Stupid things you did as a child

I did the petal perfume thing.

My brother and I used to put on plays for our parents where we would stuff cushions up our tops and pretend to be really fat, and run about. We also used to pretend to be burglars.

I also remember making a tape where we pretended we were on the radio - I think I was making my brother interview me and I was pretending to be Dollar, for some reason (both of them).

When my sister was little, I used to dye her Barbies' hair with food colouring and make them hair extensions out of wool.

Oooh just remembered another one.

My friend and I were about 6 and playing witches during playtime.

We decided to grab one of the kindergarten, called Neal, to do spells on and tied him to a tree with our skipping ropes and went off to collect magic herbs for our potion.

The bell rang and we went in for our next lesson.

I didn't think of Neal again until there was a knock at the door and a teacher holding 2 skipping ropes saying 'whose are these?' Poor kid must have been terrified!

Skipping was banned at my school for the rest of term!

These are hilarious ?

i remember my friend and i having a long running game/soap opera. we'd done some exercise in a geography book i think, where there were two neighbouring areas called laurel hill and mill pond vale

so we invented a game where laurel hill was a rough area and mill pond vale very posh. and we had imaginary families. mine was the black family and i had an older sister called jessica, two older brothers called michael and damien, and a younger brother called steven. i was karen. ? my friend's family were the browns. i can't believe i can remember all this. ?

i drew a data sheet thing for each of my brothers and sisters, with a picture of them and their full names, interests etc

just to ring the changes, sometimes in the game we were from the rough estate, and sometimes the posh.

and just incase all that wasn't tragic enough...when we were the posh girls we used to gallop around the playground, as if on horseback. my horse was black star and her's black stallion. ?

i'm seeing that friend tomorrow evening, i'll ahve to remind her about how sad we were ?

Reading this thread has me in fits of laughter. It makes me wonder if kids now do things like we did or are they too busy in front of their nintendo's etc?

I did a lot of the things that others have done, we were obsessed with Torville and Dean and used to hitch our long nighties into our pants to make ice dancing costumes and would roller

skate around my grans kitchen table. after a few weeks, there were holes in her lino and she wasnt impressed!

I also remember hating my brother as he has asthma and breathed heavily whilst eating. I was making faces at him one day during dinner and as I put a fork in my mouth,, he reached across

the table and slammed the end of it with the flat of his hand, cue one trip to casualty very very slowly, to have the fork removed from my palate! I still can feel the 4 bumps even now!

I used to rescue bees by feeding them honey and watching them put their "straws" down to suck it up, I also used to use clothes pegs to fish for worms in puddles and we had a river near

our house that we used to fish for leaches in. The winner was the one with the most of them stuck to their legs!

We also played weddings using stolen bouquets from our neighbours hyderangea bush. A lovely net curtain would be the veil. I remember Julie next door (catholic) wanting to be the bride

and i wouldnt let her. She said that she would be the priest instead and my mum freaked and brought me in. When I asked why, she told me that there would be no priest officiating

at our (pretend) wedding! She did apologise later to Julies mother and said that as we didnt go to church, she did not her daughters thinking you could only get married by a priest.

All future weddings were conducted by Julie the registrar!

My last post has gone all strange!

When I was about 5ish I found a ladybird on the vegetable patch and spent hours watching it. I made up a story about where it was going, describing aloud each bit of dirt it had to cross ?

I also got my grandma to make me a blue velvet cover for my bike helmet and would then pretend to be riding a horse round the garden and doing jumps and everything.

My old bedroom had the box for the stairs in it (iykwim) and my dad had made me a bed over the top of it. Under the bed there was a passageway which I was convinced was the passage to the secret garden, I used to crawl about halfway through before freaking out and coming out again.

This thread has really made me chuckle!

I did the whole petal perfume/water thing. I also branched out into skin remedies that contained boiled dock leaves and some herbs and spice from my mum's spice rack.

Pretended to go on a train journey where either my mate or me would be the passenger sat next to the bedroom window and the other would go outside and walk backwards past the window to give the illusion of movement.

Made our own Top 40 radio chart show complete with jingles

Played hotels and pretend to be either really pleasant or difficult customers. The wardrobe would act as the lift and my friend's little brother was the bell boy.

Played libraries, so much so that I made the little cards and the holders so that Barbie could take a book out of my library.

Petal perfume - check

we also made dance routines up to 5-star,

i also use to wear my jeans back to front like kris kross (w.t.f)

we did not have any pets when we were kids, but my dad had a fishing tackle shop and sold maggots, so i use to race maggots, and i had 3 a red one which i called pinks, a white one called chalky, and a bronze one called bronze. i use to get my hair off as they wouldnt race all the same way lol.....

I also remember my friend and I used to play at "boarding school" at break time. She would always have a different name and I would always want to be "Natalie" for some reason! We would pretend I was a new girl and she had to help me get my bag up the steps to our room. This would generally take all breaktime!

Sadly, I lost touch with my friend when she left our school and actually went to boarding school (which I'm sure wasn't like the one in our games!).

Brilliant thread!

My sister and I used to fight over who would get to have the fluff out of the tumble drier filter which would then get poked into the holes in the breezeblock garage wall.... I've no idea why

We used to find bits of old broken china and tiles in the garden and we named it 'crap' we were only little and couldn't understand why mummy went mad when she heard us shouting about CRAP

My friends and I were obsessed with Greese 2 and started writing Greece 3... I think I still have it somewhere.

Being convinced that the big wet patch on the side of someone's house was a rain ghost when really it was a leaking overflow pipe

My worst and most embarrasing one is when on holiday in Tenerife as a child, we were in a pub and I went into the toilets where there was a picture on the wall of a man with no clothes on and a flap over his privates with 'do not lift' on it...... guess what I did? well, when lifted, a bell rang behind the bar and the barman shouted to the entire pub "next person out of the ladies is a willy watcher" I remember a couple of girls coming out before me and seeing everyone staring into the toilets at me, I could have died. Thankfully mum thought it was the two girls who came out before me and I never did tell her the truth that it was me.

Me and my friend did this on our bikes in the school playground at the weekend. WE did 'jumps' on our bikes and made horse noises! It all ended in tears, when I pretended to jump a fence and went head first over the handlebars putting my tooth through my lip!

This thread is brilliant...it's reminded me of so much and has made me smile ?

I can't believe how many others made 'perfume', the poor neighbours' roses.

My next door neighbour and I (perfume making companion) would write articles for the Press Pack/Fast Forward magazine....nothing was published - sadly.

Same neighbour and I made up songs. Best one went like this <ahem>

My dad is a bricklayer, he lays bricks,

He likes cornflakes and weetabix.

<beatbox> boom boom chu

My mum is a waitress, she lays tables,

She likes horses and lives in the stables.

<beatbox> boom boom chu, boom boom chu

One day, years later, my husband began to sing these songs. Turns out my neighbour went to his primary school and shared the song with her class - he remembered it all those years later ? .

I also used to make dough out of talc and water.

Once, I was at parents' friends; they have a son a couple of years older than me and a daughter the same age as my brother. The boring littlies were in the garden and the son and I were upstairs on the Sega Mastersystem. We got bored so we tied fishing reel around some teddy bears' necks and lowered them slowly out the window, whilst hiding carefully...our siblings thought the bears were alive <snort>

We also made a fairground in the garden, this mainly consisted of our climbing frame with skipping ropes tied to it.

Ah, those were the days....

We used to play in the streams and make dams with stones to try and stop the stream flowing!!

I spent a lot of time playing on my own (my sister was 9 yrs older and left home at 16, I used to play with the home shopping catalogues, and I stole a pack of record cards from my dad's office and made cards up for make believe people. And kept records of everything they bought from the catalogue. THey all had different stories too, so bought different types of things. Each week they got more money to buy things. The amount of money they got each week was determined by which page the catalogue was randomly opened on! I must have been bored!

I used to make 'cakes' with mud and water which I would mix with a stick in a bucket in the garden, and then I would pack it into these breeze blocks my dad had, and leave them in the sun to 'bake'

I used to dress my dog up as a baby and wheel her round in my old fashioned pram ... she was a cav king charles spaniel and was as dippy as I evidently was!

I also used to set up pretend 'show jumping' courses in our back garden and make the same poor dog follow me around over the jumps.

Countless 'shows' in the lounge for my mum and auntie and other assorted people, usually helped out by my best friend - sometimes it was a puppetshow, sometimes it was us singing dressed up as something crazy and mad, but they always started off with us behind the sofa for some reason.

I also used to dress up as an astronaut a lot if I recall - and pretend I was flying to the moon.

I used to share 'love notes' with the boy next door - we'd hold up signs up at our bedrooms windows which were almost dead opposite each other and with only a driveway between the houses. We'd arrange to 'meet at the window' at certain times after we'd both gone to bed.... His name was Spencer....

Me and my friend were convinced we had the phone number of morten harket from Aha and used to go to her house at lunchtime and ring this number over and over hoping he'd answer - if we did get someone picking up we'd ask for Morten and were told over and over 'there is no one this house called morten' .... feck knows whose number it as but we must have driven them mad. I also was caught out telling that same friend that I thought her brother was really nice looking (he was about 10 years older than us) but that he had a square head - he was stood in the doorway, I was mortified.

God, haven't thought about these things for years!!

We used to sit up in the back of the car, facing backwards and waving like maniacs at the driver behind, singing our song which went "Waving to the driver behind, waving to the driver behind, yeh, we're waving to the driver behind, we're waving to the driver behind."

We had a swing in our back garden and my sis and I would take it in turns to lie on the floor, face upwards, directly under the swing seat, whilst the other would swing over them, seeing how close our feet could get to the lying down persons face without hitting it.- madness!

We had full length curtains in the sitting room, ans we would get hold of one side and then spin round and round until we were completely wrapped inside the curtains, many times causing the curtain clips to break from the strain - mum not impressed.

We would also do headstands on the sofa against the wall, ended up with footprints all over the wallpaper.

Oh, how these have made me laugh!

When I was at junior school my friend Sharon and I used to hate playing netball. We used to play horses at one end of the court instead. So of course, finally one day the ball is speeding across the court towards me, Miss Goldsmith (think Joyce Grenfell, this was 1960's Surrey) yelling "Maxie Max, CATCH THE BALL DEE-AR" whilst I am oblivious and clip-clopping round in circles with Sharon and making neighing sounds. So the ball went flying past my head (probably with me looking up with a surprised 'eh?' look on my face) and Miss Goldsmith going apoplectic at me for not making any effort to catch it - duh, how could I catch the ball whilst controlling my palamino stallion??????

On a slightly more sombre note, my mum used to have big boxes of wool delivered, the boxes were as big as us kids and my favourite game was to run up and down our very long lawn holding the box out behind me so that it filled with air (I know, weird) so, running up the garden one day, turning round behind to see the box inflated my kid brother shouted out "look out!" so I turned round to see what I was supposed to be looking out for and ran straight into the rabbit run, all sharp chicken wire and ripped most of my chin off, I was about 4 at the time and still have the scar!

Ahhh we used to make dams all the time!! Brilliant. And dens in the woods. And used to think it was the same woods as the Magic Faraway Tree!!!

These are hilarious. I've remembered so many whilst reading these.

When our cousin was over for dinner we discovered after dinner that the left over spaghetti stuck to the wall when you threw it. Fast forward 15 minutes when mum comes back in the room and there's a pan of spaghetti stuck to the wall and ceiling.

After learning about the evaporation/rain cycle at school I tried leaving lots of little pots of water in the garden and told all our neighbours that it will rain tomorrow because of my water evaporating.

Also did the garage sale thing.

I once set up my microphone and a cassette player at the end of the garden and broadcast a whole radio show. I then went and knocked on some neighbours doors to ask how they thought the show went. They couldn't deny knowing of it's existence because I had posted leaflets advertising the show through their doors the night before. It's sheer coincidence I now share my name with a famous DJ!

I got a bit carried away with the doll thing and really pretended my real life new born doll (named Dominic). I then told a school friend abut my baby and when she came home from school with me one day I tried for the whole evening to pretend my doll was a real baby. It was only when the doll fell out of the pram and all the way down the hill that my friend told me she knew my baby wasn't real.

I got up to lots of mischief with my pony when a kid. Once fell off and couldn't find the pony for an hour, but was too scared to tell any adults.We once found an abandoned chicken at the stables. I decided to take it home and set up a chicken coup in the garden using some straw bales, an old fire place and goal posts. Mum wasn't too impressed to find this when she got home. The Alsatian was quite excited by it though!! Paxo the chicken went to live at the stables for another couple of years.

My absolute favourite though is when I was 9 I was meant to take my hamster, Toffee, into school for show and tell. Very excited by this prospect I woke up extra early to practice our 'tricks'. At 6am I went to get Toffee out of her cage but she was a little cold and lifeless. Panicked, I ran into my mum and dad's room but there was no-one there and the bed was made. I ran downstairs and picked up the phone, but this was before the days of mobiles and I only knew 3 numbers, my nan my mum's friend and 999. I called 999 and explained to the operator that my hamster was dying. The operator thought I said my mum was dying. As I went to explain that it was my hamster my mum came home, she had been dropping my dad at the station which is a 2 minutes drive away. It dawned on me I shouldn't have called the police and just put the phone down. Told mum was was happening and she started to try to revive poor Toffee by blowing into a syringe. Then there was a knock on the door it was 2 policemen who soon realised that it was infact a hamster and not my mum who was dying. One had to walk out of the room because he was crying with laughter, he also canceled the ambulance which was on it's way and tried to find a vet. the other was really sweet and comforted me when my mum announced that Toffee had, after urinating on her hand, gone to heaven at only 7 months old. Over the next 2 years I had over 10 hamsters, the longest lasted about 4 months. Mum even paid £200 for a post mortem on a hamster to try and work out why they kept dying. Anyway the hamster was the 'test' before I was allowed a pony, so god only knows how I passed that!

Did the nest thing/perfume thing too

Doctors and Nurses

I used to gaze out of the coach window mournfully on the way back from school (the coach's radio used to be on) and pretend I was in a music video!

Me and 3 other kids on my street had a club in my wendyhouse where our names were our actual names but read backwards. We also had a secret language called the "Pirate language" where you added an O between all letters(where possible). So Hello, how are you? would be Hohelollolo, hohowow arore yoyou? Complicated indeed, but I cant still speak it pretty fluently..?

I trained my pony as an accomplice to nick apples and cherries..I used to stand on his back and then we shared the haul.

My friend and I once collected buckets of snails to begin a snailfarm..we were going to sell the snails to the French. We kept the snails in our garage where they (somehow)promptly escaped overnight and (felt like i anyway) multiplied. My dad went mad when he saw the hundreds of snails all over the car/freezer/BBQ and it took us days to find them all again.

I'mom hunongogrory anondod soshohalollol momakoke sosomome lolounonchoh nonawow.

I think I did most of these!

Perfume.

'Speaking French' (and teaching it to my brother, knowing it wasn't - that should have gone in the lies thread).

Plays - we used to tie teddies to string and dangle them through the banisters of the gallery on the first floor above the hall when my parents had parties.

After said parties I'd squeeze lemon ovet the remaining dry roasted peanuts (often in ashtrays) and eat them. Nice.

Play in derelict pigstys.

Dissect (sp) dead rats with twigs outside my dad's study (outside door at least!).

My friend and I used to go to 'the beavers' - a part of the brook near her house where I think we played with imaginary beavers.

The corker was probably climbing down a cliff without telling anyone where I was going and without any safety equipment. I did that a number of times, and when I look at it now I can see that it was incredibly dangerous - it was very, very steep.

Kids are hiarious (apart from when doing life-threatening things).

Just remembered...me and my sister tied scarves to the bannisters and swung about playing Tarzan. We also used to zoom down the staircse in old skool sleeping bags. My sister once put me head first in a sleeping bag, zipped me up then dragged me around the house and I had to guess where we were. She left me outside in the drivewway!

Your hamster story just had me crying with laughter!

Your hamster story just had me crying with laughter!

My sister and I used to share baths. We would take all our Barbies and Kens in with us and make them have diving competitions off the bathroom blinds. When we got a little older these diving competitions usually ended up in the winning Barbie's prize being a 'snog' and possibly, if she was very lucky, a bit of 'bump and grind' with a Ken.

We used to go on camping holidays with two other families and when us kids were supposedly all in bed asleep the adults would start drinking. Four of us kids started going on midnight walks around the campsites, generally thinking we were cool, especially as we wouldn't let the two younger girls come along with us. One time, when I was about 12, we were larking about near the toilet block when one of the dads approached. We all legged it behind some conifers next to a duck pond so that we wouldn't be seen, only for one of the lads to do a massive skid on a muddy patch and end up half in the pond, covered in duck poo. We were laughing so hard I wet myself ?. Cue angry reactions, (and I'm sure, later hilarity), from the parents when we sheepishly arrived back at the tents, two of us with soaking pyjamas, mine smelling of wee and his covered in duck poo.

I have a vague memory of playing Doctors and Nurses with a school friend at her house when I was very small. I believe a pine cone was inserted up somebody's foo foo, but I can't remember whether I was the inserter or the insertee. Thankfully I am no longer in touch with said school friend so embarrasment is easily avoided.

Oh, and when I was a kid I really didn't like vegetables but was forced to sit at the dining room table until I had finished them, while everyone else went back into the living room. I came up with several solutions to this, including feeding peas covered in tomato ketchup to my cat, persuading/bullying my sister into eating my carrots for me, and worst of all, making a little kitchen roll parcel of sprouts and hiding it behind a cushion on an chair until I could come back later and put them surreptitiously in the bin. Only I sometimes forgot and eventually my trick was discovered when my mum came across a furry green package melded to the chair upholstery and stinking to high heaven. I was in sooo much trouble and the chair bore a stain as long as we had it.