Childish Idiocy

So this is a thread for those moments of childish idiocy where you half knew you were doing something moronic but because you were a child it didn't seem to matter. Case in point:

I was a relatively greedy child, and when I could get away with it I would go searching my kitchen for treats that my parents as a reward only seldom wished to dole out. Now on one of these hunts for goodies I stumbled across a Schweppes bottle full with a viscous green liquid; and I thought to myself "Cool, limited-addition lemomade!" Still even though I was only 7 or 8 at the time, I knew slightly something was up. The liquid had no fizz, unike most pop drinks there was no "pop".

Why my mum had decided to put the over-spill of some extra bleach she had in a lemonade bottle (and not remove the label) is still nothing I've ever tasked her on; maybe she thought survival of the fittest would take care of me, or more likely - as she is quite abscent minded - it was probably something she did without even sparing a thought about.

Suffice to say, I took a good swig of bleach. I only swallowed a very small amount, the horrid burning sensation in my throat told me something was afoot. I spent the rest of the next ten minutes washing my mouth out with water, and eventually the pain subsided and I told my mum what had happened. Parental negligence - maybe; but even though I knew something was amiss my boyish curiosity still got the better of me.

Any similar stories you feel like sharing? As always with threads like these, don't be shy.

 

Thing happened when I was... Hmmm, I'm not sure. Four? Five? Something like that. When no one was looking I got my hands on hairdressing scissors made entirely of metal. I scanned the area for something cool to cut through. As it happened, my eyes fell on a cable from a turned on electric lamp. What could possibly go wrong?

Next thing I remember is my mother panicking around me, with me not knowing what's all the fuss about. Aside from blacking out for a moment, I didn't seem to be affected nor injured from the event in any way. Now, the lamp no longer had a cable so that made it the main victim of the situation. As for the scissors, they're my favourite pair ever. I probably would have forgotten about the whole affair if I weren't using them to this day and if they didn't constantly remind me of it with those twin cable-shaped melted spots halfway through the blades.

Here's another one. Age - something similar. My first scientific experiment. When I was chillin' in the bathtub, I noticed that each time I relax my sphincters and push a bit, tiny funny bubbles emerge. Hypothesis: water turns poop into bubbles! Decided to test my theory by pushing as hard as I can to receive a lot of bubbles. The result didn't exactly coincide with my expectations.

 

That last story was... lovely Muro, thanks for sharing!

Your first story actually reminded me of another story from my childhood, I guess this is on account of another child's idoicy so not quite mine. Me and my brother always used to visit my "Aunty and Uncle" (not blood relations - just family friends hence the quotations) at a young age; and one day my brother, my Aunty and Uncle's younger son (the same age as my brother, four years older than me) and their older son (about one year older than his younger brother) were all holed up in the attic. Me, wanting to be part of the action, squealed below on the first floor to let me up whilst my mum and dad were on the ground floor with their friends chatting about this and that.

The ladder in the attic was one of those weird metal ones that folds up, but regardless of that it doesn't mean it wasn't released with an unerring quickness from their ceiling. Me running below, I was knocked unconscious for a couple of minutes - but sustained no major injuries.

Apart from that, the second time I fell unconscious in my youth was during high school there was a trend going around where you used to hold your breathe and people pressed against your chest until you fainted. I always derided this as stupid, because I thought it was, but when accusations built sufficiently enough that I was a "chicken" I submitted to it. I fell unconscious as was expected, but on top of that for a good few minutes whilst my teacher didn't come I fitted. Fortunately before I hit my head on anything, a friend caught me. I don't think I suffered any brain damage, hahAHAHAahahAHAHAHhahah!!!

Anyway, carry on.

 

A few weeks before my third birthday I was outside on the front porch with my mom. I saw a bumble bee and I got very excited, because I saw from its motion it was slow enough for me to catch it. So, I did what any curious child who had "heard" bees sting but had never been stung would do - I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, abdomen on my thumb and head under my index.

"Look, mom! A b-OWW!"

A few days after that I had left a personal carton of milk outside and forgot about it. I rediscovered it and, remembering I like milk, and that this was my milk, I picked it up and began drinking. It tasted fine except there were these strange lumpy bits that I knew didn't belong there. I opened up the carton completely and discovered it was pretty well full of carpenter ants.

 

When I was about six years old, the neighbor kid and I snatched up one of his parents cigarette lighters, a coffee can and some paper, then made off into the woods to make a fire. We had a grand ol' time burning sticks and leaves and bugs. We might have gotten away with it too, but I guess I didn't realize that the fire in the can wasn't the only thing that was hot. I learned my lesson real quick when I touched the outside of the can and burned the stew out of my finger. At the age of six, a painful burn isn't something you can hide from your parents. My mom threatened me with a trip to the hospital burn ward to see all the burn victims if I ever played with fire again.

A year or two later, my brother and I were at the neighbor kid's house on his birthday, which just happened to be the 4th of July. His parents bought tons of fireworks every year, and this was back in the day when you could get M-80's in their various forms from the Indian reservations. It was early afternoon, and the neighbor kid decided it would be a great idea to raid the cabinet where the fireworks were stashed, and my brother and I agreed. When he came back outside, the neighbor kid had what appeared to be a tiny stick of dynamite. My brother lit the fuse, and we all ran a safe distance away. Much to our disappointment, the fuse fizzled out just before reaching the explosive charge. Not to be foiled so easily, my brother set his foot on the firecracker and proceeded to burn through the case with a lighter at the fuse entry point. We only had about a half-second warning when the fuse caught and emitted its telltale smoke and hiss before the thing exploded with a truly epic bang, leaving us all shaken up with ears ringing for several minutes, and my brother lucky to have moved his foot before his toes could be blasted off.

 

This one's pretty simple;

I was five, and I'm certain you guys know not to hold in a sneeze - however, I had done it before with no ill effects. Walking toward the staircase to go back upstairs from the basement, I had a sneeze come on. I didn't let it out, and it caused me to black out for a few seconds. That was just long enough to fall forward onto the stairs and get a rug burn on my face from the tough nylon carpet. I let them out now.

I also used to rain hell on nests of tent caterpillars in the woods around my family home. A few years into this dickishness, I began playing with fire - I set several nests up in smoke. I would also shake them from trees and step on them. After a day's worth of killing for no good reason, I decided it was time to wash up, but first I went to the bathroom. I undid my fly, and my underpants, and - caterpillars. Live caterpillars filling my underwear. No idea how they got there aside from maybe when I shook them down from the trees, but seriously how would they get under the waist of my shorts and into my underwear without me noticing? More than a dozen, at the least.

 

Along the lines of fire related mishaps my Dad used to hold bon-fire parties on the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes Night, pretty much British people's excuse to bust out fireworks once a year), and on the morning after he'd lit a little fire in the garden. What possessed me to do it, I don't know, but I for a good twenty minutes I'd been flinging a can of beer as high into the air as I could manage - making the can more and more pressurised. Then I put it in the fire.

Five minutes later, the can shot forth from the fire and - narrowly missing my legs - flew horizontally at a good pace hitting a nearby wall. The can was crushed flat, and the brickwork was also cracked. I guess if the can had been a few more inches to the left, I probably wouldn't be walking so well any more.

Also at a previous bon-fire party, there were a bunch of fireworks that didn't light. My brother and his friends thought it would be a great idea to throw them on the fire. Nothing remarkable actually happened apart from a pretty display, still it was farily idiotic.

Finally there used to be a video of me on youtube where I burnt a PG Tips monkey in secondary school with some friends (I don't think my face is ever shown, I just play the role of the cruel torturer pouring methylated spirits onto the monkey); sadly it wasn't tagged with anything sensible so I can't find it now. I did manage to find one video similar, but it isn't mine.

 

So... is there anyone here who didn't knock themselves unconscious as a child? I'm starting to think that I may be weird or something.

 

From all these hilarious stories I wish there was something I could recall, but I guess I've just been lucky enough to avoid such unpleasantries!

 

You're still a child though Yuki so I'm sure you'll do something sooner or later.

 

About the age of 3-4 I was deeply impressed with the destructive power of the toilet.

Hypothesis: There was no limit to the amount of toilet paper it could flush. Experiment: pile all of the paper in there and flush.

Hypothesis demonstrably falsified.

 

Brothers have the delightful effect of making childhood all the more dangerous. When I was four or five years old, one of my older brothers convinced me to construct a makeshift tent in a basement room. I was to attach a blanket to the ceiling rafters. He gave me a boost so that I could stand on a doorknob to accomplish the feat. Sure enough, as soon as I was clinging on up there, he pulled away the blanket and started swinging the door back and forth. After a couple of terrifying swings, I jumped off and landed on his head, which smacked into the doorknob and broke one of his front teeth. To this day, he takes his false tooth out at parties even before getting drunk, gumming away like a nine year old boy trying to gross out little girls. Just one of several perfectly justified reasons why my wife gets pissed off when he visits.

 

When I was three I impulsively dropped a washcloth in the toilet and flushed it. When it was immediately sucked into oblivion, I was so horrified that I started bawling. I remember it like it was yesterday. I still don't understand why it upset me so much, but I was inconsolable for the rest of the evening. It's weird, the things that stick with you from childhood.

 

I had a very similar experience, I got in the bathtub with one Dennis the Menace sock on when I was three or four and I decided - for whatever reason - that my parents would be very angry at me. So I attempted to flush it, and failed, with my parents finding me in the bathroom crying my eyes out and one cartoonish sock in the toilet bowl. Far from being annoyed, they found it was very amusing.

Another situation where I was being a drama queen was again when I was about four, and my family were ridiculing me for some reason. So, in my defiance, I took a dull dinner knife and proclaimed "You'll never see me again, I'm going to go outside and kill wild animals!" They were silent for a few moments, but then after exchanging a few glances they burst into uncontrollable laughter. I stormed out the house, sat on the doorstep and cried for about half an hour.

 

When I was four, I investigated in the kitchen without my parents' supervision. As usual. However, this time, I found in one of the kitchen cabinet a powder can. With contents that looked like powdered sugar. Unfortunately. Not. Cleaning powder. Yuck.

 

So heart-warming to read all those 'I-almost-died' stories from childhood.

One such I can remember was when I was around 5 or 6.
There I was, playing in front of my house like a normal kid, but with the difference that I wasn't playing in sand, but rather jumping on enormous stones. There was three of them, two of them smaller and one bigger that was around 3/4 of my height. So, there I was jumping from boulder to boulder and being happy and stupid and all that, when suddenly I slipped and bashed my head into one of the stones. It was quite spectacular, as I hit the stone with the middle of my forehead. After the hit, most of what happened is in blur, but I know that I somehow crawled/walked/teleported to the front door of the house where someone opened the door.
Now when I remember that moment, I wonder how come my brains didn't pour out or my skull at least split in half. Just a tiny scar the size of LED.

 

I suppose this ought to be 'childish concussion'.

Let's see: age seven, I bent a dinky little claw hammer trying to lever out a deeply embedded metal loop in an old pine tree. I thought I could bend in back the same way, but no. The head of the hammer slipped and I levered it right into my temple at a furious speed.

Judging by my friend's reaction at the time, my clobbering myself as hard as possible in the forehead with a claw hammer was highly amusing.

 

Somebody at work has been doing this, too. The janitors put up signs.

 

What you get up to at work is your own business Grakelin, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

I regret to inform you that the business where Grakelin works is very much someone else's.