My Best Running Friend (BRF) and I have little contests between us from time to time. One is to see who can get the closet to an empty tank of gas before refueling. I can no longer play the game because my fancy new car tells me exactly how many miles I can drive before running out of gas. Relying on the indicator light alone was way more exciting. Our other contest is around the shocking things our teen girls text us and then do not respond to follow up texts. She has been the winner of this contest with her daughter (I will keep the actual text message confidential, but it was a doozy).
On our Sunday walk, we were talking about the crazy things we did as kids. And so I shared the time I killed my brother. We were playing baseball in our front yard. I was swinging the bat to warm up, and he walked right into my swing. I hit him square in the temple and he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. I immediately ran inside and screamed to my mom that I had killed Kevin. My BRF said that story is the contest winner for sure. Note: he was unconscious, not dead, just for the record.
This memory got me thinking about what a hot mess I was a child. The blog post picture was of me at my Kindergarten graduation. The photographer was super creepy, so I cried and refused to let him take my picture. The entire class had their pictures taken as I watched to make sure he was not going to do anything creepy during the photo shoot. Kindergarten will be documented for all of eternity with my puffy post crying eyes.
My poor parents. My brain was always moving and so was my body. And impulse control was not a big priority to me. Here are 3 more memories that should prove that if labels were given out the way they are now, I would have had a lot of acronyms by my childhood name.
The time I shot my brother. He used to shoot the squirrels that stole my mom’s bird seed with a BB gun and explained that the BBs bounced off the target but pellets would actually penetrate the target. I decided to test out this theory one afternoon. The logic did not make sense to me. So I put in a pellet and pumped the gun as many times as I could and aimed it at his left leg and shot. Guess what folks? I was right. That pellet bounced right off of his leg. My parents were not as interested in my scientific finding as I was.
The time I ruined dinner. I was always dancing as a child. I mean, always. In the grocery store when my mom would tell me to stop tap dancing and walk, I would walk on my hands. How she did not strangle me daily is still a mystery. I used a similar strategy one night at dinner when she asked me to take the plates of spaghetti to the table. Instead of just walking the first plate to the table like a normal person, I decided to pirouette to the table. On my first twirl, the spaghetti noodles slide off the plate and splatted onto the dining room chair. I remember my mom taking a deep breath and calmly saying “that is your plate.”
The time I almost burned down the house. Remember those Easy Bake Ovens that were super cool in the 1980s that made gross little cakes with God knows what kinds of artificial ingredients? I loved mine. I wanted to show off my baking skills at a sleepover one night and decided that the rule of not using it my room could be overlooked just once. My friend and I made our little cake, put the icing on it and gobbled it up way past our bedtime. Imagine my surprise when we went to put the oven back in the box when I found a perfectly round burnt piece of carpet. I quickly came up with a plan… put a rug on top of it so my parents wouldn’t find out. The only problem was that it was not a natural place to put a rug, and the only one I could find was a really formal one that did not match my Holly Hobbie room décor.
Was anyone else a 1980s high maintenance wild child like me? Share some crazy stories with me.