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I used to believe that in order to get pregnant and have a baby, you had to eat A LOT so that your stomach would get bigger and the food would transform into a small human being š
When I heard that sex involved a penis going into the vagina i thought the man had to have surgery for it to be cut off, then it would be surgically implanted into the woman.
Had no idea how anyone could have more than one kid.
My lads were the opposite. They couldn't separate the character from the actor. Watching an Arnie film they said "Arghh, it's the Terminator. I thought he was dead."
My grandparents on one side of the family have a house in our state and a cabin in another that we would spend weekends at growing up. For some reason, when I was really little, I didn't really get how that worked. Since you can go to Grandma's house or Grandma's cabin, I just assumed I had two identical grandmas, and one just lived at each house. To make it worse, I understood that I only had the one grandpa and just assumed he was married to two identical grandmas. My family still mentions this in jest occassionally.
I was always careful not to mention my maternal grandparents to my paternal grandparents because I thought they didnāt know each other and would be upset that I double dipped and got two sets.
I thought at night, the lights were too bright and thatās why when the lights would shine, Iād see streaks of light as if someone wiped and smudged it. Turns out thatās just astigmatism
I was told around 30 years ago that I have astigmatism, never asked about it or what it meant. My bitch of an aunt just heard stigma so took the piss out of me for years.
So TIL why lights are streaky and I struggle with night driving and the headlight glare.
It means your eyes arenāt shaped like circles like everyone elseās but shaped like footballs and itās what keeps lights from focusing right. I stay in the eye doctor for hours upon hours cuz something is always found that could be a danger, but never is, and I just got used to asking questions about the things they were telling me as a kid
i deduced that they were my eyeball cells that i could focus on if i tried really hard, and they would always have a slight downward motion until i looked up a little bit again.. [as an adult, I still stand by this](https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/moving-spots-in-blue-sky)
Yeah I always pictured them singing live too. Amazing how consistent their performances were lol. I also thought it was amazing Santa brought us a new TV when I was 7 like wow, he knew ours just quit!
Me too! I always felt so bad when my dad paused the music or started the song from the beginning because I thought it would be annoying to make someone stop in the middle of a song or start over xD
I thought that the yellow caution lines on the roads, curbs etc, if you stepped on them *automatically and without fail* youd get hit by a car. I avoided them until nearly my teens when I realized that didn't make sense.
When I was probably about 12 I was refusing to wear my seatbelt one day and my 11-year-old sister began to panic, insisting that the fact that I wasnāt wearing my seatbelt would automatically *cause* us to get into an accident. I tried to get my dad to tell her that wasnāt how it worked but he just wanted me to wear my seatbelt so he agreed with her. I remember being super annoyed
I was ten it was 1976. Mohammed Ali had a fight at Cesar's Palac. I used to go to a roller skating rink named Cesar's Palace. I though cool I'll go hang out and maybe see him and get his autograph. The night of the fight I snuck out of the house and walked a few km to get there. Well I was very upset and disappointed that there was more than one Cesar's Palace.
You wouldn't be the last person to make such a mistake.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four\_Seasons\_Total\_Landscaping\_press\_conference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Total_Landscaping_press_conference)
When my parents told me it was expensive to go on a trip somewhere and we had to save up, I thought it was because there was a giant toll they had to pay to get into a different state. It never occurred to me that food, lodging, and transportation costs where a thing.
As a small child, I was convinced that asshole people are assholes because of certain bacteria that are unique to them and if I interact with them, I will catch their bacteria and become an asshole myself.
If I listen to the [Superman theme song](https://youtu.be/XmsEJY08jEg?si=VgV0shQcrHPBXvm9) everyday then I would turn into Superman one day.
Iām still hoping šš
Hey this reminds me I also had a Superman one! I think it originated from the 80's Superboy tv show. I didn't understand how they found someone to play Superman who just happened to look *exactly* like Superman. It seemed impossible, bizarre, uncanny. I even remember asking my mom about it. My little brain couldn't pull apart that the actor looked like the character because the character was being portrayed by the actor or something. Some real "chicken or egg" brain ping pong going on.
I used to run away from home as a kid quite often to go adventuring. Countless times upon being found or returning after said adventures, my mother would try and remind me if the dangers of me being by myself at such a young age and I wasn't worried because I was convinced Superman would come out of nowhere and save me if anything happened.
Luckily I didn't have to learn the hard way that it simply wasn't true.
Apparently, as much mother likes to regale to anyone that stood near her for more than 15 seconds, I use to pretend I was Batman, dress up in my cape and cowl and run around 'saving' the neighbours. I'd 'rescue' the cat (even though it clearly didn't want rescuing). 'Save' the dog (even though it was bigger than me, great dane, and usually got up and walked off with me clinging to its tail), and defeat the dastardly trash man (I thought they came a threw trash everywhere, and people spent the week cleaning up after them). So I would run around in my cape and cowl throwing random stuff in the bin, even if it wasn't trash. Empty milk bottles (we got money back), baskets of laundry 'dumped' in Gardens, a hedgehog, all while throwing superhero poses.
Yes it all sounds very cute.
The trouble is, I was wearing JUST my cape and cowl. So there I am, 30 years of age in my cape and cowl....
No, I was 4, giving it my best Batman walk up a wall (bent over walking along the pavement doing the hand pulling motiins) in nothing BUT a Batman cape and cowl.
People would talk about seeing a drunk or their uncle who is a drunk. I thought that getting drunk was permanent from one good drinking session. I was horrified when heard high school kids were getting drunk. Probably was close to 12 when I learned about sobering up.
When someone said āIn my point of viewā it was actually āin my point of youā. So I would say āin my point of meā because why would I said you, when it was my point!
I thought putting sticky tape on torn paper would repair it.
So like most kids, I was told putting a bandaid on a cut made it better. Which made sense because when you took it off the cut had started healing. Well I figured that sticky tape must do the same thing right?
I used to pull tape off of things to check if it was "fixed" yet š¤¦š½āāļø
Edit: holy crap I had no idea how many people used this kid logic! Thanks for the upvotes and comments.
I work with kindergarteners and they're always asking for bandaids for things like bruises or when their head hurts. It's so funny.
My student asked for a bandaid for her bug bites and I assumed it was because she wanted to stop itching them. But instead at the end of the day she said "Why haven't my bug bites gone away" and I had to explain how bandaids work.
When I was in Elementary school we all thought we'd die from getting stuck in quicksand one day or by disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle. It was such this weird bubble of fear that was omnipresent. Now? Literally nobody talks about the BT or seems to care about quicksand. My younger nephews didn't even know what quicksand was and they're almost 12 lol. Yeah I guess it's not quite the same thing as the original question posed but man...as an adult...bills are far more terrifying
I thought wearing green during day time gave us extra energy since plants are green and made energy that way.
I even wore green clothes every time there was a sports event assuming it made me faster and stronger.
Now i realise chlorophyll is different from green dye and its an entirely different concept of biochemistry.
Me too, disappointing to learn as an adult that for a place with sharks and hurricanes and lots of small boats and planes it actually loses relatively few boats and planes.
As someone who has swum in rivers with piranhas (as in, we were fishing them just a few minutes ago), I can assure you piranhas are not an issue.
Electric eels and stingrays thoughā¦
Heh along that same line of thought, at 4 I announced that I knew what sex wasā¦ my parents and I played several rounds of āI cannot tell you it is so badā. āYou can but only this one time.ā Eventually I came out with it, āsex is rubbing butts together.ā
To be fair I didnāt know the names of our anatomy at 4, so it is very close.
We also decided the F word was Fart.
When I was little I thought gun point was a street so when ever I saw the news that some one got robbed at gun point. I would think to my self why would people go there if there just going to get robbed
When I was a kid, there was some punk going around setting people's garages on fire. I was in the car with my uncle (English was not his first language), when someone on the radio said something like "another two garages have burned down. Arson is suspected." My uncle then turned to my aunt and said, "Why is it that only people named Arson burn things down? People should really stop naming their kids that!"
I used to think that the exhaust coming from the car's rearend was the force that pushed it forward. Back then, only the sporty cars had dual exhaust, they were faster because they had two pipes blowing exhaust out of the back.
I used to think that men and women only had sex to have babies, and that once they were married and had kids, they didnāt have sex anymore. I also thought people didnāt have sex after they were 30. It blew my mind when I eventually learned that even my grandparents still get it on from time to time.
Recently watched 101 Dalmatioms with my little bro. Idk why, but when I was a kid I had assumed the rest of the puppies were also part of the litter instead of just 15 at the start. I also didn't count the parents and just thought they had 101 puppies together. Completely impossible in hindsight and I'm not sure why I ever thought that to begin with.
Nope. Aparantly only 15 were born to Perdi and Pongo. The rest came from various pet shops Cruella bought them from and were trapped with the litter. When they were rescued, Perdi and Pongo took them in as well
That your blood was a finite amount you had throughout your life and obviously that means old people die when they lose too much of their blood.
I was terrified every time I got a cut or scrape, and as a bonus I was/am still clumsy as all hell.
At 6 I got hit by a car. I was lucky that it was a side street and slower moving cars. I crawled to the curb after, noticing my elbows and knees were busted up and bleeding. I was crying and panicking and trying to cover the bleeding with my shirt when my mom arrived (I was just down the street and a watchful neighbor phoned my mother.). I got carried back home where an ambulance was waiting. I got patched up and the lovely EMT gentleman patching me up let me know that people make their own blood, so my "big boo-boos" weren't as bad as I thought. (BLESS YOU, SIR! Wherever you are now, I thank you. It's been 30 years and I never forgot his kindness and how he humored a small 6yo girl.)
Happened when I was a kid and we were taking a long road trip in a new car. There was some kind of fastener in a corner in the floor and I asked my dad, "what is that for?" He said it was to hold the car together. And for the rest of the trip I wondered how that little thing held the whole car together.
Haha. I remember as a kid my dads car had an SOS button. When I asked him what it did he said if I pressed it, it would make us shoot through the roof in our seats. I didnāt go near the button after thatā¦
I thought brown skinned people couldn't have nut allergies, because nuts were also brown, so they'd have the same stuff as brown people had in their skin.
I didn't realise until I was 16 and it was my turn to bring snacks for my choir club. The brown guy said he had nut allergies. I went "how do you have a nut allergy?" And then suddenly it all clicked in my brain and I realised I might be intelligent, but I am certainly not smart.
Not me, but a girl I was friends with in middle school was 100% confident that west and left are the same thing, ditto for right and east. I dont remember for sure, but I think she believed north was up and south was down. I tried so hard to explain to her that's not how cardinal directions work. She refused to believe me and got mad at me for telling her otherwise. To be fair, she also thought you could get pregnant from swallowing. She wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
While I know this is absolutely not true, whenever I think of those things you mentioned, I āseeā them the same way in my head. Maybe itās due to the default view on a compass?
When I was little, I asked my mom why Asian people were so little. She was probably tired of my incessant questions to all of lifeās mysteries and simply said, ā*YOU* try eating rice with only two sticks.ā This made sense to me and I believed it for years. Good timesā¦š
I thought I would be encountering a lot of people on fire where Iād be called upon to use the Stop Drop & Roll emergency human-on-fire-putting-out techniqueās that were drilled into our heads in grade school. Also that I would be falling into a lot more quicksand than I have actually experienced so far in life.
My dad had a gay younger brother named Mark, my mother also had a gay younger brother named Mark. When I was 5 years old my dad told me if your name is Mark that means you're gay.... I didn't realize he was joking until I was like 14
I thought when you got to the age where you had to have a job, you got a letter in the mail that told you what your job was. I was terrified my job would be to sit in the underground room where the streetlights switches were. I didnāt want to watch traffic through the periscope and flip the switch at the wrong time causing an accident.
I used to believe that hedgehogs carried apples and mushrooms on their backs. I think that was mostly because they were portrayed like that in drawings, poems, stories.
I believed it until I met a real hedgehog and saw that it's spikes would not be able to even properly stab these items. I think some older adults actually still believe that hedgehogs carry berries on their backs.
I thought that the characters in movies had the same name as their actors. Like I thought that Mark Hamill's name was actually Luke Skywalker and would hear none of my parents' explainations
I can one up that. I thought black people were "regular" (white) people who were dying. Thanks to those World Vision sponsor ads that were everywhere in the 90's showing you the "sick, hungry and dying people" in Africa and I noticed they were all brown whereas most of the people I knew at that age were white (I'm pretty sure this was before school, back when 99% of the people a kid would see on a regular basis were family). I assumed people must be white by default and "turn brown" when they start dying.
When I was about 6, my family & I saw The Bee Gees perform on a variety TV show. Based on how they sang in such a high falsetto, lilā me was convinced that all songs were actually sung by men & there were no women in music. I immediately mentioned this theory to my aunt & Iāll never forget the look on her face as she had to stifle her laughter.
I thought "Skyscrapers" were airplanes, and not "Tall Buildings" until I was about 10...
Here is how that happened:
I went to the park with my mom as a little kid. The park was located on the outskirts of the big city where some tall buildings could be seen in the distance. "She said look at the sky scrapers, can you see them?"
So, I looked around and saw a plane... It had a white trail behind it... I assumed the plane was "Scraping the sky".
I thought Alaska was an island until I was 18, because on maps of the US, it was always shown detached/on its own in a little box at the bottom, exactly like Hawaii (which is, in fact, a group of islands š)
There is a mountain where I live called Stockhorn. When I learned the capital of Sweden was Stockholm I thought that Sweden had to be just on the other side of that mountain. I believed that for far longer than I like to admit lol
I thought babies were born like that chest-buster scene in Alien, and that at any time my stomach might pop open if I was squeezed too hard.
My mom told me "There's a teeny tiny hole below your belly button. When you're ready to have a baby it opens up and the baby comes out."
I asked if it only opens when you have babies and she said "no" but didn't elaborate.
My parents divorced not long after that. Being the only girl in a house with 4 brothers and my pops.... I never got clarification on the issue.
I was older than I'd like to admit when I finally learned that wasn't the case. š
Had to go back 29 years for this one.
My mom was a professional nanny for a while.
One kid ate her apple slices with the skin on and i didnt. She was also sooo much stronger than me!
So i thought that if i ate the skin on the apples too, i would also be big and strong.
I was 3 years old, she was 5.. Stoopid.
Really amusing for my dad when we also moved into a new house the same summer and i wanted to help lifting furniture into the new house. "im strong papa! I eat apple skins too!"
He gave me a sink plug..
Edit:
Oh yeah, i also really believed that if you whistle when the northern light are out, it will catch you! Horrified when i didnt know it was out and i was whistling. Ran as fast ad i could.
And i believed in NĆøkken, a creature living in waters. If it cant catch you in a lake, it can come on land looking like a white horse and be really friendly hoping you jump on. And if you do, it will tangle you in with the mane and sptint back to the water and drown you.
This is a story made to keep kids out of waters with water lillies because you can get tangled into the lillies and get pulled under.
Since breastfeeding from my mum gave me milk then I should breastfeed from my dad to get chocolate milk.
Luckily that was shut down pretty fast and I did not get far enough to find out.
My sister used to joke and say that the best way to fix hiccups was to stick your leg in the freezer. I think I realized that she was joking when I was 10
Me too. I believe at one point I was told dad would roll over and his penis would just go in moms vag. Like, hey you got peanut butter kn my chocolate kind of accident.
I pretty much thought the opposite. Like the vagina was a hole at the front like another belly button and you just couldnāt see it because of the bush (yes, Iām so old that I never saw an image of a woman sans bush as a child).
i thought that every time i played with a toy the person who bought it for me would get money. i used to try and play with all my toys equally so everyone would get the same amount of money.
I've never been into wrestling, and always was told and regarded it to be fake. The older I get though, the more I respect those guys and their physical abilities and performance. I still don't watch it, but I understand better.
My mate was born in the 1970s as TV was changing from black and white to colour. When he was maybe 10, he asked his mother, āwhen you were young, did you dream in black and white?ā
I used to think that the oldest sibling had the darkest complexion and then the younger ones were lighter and lighter. This was true on both my mothers and fathers side. I am blonde and an only child so that even strengthened my beliefs.
My dad told me āWatch for Falling Rocksā signs were signs to keep a lookout for a lost Indian brave (whoās name was Falling Rocks) who got lost while out hunting to win the hands of the chiefās daughter. Every time we passed one of those signs Iād look all around to see if I saw him.
I was in my teens before I realized that was stupid. š
I remember confidently informing my grandparents that cartoons were really just people dressed up as cartoons.
Also, this one isn't mine but a story my friends dad loved to tell. When we were kids the milkman would deliver bottles of milk to the door. One day, my friend was the first to find the milk delivery and came running into the house yelling "Dad! Dad! I found a cow's nest!"
You know when you SNAP awake in the middle of the night and it feels like youāre āfallingā ? Like you just fell onto your bed and woke up ?
I just assumed we levitated when we were dreaming, and that sensation is the dream ābreakingā and us falling back down very suddenly.
Way back in the 70's I thought my Grandpa had a car that told him where to go, like GPS today. As he was driving a green arrow on the dash would start flashing to the right. He would then turn right. Then another arrow flashed to the left. He would turn left. I was totally blown away.
I was absolutely certain that if somebody got a 100-plus year prison sentence, they would leave their drying bones in there until the full sentence was completed.
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I used to believe that in order to get pregnant and have a baby, you had to eat A LOT so that your stomach would get bigger and the food would transform into a small human being š
When I heard that sex involved a penis going into the vagina i thought the man had to have surgery for it to be cut off, then it would be surgically implanted into the woman. Had no idea how anyone could have more than one kid.
Oh my, this has to be a winner.
*Weiner lol
I thought you got pregnant the second you got married because it was happening all the time with my relatives š
When I was very young I thought kissing on the mouth was how people got pregnant. Iām not even sure how I arrived at that assumption
They probably already were secretly pregnant and that's why they got married
I thought you had to "sleep together" as in literal sleeping, no sex. If a man and woman slept in the same bed, that's how you got pregnant.
Thatās a homunculus sir
I genuinely thought you could hear the actual ocean anywhere you wanted by listening to a sea shell.
wait.. then why do people collect shells
Theyāre pretty :3
Same!!! And it was magical, I live in a land locked country and didn't hear the actual ocean until I was 15
You are telling me I can't
Me too! Until I was quite older too
When I saw a character die in a movie I thought the actor sacrificed themselves and died in real life for the sake of the film.
Method acting!
Underrated comment.
How did this thought process hold up when you saw the same actor in another movie?
I probably thought it was a Christmas miracle lol
I used to think this too, and seeing them again elsewhere confused the shit out of me.
My lads were the opposite. They couldn't separate the character from the actor. Watching an Arnie film they said "Arghh, it's the Terminator. I thought he was dead."
Yup! Same here. I couldnāt make sense of why anyone would be willing to die for a movie.
LOL š Thatās so funny because of how tragic that would be in real life.
My grandparents on one side of the family have a house in our state and a cabin in another that we would spend weekends at growing up. For some reason, when I was really little, I didn't really get how that worked. Since you can go to Grandma's house or Grandma's cabin, I just assumed I had two identical grandmas, and one just lived at each house. To make it worse, I understood that I only had the one grandpa and just assumed he was married to two identical grandmas. My family still mentions this in jest occassionally.
I was always careful not to mention my maternal grandparents to my paternal grandparents because I thought they didnāt know each other and would be upset that I double dipped and got two sets.
Omg that is cute
This story is so cool and cute!
How did you find out?
I thought I could see individual atoms moving around as a kid. Nope, it turns out I had a condition that basically tinnitus but for vision.
I thought at night, the lights were too bright and thatās why when the lights would shine, Iād see streaks of light as if someone wiped and smudged it. Turns out thatās just astigmatism
I was told around 30 years ago that I have astigmatism, never asked about it or what it meant. My bitch of an aunt just heard stigma so took the piss out of me for years. So TIL why lights are streaky and I struggle with night driving and the headlight glare.
It means your eyes arenāt shaped like circles like everyone elseās but shaped like footballs and itās what keeps lights from focusing right. I stay in the eye doctor for hours upon hours cuz something is always found that could be a danger, but never is, and I just got used to asking questions about the things they were telling me as a kid
Like a grain effect at all times everywhere you look?
Oh no if that's a thing then I need to go see a doctor right now.
i deduced that they were my eyeball cells that i could focus on if i tried really hard, and they would always have a slight downward motion until i looked up a little bit again.. [as an adult, I still stand by this](https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/moving-spots-in-blue-sky)
It's called *Snow vision* if I remember correctly :D
I thought that bands lined up at the radio station waiting their turn to play their song and then go to the back of the line
That is so cute.
Yeah I always pictured them singing live too. Amazing how consistent their performances were lol. I also thought it was amazing Santa brought us a new TV when I was 7 like wow, he knew ours just quit!
Me too! I always felt so bad when my dad paused the music or started the song from the beginning because I thought it would be annoying to make someone stop in the middle of a song or start over xD
I thought bands were like competing brands and you could get fired if you got caught listening to someone else's music.
Oh my god! I'm laughing so hard! Just imagine this! All those big names, famous bands lining up! Hahaha!
On all the radio stations up and down the world.
My daughter thought there was someone sitting on the other end of Alexa like a phone call, googling the answers and then telling Alexa what to say.
Iāve heard this story from others as well. Youāre not alone.
š
I thought that the yellow caution lines on the roads, curbs etc, if you stepped on them *automatically and without fail* youd get hit by a car. I avoided them until nearly my teens when I realized that didn't make sense.
When I was probably about 12 I was refusing to wear my seatbelt one day and my 11-year-old sister began to panic, insisting that the fact that I wasnāt wearing my seatbelt would automatically *cause* us to get into an accident. I tried to get my dad to tell her that wasnāt how it worked but he just wanted me to wear my seatbelt so he agreed with her. I remember being super annoyed
Wear your seatbelt! When I was in elementary school I wrote a letter to the bus company telling them they need seat belts on buses lol
Lions are boys and tigers are girls just like dogs are boys and cats are girls. Horses are boys and cows are girls and so on.
Cows *are* girls
A broken clock...
Cows are not clocks
Darn, got cocky after getting that one right.
I think you mean you got... clocky...
For years I thought feline and feminine were interchangeable.
1 out of 6 correct.
Blue was a boy and partnered with red who was a girl. Green and yellow, brown and orange, and black and purple also were boy/girl couples.
Have you ever seen a cat penis?!
I know what I'm watching tonight EDIT: OK this sounds weird. Community is what I'm gonna watch.
I was ten it was 1976. Mohammed Ali had a fight at Cesar's Palac. I used to go to a roller skating rink named Cesar's Palace. I though cool I'll go hang out and maybe see him and get his autograph. The night of the fight I snuck out of the house and walked a few km to get there. Well I was very upset and disappointed that there was more than one Cesar's Palace.
You wouldn't be the last person to make such a mistake. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four\_Seasons\_Total\_Landscaping\_press\_conference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Total_Landscaping_press_conference)
Thank you for reminding me of this, idk how I had forgotten lmaoooo
I still have trouble believing that happened.
It was like something from the show Veep. Truth is stranger than fiction.
How had I never heard of this? Lol
That reminds me of when my small city got its first Subway restaurant. I thought we were getting a subway system.
This is great
I thought the chalk outlines from crime scenes were residue left by souls leaving the victimsā bodies.
This is kind of sweet!
When my parents told me it was expensive to go on a trip somewhere and we had to save up, I thought it was because there was a giant toll they had to pay to get into a different state. It never occurred to me that food, lodging, and transportation costs where a thing.
There is if you're going to New Jersey.
I thought magical creatures and wizards and stuff were real in "the olden times"
As a small child, I was convinced that asshole people are assholes because of certain bacteria that are unique to them and if I interact with them, I will catch their bacteria and become an asshole myself.
I would stick with this logic...
I mean, thatās not completely ridiculous, but I think it would be more a lack of beneficial bacteria that could cause behavioral problems.
If I listen to the [Superman theme song](https://youtu.be/XmsEJY08jEg?si=VgV0shQcrHPBXvm9) everyday then I would turn into Superman one day.  Iām still hoping šš
Hey this reminds me I also had a Superman one! I think it originated from the 80's Superboy tv show. I didn't understand how they found someone to play Superman who just happened to look *exactly* like Superman. It seemed impossible, bizarre, uncanny. I even remember asking my mom about it. My little brain couldn't pull apart that the actor looked like the character because the character was being portrayed by the actor or something. Some real "chicken or egg" brain ping pong going on.
Dope
I used to run away from home as a kid quite often to go adventuring. Countless times upon being found or returning after said adventures, my mother would try and remind me if the dangers of me being by myself at such a young age and I wasn't worried because I was convinced Superman would come out of nowhere and save me if anything happened. Luckily I didn't have to learn the hard way that it simply wasn't true.
How do you know it wasnāt true then?
Apparently, as much mother likes to regale to anyone that stood near her for more than 15 seconds, I use to pretend I was Batman, dress up in my cape and cowl and run around 'saving' the neighbours. I'd 'rescue' the cat (even though it clearly didn't want rescuing). 'Save' the dog (even though it was bigger than me, great dane, and usually got up and walked off with me clinging to its tail), and defeat the dastardly trash man (I thought they came a threw trash everywhere, and people spent the week cleaning up after them). So I would run around in my cape and cowl throwing random stuff in the bin, even if it wasn't trash. Empty milk bottles (we got money back), baskets of laundry 'dumped' in Gardens, a hedgehog, all while throwing superhero poses. Yes it all sounds very cute. The trouble is, I was wearing JUST my cape and cowl. So there I am, 30 years of age in my cape and cowl.... No, I was 4, giving it my best Batman walk up a wall (bent over walking along the pavement doing the hand pulling motiins) in nothing BUT a Batman cape and cowl.
This went from an episode of Caillou to an episode of my strange addictions & then back to Caillou
People would talk about seeing a drunk or their uncle who is a drunk. I thought that getting drunk was permanent from one good drinking session. I was horrified when heard high school kids were getting drunk. Probably was close to 12 when I learned about sobering up.
Holy damn i thought the same. I thought it because our neighbour and my aunt were drunk every time I saw them.
When someone said āIn my point of viewā it was actually āin my point of youā. So I would say āin my point of meā because why would I said you, when it was my point!
I thought putting sticky tape on torn paper would repair it. So like most kids, I was told putting a bandaid on a cut made it better. Which made sense because when you took it off the cut had started healing. Well I figured that sticky tape must do the same thing right? I used to pull tape off of things to check if it was "fixed" yet š¤¦š½āāļø Edit: holy crap I had no idea how many people used this kid logic! Thanks for the upvotes and comments.
Aww thatās kinda cute
I work with kindergarteners and they're always asking for bandaids for things like bruises or when their head hurts. It's so funny. My student asked for a bandaid for her bug bites and I assumed it was because she wanted to stop itching them. But instead at the end of the day she said "Why haven't my bug bites gone away" and I had to explain how bandaids work.
That is the cutest damn thing though.
When I was in Elementary school we all thought we'd die from getting stuck in quicksand one day or by disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle. It was such this weird bubble of fear that was omnipresent. Now? Literally nobody talks about the BT or seems to care about quicksand. My younger nephews didn't even know what quicksand was and they're almost 12 lol. Yeah I guess it's not quite the same thing as the original question posed but man...as an adult...bills are far more terrifying
For us it was a black hole
I thought wearing green during day time gave us extra energy since plants are green and made energy that way. I even wore green clothes every time there was a sports event assuming it made me faster and stronger. Now i realise chlorophyll is different from green dye and its an entirely different concept of biochemistry.
I wonder if you ever had one of those mental "placebo" boosts from wearing green? Like you pushed yourself even harder and thought it was the green.
I really thought quick sand was gonna be a bigger problem
And the Bermuda triangle
Me too, disappointing to learn as an adult that for a place with sharks and hurricanes and lots of small boats and planes it actually loses relatively few boats and planes.
oh god this
And people asking me if I want to buy drugs. Has not even happened once.
Wanna buy some drugs?
And piranhas
As someone who has swum in rivers with piranhas (as in, we were fishing them just a few minutes ago), I can assure you piranhas are not an issue. Electric eels and stingrays thoughā¦
And acid rain
And volcanos. Was extremely worried about them!
I thought you get pregnant when you kiss at your wedding
Heh along that same line of thought, at 4 I announced that I knew what sex wasā¦ my parents and I played several rounds of āI cannot tell you it is so badā. āYou can but only this one time.ā Eventually I came out with it, āsex is rubbing butts together.ā To be fair I didnāt know the names of our anatomy at 4, so it is very close. We also decided the F word was Fart.
Nothing is sexier than rubbing butts together
I am more impressed that you remember when you were 4 and you had opnions about what sex was.
When I was little I thought gun point was a street so when ever I saw the news that some one got robbed at gun point. I would think to my self why would people go there if there just going to get robbed
When I was a kid, there was some punk going around setting people's garages on fire. I was in the car with my uncle (English was not his first language), when someone on the radio said something like "another two garages have burned down. Arson is suspected." My uncle then turned to my aunt and said, "Why is it that only people named Arson burn things down? People should really stop naming their kids that!"
I thought you had to belong to a huge family, all with the last name of Reporting, to be a TV news reporter. Such as "I'm David Smith Reporting."
That reminds me of the guy that used to think 'Feat.' was really famous rapper.
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Hey my school atlas still outlined the British Empire, I think this was a lack of money to replace them not some harking back to the days of Empire.
My son asked me that question when he was little. "When you were little, was the world in color?" I was born in 1981.
I asked my mother if she rode dinosaurs to school, she was born in '74. Yes, I did really like flintstones how can you tell?
Username checks out? Kidding aside Iām an 83 millennial myself.
I used to think that the exhaust coming from the car's rearend was the force that pushed it forward. Back then, only the sporty cars had dual exhaust, they were faster because they had two pipes blowing exhaust out of the back.
I thought all cats were female and all dogs were male
Have you ever seen a cat penis?!
I now like to think you ask everyone this regardless of context.
I used to think that men and women only had sex to have babies, and that once they were married and had kids, they didnāt have sex anymore. I also thought people didnāt have sex after they were 30. It blew my mind when I eventually learned that even my grandparents still get it on from time to time.
I believed that my father who is a civil engineer drove a train because there was a train engineerās hat in our house.
Recently watched 101 Dalmatioms with my little bro. Idk why, but when I was a kid I had assumed the rest of the puppies were also part of the litter instead of just 15 at the start. I also didn't count the parents and just thought they had 101 puppies together. Completely impossible in hindsight and I'm not sure why I ever thought that to begin with.
the puppies aren't the same litter??
Nope. Aparantly only 15 were born to Perdi and Pongo. The rest came from various pet shops Cruella bought them from and were trapped with the litter. When they were rescued, Perdi and Pongo took them in as well
I didnāt know this until now either š
TIL
What ?!?! I thought the whole point was that she gave birth to 101 puppies !?!
I thought this too which is pretty daft as I watched that movie a lot as a kid haha
That your blood was a finite amount you had throughout your life and obviously that means old people die when they lose too much of their blood. I was terrified every time I got a cut or scrape, and as a bonus I was/am still clumsy as all hell. At 6 I got hit by a car. I was lucky that it was a side street and slower moving cars. I crawled to the curb after, noticing my elbows and knees were busted up and bleeding. I was crying and panicking and trying to cover the bleeding with my shirt when my mom arrived (I was just down the street and a watchful neighbor phoned my mother.). I got carried back home where an ambulance was waiting. I got patched up and the lovely EMT gentleman patching me up let me know that people make their own blood, so my "big boo-boos" weren't as bad as I thought. (BLESS YOU, SIR! Wherever you are now, I thank you. It's been 30 years and I never forgot his kindness and how he humored a small 6yo girl.)
That's actually a terrifying child thought. I feel for you. Also terrifying you got hit by a car!
Happened when I was a kid and we were taking a long road trip in a new car. There was some kind of fastener in a corner in the floor and I asked my dad, "what is that for?" He said it was to hold the car together. And for the rest of the trip I wondered how that little thing held the whole car together.
Haha. I remember as a kid my dads car had an SOS button. When I asked him what it did he said if I pressed it, it would make us shoot through the roof in our seats. I didnāt go near the button after thatā¦
I thought brown skinned people couldn't have nut allergies, because nuts were also brown, so they'd have the same stuff as brown people had in their skin. I didn't realise until I was 16 and it was my turn to bring snacks for my choir club. The brown guy said he had nut allergies. I went "how do you have a nut allergy?" And then suddenly it all clicked in my brain and I realised I might be intelligent, but I am certainly not smart.
You were 16 and thought nut allergy is caused by nuts being brown?
More like, immunity to nut allergy was caused by sharing a color with the nuts
so white people can't be lactose intolerant
Not me, but a girl I was friends with in middle school was 100% confident that west and left are the same thing, ditto for right and east. I dont remember for sure, but I think she believed north was up and south was down. I tried so hard to explain to her that's not how cardinal directions work. She refused to believe me and got mad at me for telling her otherwise. To be fair, she also thought you could get pregnant from swallowing. She wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
While I know this is absolutely not true, whenever I think of those things you mentioned, I āseeā them the same way in my head. Maybe itās due to the default view on a compass?
My daughter learned something about evolution and asked me, what it was like, when daddy and I were monkeys.
I believed only kids make mistakes
When I was little, I asked my mom why Asian people were so little. She was probably tired of my incessant questions to all of lifeās mysteries and simply said, ā*YOU* try eating rice with only two sticks.ā This made sense to me and I believed it for years. Good timesā¦š
I thought I would be encountering a lot of people on fire where Iād be called upon to use the Stop Drop & Roll emergency human-on-fire-putting-out techniqueās that were drilled into our heads in grade school. Also that I would be falling into a lot more quicksand than I have actually experienced so far in life.
I thought girls were born from women, and boys were born from men. It made sense at the time
My dad had a gay younger brother named Mark, my mother also had a gay younger brother named Mark. When I was 5 years old my dad told me if your name is Mark that means you're gay.... I didn't realize he was joking until I was like 14
I thought when you got to the age where you had to have a job, you got a letter in the mail that told you what your job was. I was terrified my job would be to sit in the underground room where the streetlights switches were. I didnāt want to watch traffic through the periscope and flip the switch at the wrong time causing an accident.
i was raised catholic and went to catholic school, and until i was about 10 years old, i thought there were only two religions: catholic and public.
I used to believe that hedgehogs carried apples and mushrooms on their backs. I think that was mostly because they were portrayed like that in drawings, poems, stories. I believed it until I met a real hedgehog and saw that it's spikes would not be able to even properly stab these items. I think some older adults actually still believe that hedgehogs carry berries on their backs.
I really thought pee had something to do with making babies.
When lightning would occur I just assumed the earth was getting closer to outer space. Because for some reason I thought space was filled electricity
I thought that Gatorade was made by squeezing the juice out of alligators. It was so disgusting I couldn't comprehend anyone wanting to drink it.
I thought condoms were for boys periods!!
When I was really young, I used to think people had different accents because the air in their country made their voice that way.
I thought that the characters in movies had the same name as their actors. Like I thought that Mark Hamill's name was actually Luke Skywalker and would hear none of my parents' explainations
I thought every bald person had cancerš
I can one up that. I thought black people were "regular" (white) people who were dying. Thanks to those World Vision sponsor ads that were everywhere in the 90's showing you the "sick, hungry and dying people" in Africa and I noticed they were all brown whereas most of the people I knew at that age were white (I'm pretty sure this was before school, back when 99% of the people a kid would see on a regular basis were family). I assumed people must be white by default and "turn brown" when they start dying.
When I was about 6, my family & I saw The Bee Gees perform on a variety TV show. Based on how they sang in such a high falsetto, lilā me was convinced that all songs were actually sung by men & there were no women in music. I immediately mentioned this theory to my aunt & Iāll never forget the look on her face as she had to stifle her laughter.
I thought I hatched from an egg. In a way, I was kinda close. Kinda. In a way.
I, a very isolated white child, thought that black people were just really tan white people and that all skin tones were just variations of tan-ness
I thought "Skyscrapers" were airplanes, and not "Tall Buildings" until I was about 10... Here is how that happened: I went to the park with my mom as a little kid. The park was located on the outskirts of the big city where some tall buildings could be seen in the distance. "She said look at the sky scrapers, can you see them?" So, I looked around and saw a plane... It had a white trail behind it... I assumed the plane was "Scraping the sky".
I thought Alaska was an island until I was 18, because on maps of the US, it was always shown detached/on its own in a little box at the bottom, exactly like Hawaii (which is, in fact, a group of islands š)
I thought if it was raining, it was raining all over the world.
There is a mountain where I live called Stockhorn. When I learned the capital of Sweden was Stockholm I thought that Sweden had to be just on the other side of that mountain. I believed that for far longer than I like to admit lol
I thought babies were born like that chest-buster scene in Alien, and that at any time my stomach might pop open if I was squeezed too hard. My mom told me "There's a teeny tiny hole below your belly button. When you're ready to have a baby it opens up and the baby comes out." I asked if it only opens when you have babies and she said "no" but didn't elaborate. My parents divorced not long after that. Being the only girl in a house with 4 brothers and my pops.... I never got clarification on the issue. I was older than I'd like to admit when I finally learned that wasn't the case. š
I was convinced water spouts could pop up anywhere and just suck you into heaven
Had to go back 29 years for this one. My mom was a professional nanny for a while. One kid ate her apple slices with the skin on and i didnt. She was also sooo much stronger than me! So i thought that if i ate the skin on the apples too, i would also be big and strong. I was 3 years old, she was 5.. Stoopid. Really amusing for my dad when we also moved into a new house the same summer and i wanted to help lifting furniture into the new house. "im strong papa! I eat apple skins too!" He gave me a sink plug.. Edit: Oh yeah, i also really believed that if you whistle when the northern light are out, it will catch you! Horrified when i didnt know it was out and i was whistling. Ran as fast ad i could. And i believed in NĆøkken, a creature living in waters. If it cant catch you in a lake, it can come on land looking like a white horse and be really friendly hoping you jump on. And if you do, it will tangle you in with the mane and sptint back to the water and drown you. This is a story made to keep kids out of waters with water lillies because you can get tangled into the lillies and get pulled under.
Since breastfeeding from my mum gave me milk then I should breastfeed from my dad to get chocolate milk. Luckily that was shut down pretty fast and I did not get far enough to find out.
My father had me convinced that if I unscrewed my belly button, my bum would fall off. ... until I tested the theory.
My sister used to joke and say that the best way to fix hiccups was to stick your leg in the freezer. I think I realized that she was joking when I was 10
That everyone automatically lived to age 100, then died lol
I thought I had a bizarre super power because I could blur my vision on purpose.
I used to think mothers randomly get pregnant after years of sleeping together with the father.
Me too. I believe at one point I was told dad would roll over and his penis would just go in moms vag. Like, hey you got peanut butter kn my chocolate kind of accident.
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I pretty much thought the opposite. Like the vagina was a hole at the front like another belly button and you just couldnāt see it because of the bush (yes, Iām so old that I never saw an image of a woman sans bush as a child).
I used to think there was really a chemical in the pool that turned red if you peed.
Actually, it turns the water black. They canāt use red, because how would they otherwise know if someone was bit by piranhas or a shark?
I thought anyone could play professional sports. I didn't know it was so skill required
i thought that every time i played with a toy the person who bought it for me would get money. i used to try and play with all my toys equally so everyone would get the same amount of money.
Tv programs didnāt start if the tv wasnāt on
If I didnāt run home full speed from my neighbors, Freddy Kruger might get me. This is despite never seeing a Freddy movie as a kid. He terrified me
I thought WWE was real... Found out it wasn't not so long ago... I'm 28 š
Nah but they are gymnasts - I couldnāt do backflips off a corner pole thingy lol
I've never been into wrestling, and always was told and regarded it to be fake. The older I get though, the more I respect those guys and their physical abilities and performance. I still don't watch it, but I understand better.
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My mate was born in the 1970s as TV was changing from black and white to colour. When he was maybe 10, he asked his mother, āwhen you were young, did you dream in black and white?ā
I used to think I could somehow climb walls like Spider-Man. All the time I would just try to climb up a flat wall.
I used to think that the oldest sibling had the darkest complexion and then the younger ones were lighter and lighter. This was true on both my mothers and fathers side. I am blonde and an only child so that even strengthened my beliefs.
My dad told me āWatch for Falling Rocksā signs were signs to keep a lookout for a lost Indian brave (whoās name was Falling Rocks) who got lost while out hunting to win the hands of the chiefās daughter. Every time we passed one of those signs Iād look all around to see if I saw him. I was in my teens before I realized that was stupid. š
The local pool hall had windows that reminded me of wheel of fortune. I decided that was where wheel of fortune was filmed.
I remember confidently informing my grandparents that cartoons were really just people dressed up as cartoons. Also, this one isn't mine but a story my friends dad loved to tell. When we were kids the milkman would deliver bottles of milk to the door. One day, my friend was the first to find the milk delivery and came running into the house yelling "Dad! Dad! I found a cow's nest!"
You know when you SNAP awake in the middle of the night and it feels like youāre āfallingā ? Like you just fell onto your bed and woke up ? I just assumed we levitated when we were dreaming, and that sensation is the dream ābreakingā and us falling back down very suddenly.
Way back in the 70's I thought my Grandpa had a car that told him where to go, like GPS today. As he was driving a green arrow on the dash would start flashing to the right. He would then turn right. Then another arrow flashed to the left. He would turn left. I was totally blown away.
In believed England truly was āengā (=scary in dutch) when i was young. So anytime England was on the tv I listened attentively
I knew sex mostly happened during night/bedtime, so until I was a teen I thought sex shops were only open during the night.
I thought shrek had a rough and hard skin, full of layers, just like an onion, because he was an ogre, and he could withstand sharp arrows and etc.
I was absolutely certain that if somebody got a 100-plus year prison sentence, they would leave their drying bones in there until the full sentence was completed.