Alicornutopia

BlueSkySprite wrote:

Kappa wrote:I am really enjoying all of the adorable childhood stories in this thread :D

Yay! Me too!

They make me so jealous

Not so much a recreational thing as the others that people are coming up with, but that might be a plus: Starting when I was maybe eleven or twelve, every so often when my parents were driving home from an errand with me and/or my brother in the car, they'd ask one of us to navigate home, expecting us to recognize and/or remember enough of the route to do that. There's a few different ways that could play out - for me it was mostly just really unpleasant and anxiety-making, but a kid who had a bit better of a sense of direction/less of a tendency to zone out when there's nothing particularly interesting going on (i.e. in the back of the car on the way to somewhere) could take the opportunity to pick a scenic or otherwise interesting route or try to get their adult to go somewhere other than home, for example.

My parents used to make me recite my address, phone number and their names when driving back from my grandma's house.

Which I see now as a really good idea!

Me three! BlueSkySprite's childhood is cutest.

Some other tidbits from my childhood that I thought of:

• I would borrow my uncle's video camera and set it up to make nature documentaries in which I acted out various animals I had invented, arranging his furniture in various ways to create habitats for myself.
• In kindergarten, a group of kids formed a Peter Pan club. I failed to make friends with them when I pointed out that "right" is a relative term and so any star could be the "second star to the right".
• I was invited to the birthday party of a girl in my class, which was an extravagant affair involving gymnastic lessons and a huge scavenger hunt and a bunch of other fun stuff.
• I got an Easy Bake Oven and made up my own cake recipe from scratch. Unfortunately, while I got the rest of the recipe fairly balanced, I knew that cake batter always called for two eggs, so I ended up with something much more like a chocolate omelette than a chocolate cake.
• We had a couple female cats which weren't spayed, and had several adventures when they got pregnant and had kittens. One had her kittens and hid them in a pile of firewood outside and we almost didn't find them before we moved to a different state. My mom then had the ordeal of trying to drive a Uhaul full of two children, a cat, and a litter of kittens across several states. Another time, our cat made a nest under a desk in the house and we thought she was giving birth so we started videotaping her. It turned out she just had to make a really big poop.
• My dad wanted to foster my artistic talents, so he bought me some oil paints. I used them to paint my hands and forearms green, then was surprised when they didn't immediately dry and I couldn't touch anything. My mom had to put me in the bathtub and wash me down with turpentine.
• My mom told us that there was a "house fairy" who was like the tooth fairy, but lived in the vacuum cleaner and would give us candy if we did our chores. I noticed that while my aunt was visiting, I got extra candy, and became skeptical about the house fairy. I set up my stuffed animals in my bed to look like my sleeping form, then climbed on top of a tall wardrobe in my bedroom to try to catch the "house fairy" in the act. The next day, my mother almost called the cops because she couldn't find me and thought I'd run away. My brother found me asleep on top of the dresser.
• I was invited over to my friend's house for Passover, which was new to me since my family is culturally Catholic.
• I would have long debates with my uncle, who was a fruitarian, over the limits of his diet (he wouldn't eat anything if it involved killing an animal or a plant, so he was basically limited to fruits and seeds and other things that were 'made to be eaten'). I would ask him if it was okay to eat a part of an animal, like if you got a lizard tail, and whether fungi or protists counted as alive. I managed to convince him to expand his diet to include pickles, lemonade, certain ethically produced dairy products, breads, very simple pizzas, and also cucumber avocado sushi.

A possible thing you guys could do is look up home videos of children on youtube, you might find some cute inspiration there.

... and also cucumber avocado sushi.

o_0

You all have much more adorable childhoods than me. I do have one good snippet, though:

My uncle lived with my family when I was small, and frequently had babysitting duty. His favorite ways to keep I and my sister occupied were
a)shaving, which is inexplicably fascinating to small children and
b) tell installments of a long series of stories starring the crew of the Starplane, flown by Pilot Captain Uncle Jack and his niece and nephew, who had our names, but backward. These got more and more involved the more of them he'd told, with us adding weird details and him keeping them as part of the little world. A lot of it were about places near where we lived, too.

Let's see... a lot of what I got up to as a kid is somewhere between impractical and outright negligent for a child with Bell-standard coordination problems. Although you can make a proper story out of somebody slipping while crossing a scree slope on a backpacking trip, badly cutting their knee and thigh on the sharp rocks, and needing to be evacuated by helicopter (that was my dad, not me; he was all right a few weeks later). Not actually all that much of my childhood was "cute" but there was a lot of it anyhow.

At-home / in-my-head things:

• My parents and friends from back then have the most hilarious / embarrassing stories about just how I treated religion, back when I had no idea that people actually took that stuff seriously and I was too young to have noticed the social consequences of it. This included things like
  • Explaining to friends (circa age five) that my imaginary friend (who had been more-or-less made up on the spot) was just as real as theirs (the Christian God).
  • Thinking (and occasionally talking) about how the picture-book version of the start of Genesis that somebody had given me was not only obvious fiction, it wasn't even good fiction. Nobody's motivations made sense and where did God come from anyhow and why were people so different from one another if we all descended from a single couple? Bear in mind I was around five here too; I thought kids time-traveling to play with dinosaurs was a reasonably plausible thing by comparison.
  • We had a bible in the house, even though nobody in the family was notably religious (mom's parents were, somewhat) and it was therefore essentially never opened. Most of my friends' families were various sorts of Christian; they had bibles too. I once saw a hotel-provided bible in a room we stayed in. My conclusion from all this: bibles were a mandatory part of any residence.
  • Being "kicked out" (made to go sit by myself) of Sunday School once (I only ever went twice, for reasons that I think had to do with family friends?) for pointing out that the Old Testament God was a total jerk.
• Back to the books thing: explaining to various adults how things like the Magic Treehouse worked (I can no longer remember, but I had it worked out to a better degree than "it's magic!"). I was maybe seven?
• Picking up a pocket calculator (after I had learned basic multiplication and division, but not yet covered them in school; six or seven?) and figuring out on my own what square roots were, though I didn't know what they were called.
• Coming home from third grade one day to find a Book on my computer desk (yes, I had my own PC at age 8; a hand-me-down from my dad). Book was over two inches thick, each page was about the size of a sheet of letter paper, on the cover it said "Learning Microsoft QuickBasic 4.5" (WTF why does my spellchecker know "QuickBasic" and correct my capitalization of it?!?) and in the back there was a 5.25" floppy. I loved that Book and it got an awful lot of use.
• Designing, and sketching, maglev electric cars and their corresponding roads. This was closer to age 10. They came out looking a bit like Star Trek runabouts, except the "warp nacelles" were diagonally-oriented magnetic rails that either kept cars in their lanes or could have their polarity quickly reversed to cause the car to hop over the lane boundaries. Technically I guess a lot of this happened on the school bus, but it could have been anywhere.
• All the usual blanket forts/floor is lava/etc. games. Funny how common those are!
• Legos, Erector sets, electronic breadboards of varying complexity, crystal radio kits, and so on. In case you hadn't guessed yet, I was a TOTAL NERD and OK with that!
• Once I was old enough to use the blender unsupervised, making smoothies (usually out of frozen blackberries, yogurt, milk, and honey) every day when I came home from school.
• Picking blackberries with my dad and sister in the park across the street from our house. We would bring back literal buckets full of berries, and that's not counting the ones that had spoiled our dinner appetites.
• Bringing home literally armfuls of library books - sometimes so many that they weighed too much for me to carry easily even in a bag - and reading them all within a month.
• Making all kinds of things - airplanes, sailboats, houses, crossbows, etc. - out of tongue depressors, hot glue guns, a huge roll of construction paper, and string.
• Making friends with the kid who had cerebral palsy and was stuck in a powered wheelchair, because he spent so much time just *thinking* that even though his speech was hard to understand he was way more interesting to talk to than most kids my age.

Lots of stuff at / around school, too:

• Going to the library every recess that I was allowed to. It's not that I disliked the outdoors, just that 1st-3rd graders weren't allowed to check out more than one book at a time, and I read too fast for that to be practical.
• Going to the library at recess and playing the computer games there, the ones with flash cards that you had to solve in order to arm and fuel your airplane, etc. (multiplication / division flash cards, because otherwise math got boring in second grade).
• Propping up my binder or other large book-like object on my desk (open, spine facing the teacher) so I could hide and read a novel behind it while the teacher droned about carrying the one in double-digit addition. In retrospect, pretty sure the teacher knew; I wasn't exactly subtle.
• Fourth grade teacher introducing us to Greek mythology; much of the class promptly started playing "Greek gods and goddesses" during recess.
• Pulling all-nighters to do entire month-long projects in the 24 hours before they were due, as early as 4th grade. (I've probably done my cognitive abilities permanent harm from so many all-nighters).

... on that note, I reallllly need to go to sleep now. There's so much more I could write though, I haven't even gotten to the travel stuff!

My mother dyed her hair when I was 8 or so and I couldn't recognise her anymore and I didn't know who she was.

CB's reactions to religion reminded me of the best tiny-Villain story. You can judge whether it's cute for yourself.

My parents were never religious. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a fervently believing Catholic all her life. When I was about 4, my grandfather (her husband) died, and we flew out for the funeral. Naturally, we're in the front row for the service, my grandmother is bawling her eyes out, and the priest is going through the traditional rigmarole. Then he gets to the part where he talks about Jesus's resurrection. And I burst out laughing, "Isn't that funny, Dad? He said he CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD!"

Yup, born atheist right here.

In the vein of Born Atheist stories: I'm told that when I was a very small child my parents took me to a wedding in a church, and the small children were all ushered off to a room somewhere to be kept busy with some manner of religious instruction while the grown-ups did sophisticated grown-up things. I'm told I came rocketing out of there yelling at the top of my lungs, "MOMMY! DADDY! THEY'RE TRYING TO BRAINWASH ME!"

Also on the topic of Born Atheism, I was about 6-7 and at the service for my grandfather's funeral . I couldn't actually read Hebrew, so I was reading in English on a different page of the sidur, and saw that it said that god brought life to the dead, and I eventually was brought out of the room because I was kicking up a giant fuss, saying that our god was evil if he didn't bring my grandpa back right now.