruised but didn't break anything.

My worst broken toe was from a sewing machine. I was folding it back into its table when it came loose from the brackets. The full weight landed on the second toe. I never even got it X-rayed - the doctor just taped it to the next toe. I limped for a couple of months, re-taping it as needed.

I have big fat feet with high arches and barefoot is still comfortable for me. Basically no shoes are truly comfortable, Aside from going barefoot most of my childhood, I had a third degree burn on the top of one foot. For years the scarring made wearing shoes with any kind of strap over the top of that foot painful and open topped shoes made the scar too visible. So I went barefoot as much as possible and still do even though the scar has fully healed and is not even very visible any more.

[CottonBear]

33. Stomped toes are the worst!

Especially when the darned equine won’t budge! I owned a warmblood who stepped on me more than a few times.

I broke my little toe (again!) recently! Damn, that hurt!

Like you, I straightened it out and taped it to the next toe for a few weeks.

[csziggy]

39. Got to lean into the horse to get them to move

A friend reminded me recently that I taught him that decades ago. He said it came in useful when he was at a rally and a police horse stepped on his toe. He leaned into the horse to make it move. The mounted officer took exception to that until he showed her his shoe with the hoof impression on it. Saved him getting hauled off to jail since interfering with a police horse is illegal.

To be honest I am glad I have given up on handling horses anymore. I'm down to four mares, who will age out and then no more horses for me. I just gave away our last foal - at six years old - to the girl that has handled him since he was born and has ridden and trained him since he was started under saddle. She rides eventing and he has a lot of potential. At sixteen hand, three inches he is impressive for a foundation bred Quarter Horse.

Here he is the day he was born:


Here he is as a yearling:


There he was about 15'3". I've got to get some new photos of him!

[Bayard]

43. Love a horse thread!

And been stepped on by many a Warmblood. I taught my horses to move over from a thumb on their side where a spur would go. Not a kid thing, but have many old broken bones. I aspired to be an eventer at one point. Finally decided that dressage meant a lot less trips to the emergency room.

[CottonBear]

50. Dressage is so much safer for sure!

The older you get, the more you worry about getting hurt.

[CottonBear]

49. Yep. You gotta lean hard! Fortunately, none of my toes were broken by horses!

I managed to break them all on my own!

I understand getting out of the horse training, handling and riding business. I sold my beloved Oldenburg mare after having a baby and then also losing my professional job during the 2009 recession. I miss my horse, who I also raised from the day she was born. But I just didn’t have enough time or money. Sigh. I will always love horses. However, they are a constant demand on one’s time and resources.

Your horse is really nice and that young lady is a lucky girl. He’s really big and tall for a quarter horse. I’d say he’ll be a solid event horse. His Palomino coat is just grand! His head is pretty and his markings are very striking. Quarter horses are so much easier to handle than Thoroughbreds and warmbloods. I think they tend to be generally healthy and sound, at least more so than Thoroughbreds.

I miss the smell of hay and my horse’s warm coat in the sun and grooming her and just hanging out with her.

Enjoy your old mares! They deserve a nice retirement!

[csziggy]

57. I had to stop for health reasons

Between 2001 and this past December I had thirteen major operations. Each time though I went through physical therapy my ability and strength decreased. I am almost finished with my cardio rehab after getting a new heart valve and losing a kidney

The gelding I gave away is seventh generation that I bred and raised on my farm so I had been doing it a long time. I am proud that he is everything I had been working towards in conformation and personality. He's actually a red dun with flaxen mane and tail. His sire has the same coloring.

His sire:

[CottonBear]

60. Hes beautiful! I dont think Ive ever seen a red dun horse in person.

I can see the sire’s red dun coloring clearly in the picture. Very handsome!

Cotton, the horse that I used to own is a beautiful reddish gold bay Oldenburg mare with 3 white socks and a white star. She is very feminine. She looks just like her Oldenburg sire.

So sorry to hear about your health problems. I hope you’ll not need any more operations.

Do you have someone to help care for your remaining horses?

[csziggy]

61. Oldenburgs are lovely horses

I stuck to QHs but I boarded all breeds, warmbloods, thoroughbreds, arabs, and more. I liked the warmblood personalities, but not really their size.

Hopefully most of my problems are over, but I now have to get a tooth extracted (not simple so my dentist is sending me to an oral surgeon) and more work on my hands.

The family of the girl that now has Seamus (the "foal" I gave away) has been taking care of my farm and my horses for over ten years. They and the wife's sister have horses here and they all pitch in to help out. When we go away they even feed my aging cat so he doen't have to be boarded away from home. When their kids were younger, they could ride their ATV from their neighborhood to the farm the back way and not go out on the roads. It was ideal for them then and has been great for us. They have several aging horses so having a place to keep them that just calls for work rather than money works out great for us all.

[CottonBear]

62. It seems like you have the perfect arrangement for horse & farm care.

I hope that the oral surgery goes well and that your recovery is uneventful.

Take care! 🐎 🐴

[csziggy]

63. Thanks!

Hopefully someday you will be able to get another horse.

[yardwork]

7. I ate paste in elementary school. And glue.

[Shrike47]

30. Didnt everybody?

[Arkansas Granny]

31. I recall one paste that had a minty smell to it. I dont remember the brand name.

I didn't eat it, but I knew kids that did.

[Major Nikon]

40. Ah yes , a glue aficionado

[Laffy Kat]

69. What about Vick's Vapor Rub?

We used to eat that!

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

8. Devised a pulley system

to open and close my bedroom door. It didn't work very well. I was seven. My mom was pretty mad. If I had tried to build a Rube Goldberg contraption, I think she would have sent me to live with my grandparents.

I also wanted to start an animal shelter in our backyard. That idea was squashed quickly after I took in one stray cat. She let me keep the cat though.

They both seemed like brilliant ideas at the time.

[Ron Obvious]

10. I never had the guts...

But some of my more courageous (or stupid) classmates would lie down on the railroad tracks and let the trains pass over them. If they had merely raised their head the train would have taken it clean off, but if they kept completely still it would pass over them without harming them.

When I say I never had the guts, I mean I never had the guts to even watch this.

[sl8]

19. I find it a little unnerving just to read about it. n/t

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

12. I invented entire countries and drew elaborate, detailed maps of them.

[Ron Obvious]

21. A D&D player or Dungeon Master, were you?

If you weren't, you missed out on something you probably would have really loved. I did the same, BTW.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

22. No, this was back in the late '50s-early '60s, long before D&D.

[benld74]

13. I was a rough and tumble boy born

9 years after my sister. 10lb 6oz. Never realized size nor strength until,,,when I was around 5

I tackled mom while she was talking with sister next to the china cabinet. When she had dishes in her hands.

From behind
Blindsided her

Dropped the dishes
Grabbed the cabinet
Almost took THAT down too

Next thing I recall is my sister trying to talk me out from under my bed.

[Hayduke Bomgarte]

15. Fastened an old bath towel

With a safety pin, as a cape and jumped off the garage roof, several times til my Mom caught me. I was trying to see what it felt like to fly like Superman. I was probably 8 or 9.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

23. My brother did that, with cardboard wings.

Fortunately he only jumped off a 4' high retaining wall and fell into a vegetable garden.

[frogmarch]

17. Played Stick'em

barefoot with my friends. This was in the early 50s. Stick'em was a lot like Twister, but with knives, and we played it in each others' backyards. Sometimes our feet got bloody, but it was fun.

[dameatball]

34. Lol.....we called it Mumbledy Peg.......same outcome though

[frogmarch]

38. Mumbledy Peg!

Great name! I wish we'd called it that too.

[dameatball]

41. If it was just my brother and me wewore our Keds. When the neighbor kids played it was more serious.

[frogmarch]

67. Oh, the good old days,

right?

[rzemanfl]

18. Used an old mortar box as a "boat" us kids poled down the semi-navigable muddy creek behind

our houses and got filthy in the process. I seem to recall a Davey Crockett connection regarding poling boats.

[bettyellen]

20. Bookmarking!

[Bayard]

24. Our family lore included

Me being out on a blanket in the yard as a baby. My sisters were supposed to be watching me. They say I picked up a daddy-long-legs spider and ate it. Wiggly legs sticking out of my mouth.

[Binkie The Clown]

26. I invented my own language from scratch. nt

[jberryhill]

27. Define an age bracket around "kid"

I need to narrow this down a bit.

[PJMcK]

29. Climbed out of my bedroom window

When I was between 6 and 10 years old, we lived in a suburb of Chicago in a comfortable two-story house. My bedroom on the second floor was at the opposite end of the house from my parents.

One night when I was 7 or 8, I decided it would be pretty cool to tie a rope in my room and climb down outside the house in the dark. You know, like Batman or James Bond, (my childhood heroes). So, I tied the rope to my desk and then climbed onto the window sill to begin my descent.

It went much fast than I expected because the desk simply slid across the floor and I hit the ground pretty hard. Although I didn't break any bones, the desk smashed against the wall with a thunderous noise that awakened my parents. When they found me on the ground outside, they were understandably pissed!

Later, after everything was cleaned up, my father asked me what I was trying to do. When I told him I thought it'd be cool to go outside at night, he suggested that next time I should use the front door.


ETA: I was a nail-biter, too, but I never went for the toes!

[FSogol]

35. I liked tools, so whenever the parents went away, I'd take something like the washing machine, dryer

vacuum, dehumidifier, etc apart. When I couldn't put it back together, I'd start taking something else apart. My parents prayed that when I had kids, they'd do the same thing to me.

[underpants]

37. My brother and I playing hide and seek. I hid in the dryer.

He turned it on.

[underpants]

36. Bit the torch off a steel replica of the Statue of Liberty. Broke my nose 5 Times.

Not sure how or why I bit the thing but I did.

Nose - ran into a lot of things. First baseman, brick wall, tree, foiund about the fourth break when I was getting examed for the fifth break. Actually had a nose cast at one point- just a bar across my nose and when I sweated it off my mom taped it back on. Spiderweb of tape on my cheeks. I have no sense of smell.

[ret5hd]

42. You might have lost your smell, but your aroma is going strong.

[Leith]

44. We Used to Carch Bees

Our moms would give us Mason jars with holes punched in the lids. The lilac bush on the corner was the best place.

We would find a bee collecting pollen, lift the lid just a bit around the bee, then slam the lid shut. The first bee was easy. After that, the more bees you caught, the harder the next one would be to get without a captive flying out.

Oddly enough, I've never been stung in my life.

[womanofthehills]

46. We used to catch a bee in our hand and see if we could run down the block and back with the bee

I did this successfully a number of times till I was stung.

[Laffy Kat]

70. My big sister convinced me that if I cup a bumble bee in both hands...

The bee would be confused and not know where to sting. Found out fast that was bullshit and I ran home screaming. My mother got mad at me for being so stupid. I remember her scolding me and saying, "Well, if it was so safe, why didn't your sister do it?" Good point, Mom.

[OilemFirchen]

45. Returning from delivering newspapers at about 6 A.M....

I decided to throw a "spare" smoke bomb into a sewer drain. Instantly, flames shot out of the drain and, as I pedaled madly to return home, each drain was spewing fire. As I reached my house, I heard sirens and assumed that I'd just set fire to the city.

I told my mom about it this year - fifty years after the fact - and she roared with laughter. I sense that, had I informed her at the time, her reaction might have been a bit different.

[LuckyCharms]

47. Lick the terminals on those 9 volt batteries.

[WhiteTara]

48. We brought a horse into the house

and then realized how big it was!

[CottonBear]

52. Ha!

That’s awesome!

[WhiteTara]

59. He was the tail end of our "bring that in the house" adventure

we brought in wild rabbits, my sister liked mice, pigs, chickens baby calves so we thought, Why not the colt? Aaaaah! He freaked out and we almost couldn't get him out before he kicked in the walls!

[Bleacher Creature]

51. I collided with Russia to steal a Presidential election.

Oh wait, I'm thinking of someone else.

[CanonRay]

53. Had "chicken races on our bikes

Go full speed straight at a fence or wall. First to bail is a chicken. Idiots. Amazing I lived to be a teenager

[JohnnyLib2]

54. Chewed on soft chunks of tar/blacktop on the playground

Germs be damned. We also lit the cotton from cottonwood trees. I still miss that.

[nocoincidences]

55. I painted the neighbor boy glossy blue.

To be fair, his sister helped me but I got the blame for having the idea.

I started a campaign of throwing rocks and name-calling at any cab in my neighborhood after one hit my dog and broke its leg. The cab company ratted me out to my parents, although one of gang must have been the original rat to the cab driver who asked.

I consider it my first political protest.

[The Genealogist]

56. I used to tape myself doing the WIERDEST tornado warnings ever

My grandma had a tape recorder, and when I was about 7 I used it to make tornado warnings one afternoon at her house. They included the same list of Missouri counties for each one. The first one or two were pretty much like you heard on TV/Radio, but then I added little commentaries on the county names (ie Henry County...HELP UNCLE HENRY!!). By the end of my little project I was singing and belching and there were sponsors and commercials (Coke, Bounce dryer sheets, etc). Do I still have this tape? I do.

[woodsprite]

58. I'll go with "stupid".....

I wedged a metal slinky into an empty ceiling fan/light combo in my friend's house, thinking that when they turned it on, it would spin around and around. Me! The Fireman's daughter.

Thankfully they noticed it before hitting the light switch. I got a good yelling at by my parents and my friend's parents.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

64. I got to drive a locomotive around some tracks.

It was cool.

[Bayard]

65. These are all great!

Maybe I'm not so weird after all.

[DFW]

66. Mission Impossible

In the sixties, after I had left my original high school, my sister, who still went there, had two girlfriends over one time when I has home from my new school. We had a primitive tape recorder, and they had a biology teacher who was difficult but had a great sense of humor. I had taken his class, too, when I was there a few years earlier.

I recorded the following: "Good evening Mr. [his name]. As you know, Anton Rojak, the evil communist spy, has kidnapped the Vice-President* and has taken his place. You mission, should you decide to accept it, is to expose Rojak and free the real Vice-President. As always, should you or any of your team be caught or captured**, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. Your telephone will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck [his first name]!"

We then called his home number and played the tape into the phone. We could hear him laughing his head off on the other end.

*the VP at the time was Spiro Agnew
**the use of "captured" instead of "killed" was deliberate

[Number9Dream]

68. Ran after, rode bikes after the mosquito sprayer truck

Our street partially bordered woods on one side. During the '60's summers, the township would occasionally send a modified truck around to spray clouds of white mosquito spray up our street. We didn't know how toxic it was, but running / riding through the fog was a hoot.

[Laffy Kat]

72. OMG, we did that, too.

Ran behind the DDT truck in the fog. Still waiting to get breast cancer; if figure it's not "if" but "when".

[Codeine]

71. Bottle rocket wars.

In Wyoming there are evidently no laws whatsoever about fireworks vending, so here was a year-round stand that would sell us (8 year olds!) bottles rockets whenever we could scrounge together enough change.

Then we’d square off in this old field with junk cars strewn around and shoot them at each other. Luckily nobody got hurt.