Children under the age of 11 never cease to amaze me. The unabashed and occasionally brutal honesty with which they live their lives is something I truly admire. Once you reach middle school, you're suddenly supposed to know better than to ask a plump old man with a beard if he's Santa Claus or tell your older sister she does look like Sarah Palin with her new specs. Before the regrettable entrance into the awkward middle school years, you're essentially free to say and do whatever pops into your premature noggin. When I think back on the days I spent trying to jump the farthest off of the swing set at recess or defeat my arch nemesis (a.k.a. my BFF) in Scategories Junior, I slowly begin to realize just how bizarre and hysterical kids really are.
As the youngest in the family, my older sister and brother obviously tortured me endlessly. Even after revealing to my dear mother all of the battle wounds I accumulated by the end of the day, she still seemed to believe my sister and brother had a good handle on the whole babysitting job. When I look back, I realize some days were just downright horrific. For example, my sister forced me to eat an entire box of mac n' cheese (mind you, I had the stomach of a small eight-year-old) or else she was not going to take me to go see who my homeroom teacher for next year was. I don't know about you, but having to wait an extra day was the equivalent to waiting seven years. Other days, though, I can look back on now and chuckle. Here's a brief list of a few quirky little pranks my siblings and I used to pull on each other to give you an idea of how ridiculously great children can be:
The Polaroid Incident
Picture this. I'm four years old. I'm lying in my bed taking a little catnap and innocently dreaming I had won the golden ticket and got to go on a tour of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I awake from my slumber, content and in dire need of some chocolate. I go downstairs to make myself a fat bowl of chocolate ice cream with Oreos when BAM! Taped in the middle of the fridge is a Polaroid snapshot of my bare buttocks. The little scoundrels had taken it while I was dreaming of a chocolate waterfall and Ever Lasting Gobstoppers! Did they get in trouble? Certainly not. My parents laughed. And I pouted in my room for the rest of the night.
The Odoriferous Baseball Cards
My brother and his friends smelt 99.5 percent of the time like a combination of sausage, cheese, Doritos and farts. Each time he had them sleep over, we would have to do some serious work sanitizing any room they had been in. Obviously I would not let them into my precious bedroom, so they employed a new tactic to get their stank in there. What did they do? They farted on baseball cards and slipping them under my door. At the time, I was pissed and screamed for my mom to make them stop as I sat huddled in the opposite corner of my room with my nose plugged. Today, I realize I would never be able to think up a brilliantly awful prank like that. Pure genius. Plus, at age 20 it wouldn't be hilarious anymore—it would simply piss people off.
Bathing Beauty
It was the summer. My sister was about four or five years old at the time. It gets pretty toasty up in my parent's house because we don't have central air, so my sister decides she's going to go lay outside for awhile to get some fresh air. The rest of us come out to join her, and what do we find? Her sprawled out on a lawn chair in the front yard with nothing but her birthday suit on and some hot pink heart-shaped sunglasses. Only a five-year-old could expose themselves like that in public and rather than receive a reprimanding, have their mom take a million pictures.
I could go on and on about the joys of being a child when virtually everything you do is either adorable or admissible because you're ""only a kid,"" but I think you've caught my drift. All I'm looking forward to now as finals week creeps up on me is watching the kids I babysit for this summer pull stunts like these and say things that I would be shunned in society for saying now. Like asking their pregnant mom why she's getting so plump these days.
Send your crazy childhood stories to Rebecca at alt2@wisc.edu.
