Here’s something funny: As a kid, I always thought...

Hi everyone :)

I heard on the radio once that people share funny things they used to think as kids. It’s totally hilarious.
Do you guys want to give it a try?
Then I’ll go first with two examples!

1. As a kid, I always thought that parents could take out as much money as they wanted from an ATM.
Whenever I didn’t get something, I always thought they were just too lazy to go get more money.

2. My mom once told me (when I was about 3) that at a wedding, the man gives the woman a new name.
I then decided I’d never get married... I was too scared that he’d call me Brunhilde, Berta, Olga, or something like that. (Note: If anyone here has one of those names—please don’t hold it against me; those were the names of my older kindergarten teacher and my great-grandmothers. As a kid, “old-lady names” are just unimaginable to you.)
It wasn’t until 4 or 5 years later that I finally figured that out ;)


What funny things did you think as a kid? Or what funny thoughts have your kids or grandkids come up with so far? :)

You won’t believe it, but 60 years ago I still believed in the stork and would put sugar cubes on the windowsill so I’d get a little sibling. That was my biggest wish back then—one that never came true. Because my mom was already almost 43 when I was born.

Of course, I also believed in the Easter Bunny and the Christ Child. And in St. Nicholas.

When I was 6 years old, he came to see me on December 6. He was huge and dressed very elegantly—just like St. Nicholas, with a bishop’s mitre and that staff in his hand. He had a thick golden book with him and then read to me everything I’d gotten up to during the year. Of course, I was amazed at how he knew all that.

To win his favor, I wrote my first poem back then. I was just in my first year of school. I even still remember the first three lines:
“Dear, kind St. Nicholas,
come into our house,
unpack your good things...”

My fear of him was, of course, unfounded, because he brought wonderful gifts.

@Mowi: Well, of course I believed in all those characters at one point, too :) But only until I was about 5 or so.
I grew up with an older brother and also had a few cousins who were two years older than me. As soon as they found out the truth, I knew it too, of course.

And the evil St. Nicholas himself once shattered my belief in him...

Every year, St. Nicholas and Knecht Ruprecht would come to our house—we were all so excited!
At some point, he asked me, “So, do you know who St. Nicholas was?”
Me: “But you’re St. Nicholas!”
  He: “But I’m not the real one!”
Of course, St. Nicholas isn’t really the same as Santa Claus, the Christ Child, or the Easter Bunny... But do you really have to shatter the illusion for a 3- or 4-year-old? :D 

When our son was about 3 or 4 years old, we were driving home one evening at dusk. He didn’t want to go home yet and was whining a little. As we drove past a pasture full of cows, I said, “Look, the cows are already really tired and are about to go to sleep!”
He looked at me with wide eyes and asked, “Does the farmer come and tuck them in then?”
I thought that was such a cute idea, and I’ve never forgotten it to this day (he’s 18 now).
The things that go on in kids’ heads....

Well, luckily I didn’t have any older siblings who took that belief away from me. I believed in the Christ Child and the like for a very long time, and I’m still grateful for that today. As you can see, I could even write back then.

However, the fact that they scared us into behaving—I don’t think that’s so great anymore.

When I was pregnant with our son—he’s 15 now, and his sister was almost four at the time—there was a commercial on TV all the time where a kid wanted to “exchange” their sibling. Maybe some of you remember it.

I took my daughter with me to an abdominal ultrasound ;-) My doctor at the time explained everything to her—“Look, that’s the little head…”—and asked her if she wanted to know whether she was going to have a little sister or a little brother… She answered “Yes,” hoping she’d get the little sister she wanted… The doctor told her she was going to have a little brother. She looked at me, then at the doctor, and said, “Can we exchange him?”

Even today, I still tell her—now 19—this story—because today she’s happy to have a brother ;-)

For many years, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the whole business of how babies are made. When I was about five, my mom told me that babies grow in the belly and then are born, and that she, too, had once been in my grandma’s belly. And somehow I just couldn’t imagine how she had fit in there. So the idea that my mom had once been a baby, too, was still unthinkable to me back then.

As a child, I believed for a very long time that a monster lived in my closet. And even today, I can’t sleep if the closet door is open, and any open closet door makes me nervous. I mean my clothes closet—there was never a monster in the other closets.

When my kids were little, they were also afraid of the monster in the closet. So we stuffed everything we could find into the closet until nothing else would fit. And then I told them, “Any monster that could still fit in there now is so small that it’s actually most afraid of itself.”
Often, they’d check the closet again in the evening to make sure there really wasn’t any room for monsters. And their fear would quickly fade away.

And I also used to believe that the “keys to heaven” were the flowers that the deceased needed to unlock the door to heaven. When they bloomed, my sister and I would always pick lots of them and place them in little jars at the various graves so that the deceased wouldn’t have to search for the keys for too long.

As a child, I believed that if you ate a (cherry) pit, a tree would grow in your belly ;-)

All things that adults told me and I believed them (Incredible what you believe as a childeverything you believe)

• That the man in the moon has a long ladder he could use to fetch children who were still outside in the dark.

• Grape seeds have to be eaten, otherwise you become stupid.
• If you cross your eyes on the hour, your eyes will stay that way.
  
• May rain makes me grow.

Apparently I stood in the May rain a lot and didn’t cross my eyes on the hour, I haven’t been to the moon yet either, and I didn’t turn out soooo... stupid, so I did everything right :) :)

Best, Petra

:D
Your stories are awesome.
There’s just nothing better than the things children think :)

Ohhh, I feel the same way as Petra :-)
The adults (especially my grandma) told me some real nonsense!

- drinking tap water gives you lice in your stomach
- if you swallow apple or cherry pits, either apple or cherry trees will grow in your stomach
- and this is how I know the one about crossing your eyes: if you cross your eyes and press on your temples at the same time, your eyes will stay that way
- if you swallow chewing gum, you’ll get appendicitis

OMG!!! Although I have to admit that I actually did everything in secret, pressing on my temples while crossing my eyes was something I didn’t dare try until my early 20s :-))))

Best, Marion

I didn’t actually believe it, but the adults always told us that if you swallowed gum, your stomach would stick together…
Of course, I “compulsively” had to try it out, and, what can I say…I still swallow my gum today, and my stomach is as unstuck as ever ;)

As a kid, I believed that the desert and the jungle were right next to each other—so that they bordered each other exactly, with the desert on the right and the jungle on the left (or vice versa)—with a perfectly straight line between them and no transition. And lions live in the desert, tigers in the jungle—and they never meet because one species doesn’t venture into the other’s territory...

Our eldest was sitting in front of the TV at about 4½ years old, while the Sandman was on. Suddenly, with her eyes wide open, she looked up and said in amazement, “Those are just puppets!”...up until then, she’d thought the characters were real living creatures...

@Nina, talking about dolls reminds me of something from my childhood: A neighbor of mine who was four years older claimed to have invented an elixir of life that could bring her doll to life. I was already 7 at the time, but I still believed it a little bit and dreamed of bringing one of my dolls to life.
Oh, and when I was really little, I believed that everything shown on TV was actually inside the TV itself.

How wonderful—what a lovely idea!

I just couldn’t understand how all those little people and characters got into the TV. So I believed that they all lived together inside the TV. Of course, there was a huge space problem, and how did they keep getting in and out through that narrow cable? I really racked my brain over it.

Best wishes,
Elke

When our daughter was about 2 or 3 years old, she once said to my mother-in-law, completely astonished: “That show’s on your TV, too, Grandma! It’s on ours, too!”
She probably thought the characters actually lived inside the TV and couldn’t understand that they were on Grandma’s TV as well...

“When you cross your eyes, your eyes get stuck”—that was one of those scary stories. As a kid, I slowly worked my way up to trying it until I was really sure that nothing actually got stuck :-)

When I was a kid, I was told that animals can talk at midnight on Christmas Eve. So I always tried to stay awake until midnight because I really wanted to talk to our dachshund. But I never managed it—I always fell asleep before then. And then I had to wait another whole year...

I know that thing about animals, too—I always wanted to go on vacation where “foxes and hares say good night to each other”; I was told it was especially beautiful there.

I believed a black hand lived under my bed that would come out if I didn’t clean up.

Also, as a kid, I believed girls didn’t fart.
Greetings, Klaus

☺☺☺ The thing about farting is true too ☺☺☺

When our youngest (now 18) was about 3 years old and a very picky eater, we told her that if you eat mangoes, you’ll be a good kisser. 
To demonstrate: My husband and I put a piece of mango in our mouths and gave each other a kiss.

She then tried it out, and sure enough, every piece of mango was followed by a kiss.
She believed it for a long time and kept trying it over and over.
Today, she loves mangoes more than anything.
And as for whether she’s a good kisser, I don’t know—I’ll have to ask her boyfriend :-)

In the basement of my parents' apartment building, there is a small cubbyhole that runs along under the last flight of stairs.
This cubbyhole gets narrower the farther it goes and eventually ends in the middle of nowhere. 
As a child, other kids told me a genie lived there. 
Back then I didn't know what a genie was, but I imagined something absolutely terrifying. 
The result was that for many, many years I couldn't go into the basement without being scared. 
I always sang loudly to calm myself down. 
Even today I still don't like basements, even though I stopped believing in genies a long time ago. ^^