I just returned from a wonderful trip up to Delaware to see my nephew, who was born on Dec. 31. Mr. E is now babbling up a storm; he was just a tiny little one when I first met him back in February. He looks a lot like my brother when he was a baby (Tim’s 5 years younger — he turns the big 4-0 this year). The weekend was spent getting a lot of quality face time with E, since I’ll likely not see him again until July — he may be crawling by then at this rate. He is already trying to turn himself over and itching to move around. Of course my brother and sister-in-law haven’t baby-proofed the house yet, so that’s the next project to take on before E is mobile.
I can’t believe all the baby-raising gadgets and safety restraints they have today. When I was a little one (back in the 60s, friends, the dark ages), my mom had none of these handy things. Tim and I learned about stairs by falling down them. We learned about the hot stove by, well, hands got sizzled.
My favorite toddler environmental encounter milestone was when I took a stray bobby pin, pulled it open and inserted each end into an electrical wall socket. ZAAAPPPP! I liked the fry so much, according to my mom, that I actually did it again not too many days thereafter. Hmmmm…that may explain some of my idiosyncrasies.
My brother’s infamous childhood incident was crawling into the dryer and almost shutting the door. We were looking all over for him and I found him laughing inside it.
Share time: tell your own self-endangerment toddler story. 
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My little brother fell off a tricycle when he was 2 or 3, and stopped himself from falling by a hand to the (then burning away, as it was winter) wood stove. Ouch. His whole palm was burned.
I liked to make friends with every dog I ever came across. Like by sitting on them, or playing with ears, or sticking hands in mouths.
The electrical socket thing isn’t too surprising–electric shocks have a nasty habit of inhibiting memory formation, preventing you from remembering why you don’t want to do that.
For my own part, I think I managed to slam my hand in every frequently-available door, including one oven door, at least once before I was eight. I still have no idea how I never managed to break anything.
hmm. in a move of parenting genius, my pops taught me about the hot stove by putting my thumb on it. i had nothing to do with the situation.
Swallowing small plastic objects. & mothballs. & gum. & candy. & rocks. & many, many, other things.
Sitting down in a fire ant mound that looked SO big and FLUFFY and SOFT.
Um, ow.
At work, as a man in his twenties, I grabbed the ancient, malfunctioning mixed machine which I just accidently sprayed with a water hose and then got zapped. Then, after a moment to give the machine time to “cool off,” I grabbed it again and got shocked so hard I cussed in front of a group of little kids.
Idiotic self-mutilation isn’t just limited to childhood.
I’m sure I must have done dangerous little kid things but I don’t know about any of them.
Also, that is the ABSOLUTE CUTEST BABY in the world. With GORGEOUS eyes.
Just saying.
Back when my dad was still in the process of finishing building the pool and surrounding deck and pool-shed holding the plumping, we would run the filters overnight on cheap-rate electricity in order to get all the gunk out of the water.
So every morning it was either my or my sister’s job (usually mine) to trudge out through the backyard to where the filters were and shut down the system. Some of the wiring was still a tad exposed.
Yeah, you can imagine what happened.
My hand slipped off the switch, touched the contacts, and I got softly thrown against the wall. I walked back half-way across the yard and just kinda collapsed and laid there for a bit.
Finally I picked myself up and walked back into the house. Since I was up and mobile when I told my story no one was too concerned.
i got hold of my brother’s Cub Scouts knife and sliced my hand open, but I don’t even have a scar. Apparently my mother didn’t notice until I was happily rubbing blood all over my face.
Oh, and one of our favorite rainy-day activities was putting the couch cushions at the bottom of the stairs and flinging ourselves down the stairs. it was fine, because the closet door kept us from going too far.
I’m a few years older than you Pam and my self-inflicted childhood disaster occurred when I was four or five.
We had an old-fashioned washing machine with a wringer on top. Mom left the wringer going when she went outside to hang the clothes on the line. I reached up I think to see what would happen if I let my fingers go onto the wringer. My arm stopped about half way up the forearm. The burn resulted in a big bandage and a visible burn scar for decades (it has finally faded now).
That pretty much trumped for me the times when I tried to be faster than my sister when she was swinging the door and I got the finger smashed in the jam.
I, too, am a child of the no-seat-belt 60s and the youngest of four kids. We all learned about gravity by falling down the basement stairs onto the concrete floor.
My brother was the accident-prone kid, and by the time he was three, he’d run through a glass storm door, had a 2x4 dropped on his head, and caught his pants leg on fire (those are just the highlights). By the time I came along, mom was pretty blase about injury. Her only instructions to my older siblings when I was in their care was “don’t maim her.”
When I was two or three, the family went to the zoo. I must’ve wanted a closer look at the bears because I squeezed through a fence opening to enter the enclosure and head towards the concrete moat. I think some man hopped the fence and fetched me for my mother. (No harm done.)
Well, there are a pair of incidents.
Incident#1:
Age: About 10 months. Time of day: Sometime in the wee hours of the morning. Location: Crib.
I was one of those kids who would rock back and forth. So one night (in late October), I did so, to the point that my crib scooted across the floor of the room. Once it was against the door (which opened in and was shut), I began to cry. My parents, awakened, came to soothe me, only to discover that the crib was blocking the door. They were unable to budge it and thus had to climb through the second-story window! After that, they bolted the crib to the floor. When they moved out of that house, the realtor gave them a very funny look when my parents explained why there were bolt-holes in the floor. The most bizarre twist is that the crib in question was a large, solid wood crib that had been in the family for a very long time. It was heavy! My parents were then and still are baffled at how I managed to move it (they think I must have rocked for hours, which is positively absurd).
Less funny, but more life-threatening is Incident #2:
Age: 18 months. Time of day: Midafternoon. Location: Random room in the house.
I had decided that walking was for wusses. So I ran everywhere. I did not always look where I was going (this is also something that only wusses do). So I, at full tilt, ran into either the wall, a chair, or a table (accounts vary). Whatever it was, it was big and heavy enough that the object that rebounded forcefully was me, not it. I fell back hard enough that when my head hit the floor I concussed myself and lost consciousness. My mother was nearby and heard (1) Delighted squeals of a hyperactive toddler, (2) A loud thump, (3) A childish voice saying “Ow!” (or some variation thereof) and then (4) Very loud thump followed by (5) Silence.
I was rushed to the hospital. Due to my young age and the fact that I had lost consciousness, the doctors were rather concerned. Fortunately, I recovered completely and suffered no lasting effects.
Once I grew out of toddlerhood, my accidents were more prosaic, such as crashing my bicycle and the like.
Tried taking the food dish away from a German Shepherd when I was about 5.
You wouldn’t think a wrist could bleed so much and still be attached to a living child.
I ate a lot of paint, circa 1987. Not sure what its lead content would have been.
When I was little, those “walker” things that were basically a circle of tray with a sling seat and wheels were still in vogue. I drove mine right off the edge of my parents’ backyard sidwalk and onto the lawn, which resulted in its tipping forward and me smashing my face into the ground. I apparently wasn’t badly hurt.
I also fell down the basement steps in that house and landed on a concrete floor. I remember doing it, and I remember that it hurt.
Around the same age, I fell seven feet off the top of a playground slide.
I remember the illnesses more than the injuries, though.
I don’t recall doing anything particularly noteworthy, except to watch my toddler sister stuff Spanish peanuts up her nose. My mother yelled at me, “Why didn’t you stop her?” I said, “But I thought she could get them out.”
I’m still amazed my younger brother got out of childhood unharmed. When he was two, he:
*managed to open and drink a can of beer (getting drunk in the process)
*fell out of the Corvair (unsafe at any speed) on a four lane highway (my sister piped up from the back seat, “Mom, Jay has fallen out.”)
*walked across a railroad track and said four lane highway by himself to my elementary school, where I found him playing on the lawn. I still remember the day, it was March 19, 1966. I walked up to him and he kept saying, over and over, “Hot dog day! Hot dog day!” He was 26 months old. Of course my parents were taking the neighborhood apart brick by brick when I brought him home. All the neighborhood kids gathered underneath the front window to hear my parents yell at him (he was soooo clueless–he was two).
But we older sisters weren’t entertained by our baby brother, we wanted him gone. Not long after that, we helped him pack his suitcase (a ginormous Samsonite hardsided piece of luggage) one bright Sunday morning and had him convinced that our parents didn’t want him anymore. If memory serves, we were escorting him out the door when our parents put in an appearance. To this day, I wonder if they were hiding in their bedroom and listening to this or if they just happened to walk in at just the right time. My parents swear they don’t remember this.
My husband broke his collar bone climbing out of his crib at about 16 months old.
So when our son started climbing out at 15 months, we gave him a very low bed with a bed rail and totally baby proofed his room. (I’ve seen a special crib tent system for preventing climbing out but WTFH!?? Just get them a bed! Nicky would have disassembled it for his own amusement anyway).
I myself was the grand queen of stepping on nails. I collected at least 5 of them between my 3rd and 7th birthday.
When I was five, I tried to use a bath towel as a parachute when jumping out of a tree. When I asked my mom why it didn’t work, she began by saying that parachutes only work from much higher in the air. She claims I looked at the roof of the trailer at that point, and she gave me a better explanation.
I cut my finger on my dad’s shaving razor blade because I didn’t know what it was (fortunately, I stopped pretty quickly and never did it again.)
When I was about 2-3, my parents were outside painting the house and assumed I wouldn’t get myself into any trouble. I proceeded to climb my bookcase (which, in all fairness, was only 2 shelves tall and pretty stable, so it wasn’t real likely to fall over), then walk around the outside of the railing around our kitchen before climbing back down the bookcase.
According to my parents, when I was 1-2 years of age I thought fire was pretty and colorful and tried to grab the fire on candles a few times before burning myself.
And my younger sister was the queen of putting things up her nose, especially plastic beads from jewelry she’d take apart.
When I was about two, I emptied an entire can of baby powder over the wood floor in my baby brother’s room, because I wanted it to snow. Large mess. Possible asphyxiation risk from all the powder.
When I was three or four, I insisted that I could PEDAL my tricycle down the hill near my house, not just coast, because I wanted to go faster. Ass over teakettle. Butterfly bandage on my chin.
My brother managed to unhook a large full length mirror from the wall and drop it on his foot when he was about two. He didn’t break anything. Not even the mirror.
He also really liked to shake a tall spindly floor lamp with a large glass globe, but he never broke it.
My story is also pretty life-threatening. I was at my grandparents’ house (complete with pool) just after my 2nd birthday. I managed to make it out to the backyard - accounts vary on how this happened, from I opened the door myself to my cousin opened it to my dad left it open by mistake. I saw a pretty ball in the pool and wanted to make it my own. Unfortunately, the ball was pretty far out in the pool and I fell in. And wasn’t found for a couple of minutes. Thankfully my aunt knew CPR, and I was rushed to the hospital. Despite being clinically dead for 3 minutes, I managed to turn out fine (accounts also vary on that fact!). In a not-so-surprising turn of events, my younger sister and I were taught to swim within the next few months…as were my other sister and brother as soon as they could walk.
To make up for my total downer of a story, my brother had some of the most amusing injuries ever in his younger years. He managed to trip and fall, hitting his forehead on the corner of the fireplace, not once, not twice, but THREE times - a few years apart. He has a permanent dent in his forehead now…not just from the falls, but because each time he fell he had to get stitches. My dad thought having stitches put in required a doctor, but having stitches taken out only required a pocketknife. He also has a permanent scar on the back of his head from falling backwards off the railing at a Putt-Putt course.
Yeah…my parents apparently didn’t pay too much attention!!
Well, in terms of toddlerhood, there was the wandering out onto too-thin lake ice, and the frantic calls to poison control (if it’s not edible, why is it in the kitchen?), and my attempt to explore Mr. Continental Shelf . . . but I was thinking of the time in middle childhood when I discovered that you could charge a sheet of aluminum foil using the static electricity from a tv screen turned on and off. I then got the idea to make a improvised Leyden jar to store it up, tried it out, and opened my eyes to find myself across the room, and with an arm that didn’t work quite right for a few minutes.
At which point I promptly tried it again . . .
After I entered my comment, I started thinking…is it even possible to be clinically dead for 3 minutes and still survive? Then I remembered my mother’s penchant for exaggeration and figured it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
And that explains why to this day I can’t manage simple html tags . . .
Now, that baby’s smile is going to break a lot of hearts one day.
Me? I managed to split my forehead open (and get stitched up) three times before I was thirteen, stepped on a needle which got embedded in my foot, got enough splinters to build a yacht, rode a tricycle down a steep hill straight into a telephone pole, nearly drowned in a flooded creek, stayed out so late sledding that my feet turned blue, got bitten by a German Shepard on my paper route, and burned my finger on an Easy Bake Oven.
Yet I survived. In more or less one piece.
Honestly I do not remember my toddler years. At some point I smacked my head against an old-style radiator and required several stitches. I do not remember the incident and can only recall it because it has been repeated to me time and time again. (Who honestly recalls anything prior to age 10?)
What I do remember are the slides. the playground slides. The big tall steel playground slides. The slides that would become redhot in the summer. The slides which were designed to go down head first.
God was that fun. Diving down onto the slide. Gripping the rails and squeezing them in your fists to slow down. I am sure someone must have slammed head-first into the ground/ I never did. Well not that I remember.
That is the kind of thing a 21st Century parent would have a heart attack seeing. Their dear young child 20 feet up a steel slide barreling headfirst to the ground. Good god was that fun!
Now playgrounds are all curved edges and rubber. How lame. The big steel merry-go-round that would get going so fast you would throw up. The big swings which would get you high enough to see over the school’s roof! Those were playgrounds!
My younger son was riding his bike when he hit a curb and fell such that the brake lever completely punctured his thigh.
He has a dimpled scar now. It was really nasty. “Mimo, what is this yellow stuff coming out?” … “Um … that’s your stuffing … don’t touch it, okay?”.
As a toddler I had the swallowing-pennies thing and the head-stuck-in-the-stair-rail thing. I was a little older when when of my older siblings brought home the linoleum-block tool from art class…
But yeah, kids are far more constrained nowadays. I got yelled at for lying down in the back of the station wagon and reading books on longtrips, but it was because I was (ostensibly) going to get a headache and throw up, not because I would be an unguided projectile in case of accident.
Honestly I do not remember my toddler years. At some point I smacked my head against an old-style radiator and required several stitches. I do not remember the incident and can only recall it because it has been repeated to me time and time again. (Who honestly recalls anything prior to age 10?)
What I do remember are the slides. the playground slides. The big tall steel playground slides. The slides that would become redhot in the summer. The slides which were designed to go down head first.
God was that fun. Diving down onto the slide. Gripping the rails and squeezing them in your fists to slow down. I am sure someone must have slammed head-first into the ground/ I never did. Well not that I remember.
That is the kind of thing a 21st Century parent would have a heart attack seeing. Their dear young child 20 feet up a steel slide barreling headfirst to the ground. Good god was that fun!
Now playgrounds are all curved edges and rubber. How lame. The big steel merry-go-round that would get going so fast you would throw up. The big swings which would get you high enough to see over the schools roof! those were playgrounds!
Let’s just leave it at the observations that (i) I had no idea that the bunsen burner wasn’t supposed to be filled to the brim and (ii) I’m really really sorry for terrifying the babysitter. Especially because she refused to ever babysit for Mum again.
Now playgrounds are all curved edges and rubber. How lame.
Despite state-of-the art technology, my son was lurking on a playset stairwell at school, hiding and “spying for enemies”, when he started to sit up just as another child attempted to use the stairs and WHACK!
I suppose that 6-stitch scar between his brow and eyelid will keep him from all the best jobs, if you believe the makers of anitbiotic ointment.
(The last was not quite toddlerhood, mind - more age ten or eleven, of course. I’d rather not mention the incident with the electric heater and the coat-hanger…)
Ms Kate,
Not sure I see your point. I can’t tell whether you agree or not. 6 stitches between brow and eyelid will be invisible by puberty and certainly by adulthood. I can remember a lot of scars I had as a kid which were invisible by the time I was 20.
So, are you agreeing that the playground safety advocates have gone too far or are you saying they have not gone far enough?
I touched an electric fence when I was about 8 and got a nasty little shock. And my brother somehow fell out of a baby carrier and down the escalator in the Tower of London and broke his leg when he was 2. He healed just fine but I’m sure my parents about had a heart attack at the time.
Mine is more Endangerment By Enraged Parent - I was about 3 when my little brother was born, which was all fine and dandy until he started crawling and following me around everywhere. Being the responsible big sister that I was, my mom thought it was Just Too Cute, until one day she hears a small toddler voice start crying: “I kicked him in the head and it hurts!”
The rest of my near-death experiences were all my dad’s fault while trying to do things right - nearly drowning me with the bottle as a newborn, landing on top of me when we went ice skating together…there was even a 911 call or two due to bedtime stories gone horribly wrong. More traumatizing for him than for me, however.
Mine involves a pyramid of 8-oz glass Coke bottles in a warm garage, waiting for a party. They looked like stairs to my dad’s workbench of forbidden things. By the time he looked over, I’d already knocked a box of bottles over, causing them to explode, setting off a chain reaction with the rest of the pyramid. Dad says he just kept screaming “Don’t move!” until every bottle exploded, and when he finally picked me up, I’d shit my pants in fear.
As a 2 year old, I kept finishing my Aunt’s scotch all through my sisters Christening party. Apparently, by the end of the day, I was sitting in the middle of the room trying to make the room stop spinning.
Next time you are in DE, look up DelawareLiberal, and we’ll take you out for a drink.
Most of my childhood endangement memories seem to involve endangering someone else. I don’t recall locking my mother on the back porch, or her breaking her arm trying to climb down, but she says it happened. I do remember deciding that I really wanted to go play outside with my dad, who was working two jobs at the time and napping on the couch, so to encourage him to wake up I hit him across the shin with my mom’s wooden sandal. He woke up, but I didn’t get to go play outside.
I’m told that I I rolled one of those walker things (the tray with springs and whatnot mentioned upthread) down the basement stairs once But the most amusing self-endangerment I can recall was shared with my brothers. We spent many a winter day modifying our toys by melting them on the top of the kerosene heater in the family room. I’m not entirely sure which was more dangerous, the fumes from melting, burning plastic, the sharp points we melted onto our plastic toy weapons, or the three of us clustered around the heater for some precision work. How none of us managed to burn ourselves horriby I’ll never know.
Colorado Dave,
Oh, the red hot slides were even more fun when I was a kid, especially when a couple of bullies decided to make them more exciting by putting broken glass shards on them. Didn’t have to go to the ER, then, but it was a near thing.
Hmm.
I was born in the high north Prairie of Alberta. At the age of three my friend Barry Schiller and I decided to take a walk — out of town. It was a hot, dusty summer day and we just headed down the empty road together. This was farmer country, straight roads, gravelled, and the cars that didn’t drive 70 mph were big farm machinery with bad visibility. We could have been killed by either. We walked for about three hours when a rational motorist stopped and put us in his car (driving with strangers, ack!) and drove back the direction we had come, to find the entire village out looking for us.
And then there was being buried under the eight feet of snow I had burrowed under to make a snow fort; and drinking the bleach; and playing in the deadly pools of the Bow River in Calgary . . . .
Hmm, which one to choose….
I swallowed a month’s supply of birth control pills at one point. I’m told that I thought they were candy (I don’t remember this, I was too young). What’s amazing was that they were stored in a closet that had a baby lock on the top (6 feet from the floor). I apparently stacked several items to get to the child lock, balanced on this perilous stack of items, and figured out how to undo the child lock. The doctor said I should be ok, but to let him know if I grew breasts.
I also remember riding down a curved road on a hill (as I did many times that summer), but meeting a VW bug travelling up the hill at about 30 mph. I remember this incident vibrantly. My memory was this: oh SHIIIIIII-SKY-GROUND-SKY-ground-sky-ground-skygroundskygroundskygroundskygroundskyground skygroun…………………
Darkness ensued. What pisses me off the most was I woke up alone. Yeah, it was my fault: there was no way the driver could have stopped in time. But still, when you hit a kid coming down the hill on her bike and the impact knocks her unconscious, you at least stick around to take care of her and make sure you didn’t kill her.
ahh, those were the days……
I lived in a 5th floor apartment (nominally, in fact it had 3 additional storeys) and my cat loved to pass to the neighbor’s terrace and chew his plants. The problem was, once it felt purged enough, it wasn’t able to come back- the animal had an horrible fear to heights- so one day I was trying to make it come back and in the end I decided to go fetch it. So I climbed to the terrace’s handrail and passed to the other side. I might have liked the experience, since I did it again one day I was playing hide and seek with a friend. Only this time the neighbor was at home and caught me red handed, so I didn’t repeat the mischief out of embarrassment.
My mom remembers when she was a kid before WWII. Grandma knew war was coming, so she bought several ten pound bags of sugar and stored them in the attic. Unfortunately, Mom and her cousin discovered the sugar and decided to make it “snow” by scattering it all over the attic.
No, Mom wasn’t injured during the sugar snow. But she certainly was when Grandma found out about it.
I don’t remember anything from toddlerhood, but I do remember the dangerous influence of Burt Reynolds movies. My uncles (only 2 and 3 years older than I) and I went to see “Hooper” when I was 10. We spent the rest of the weekend hurling ourselves off of moving bicycles and rooftops, trying to be Hollywood stuntmen. It’s amazing that we weren’t even hurt.
Kids today, with their bike helmets and car seats… hmph.
For much of my misspent childhood, the family car was an old Dodge pickup. I used to ride in the back all the time. Seatbelt? Hell, I’d ride standing up.
I’m also reminded of the first school zones in my town when I was in high school- 15mph within a block of any school. A girl I knew responded to my complaints about them with “well, kids are worth slowing down for.” I replied, “why? We weren’t.” (Yeah, I was a bit of an asshole in high school.)
Lead paint was banned in 1978. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t any still around (especially in older houses) but your odds are better than they might have been.
It’s not self-inflicted, but Augustlet’s cheek-denting was pretty memorable.
Wow, all these stories sure take me back — I was also a child of the 60s, and grew up in rural NC. I remember riding in the backs of pickups or on the backs of farm tractors, without a concern in the world. One of my brothers managed to get both legs broken by hopping off the tractor when it got stuck while our father was plowing, and he threw it into reverse assuming Rick was still standing on the tongue, and backed over him. Fortunately the ground was soft, but not soft enough.
Personal endangerment stories: I was probably around 4 or 5, and had been told the way to check if an electric fence was “live” was to brush it with your finger. What had not been stressed was that you should brush it with the back of your finger, because if you brushed it with the front, what happened next was your finger involuntarily curled around the wire and would not let go. My father was standing in the middle of the pond flyfishing and yelling at my sister to pull me off the fence, but she touched me and got zapped herself and didn’t want anything of it. I, after what felt like an eternity, yanked my hand away. I was very nervous about electricity after that.
Incident #2: Still pretty young, we are at a church outing at a local swimming hole called Person Mill Rock, a waterfall over a granite outcropping that was smooth enough to use as a natural waterslide. I cannot swim, and am sitting at the top of the rock sailing “boats” (twigs) over the falls when I must have leaned too far out or something and found myself rushing down the slippery rock and splashing into the pool below. Sadly, the area directly under the waterfall was about 6′ deep and I was about 3′ tall, so I was spending a lot of time looking at the silvery bubbles rising up past me in the green water. Fortunately, my brother Rick was over 6′ and could swim, and he jumped in there and yanked me out before any permanent damage was done. I remember my mother, later at home, ironing out his money to dry it where his wallet had gotten soaked.
Goddess, but it’s a wonder any of us made it to adulthood sometimes, isn’t it?
God… I dunno if I want to share.. Someone might think I was doing a one up or something. I am surprised I lived to adulthood.
I was about 18mths old (told to me by mom), when I decided that I was a fish. My parents had built this beautiful full wall aquarium. Something like 500 gallon tank. There was an area behind it to take care of it etc. Dad had locked it and put the locks high up. I remember little bits and pieces and I definitely remember that room. The blue puffy carpet I crawled across and I was riding one of those little trikes for tots (it was tiny) and looking up and seeing the big round fish. (discus for those interested). I wanted in there. I remember thinking that…. omg.
To hear it told gives me shivers.. Dad found my toy boxes, a couple of tall dolls, and a chair that I managed to push and stack up near the door. I unlocked the door and made my way inside the 500 gallon fish aquarium. I couldn’t swim. Mom said she heard a weird noise and come looking in and saw my little feet kicking at the fish and she rushed to me and tried to get me out. She couldn’t and called my dad while she held my arm to keep me from drowning. (the back side needed a foot stool to even see the top of the aquarium and how I got in, neither of my parents could figure it out.
Not to mention being electrocuted by a light bulb, stepping on about 5 nails, being stung 4 times (enough to know that I cannot be stung any more, I lost my eye sight on the last sting.) and breaking my left arm 4 times. (with in 2yrs) various other injuries. Yes I am surprised I made it past 15.
My boyfriend has a dent in the back of his head from running over to see what his cousin was going to show him and falling backwards on to a cinder block.
I just fell off a one of those swingsets with the slide in the middle at 3 because the slide hadn’t been attached first (I wanted to “help”. Headfirst of course.
Also got stitches in my face twice, from tripping over things. Once, I fell into the latchplate of my door and ripped my chin open, second time I tripped and put my teeth through my lip.
I also scratched my cornea after falling off a bench and getting sand in my eye.
But Mine are all 90’s stories.
Mine isn’t a me story either, but i got a call when I was about 14 asking in a frantic voice if I could come and babysit a family my sister normally watched (she was out). I got there and realized I’d only be watching 2 of the 3 kids since the middle boy was off to the hospital with mum.
He had gotten a brilliant idea while watching a movie and decided that he could be a ninja too. He was smart enough to realize that movies aren’t totally real, so when he went to karate kick the door open, he opened it enough that it would swing wide. Problem is, he didn’t check to see which direction the door swung and did a flying kick… that closed it half an inch with the rest of his body coming at it… he not only broke his leg, he fractured his wrist on the landing too.
When I was quite small, my brother and I were playing tag or something else involving running in the house with our babysitter, who was the teenage son of a friend of my mother’s. Since I was younger than my brother and not so fast, babysitter had me up on his shoulders. Babysitter was over six feet tall. The house was an old house. It had high ceilings, but not high enough for my head to clear the light fixture he ran under.
I don’t know if he ever told my parents, or if he just cleared up everything and pretended it never happened. He also locked me into my room once (it was an old house, and there was no key that I know of, so he tied the doorknob to the railing on the landing), but in his defense I was being pretty much a pill.
I also mangled my finger in the hinge side of a door because I liked the way it felt when I closed the other side of the door on my foot. The finger bled pretty nicely. I have an interestingly layered nail on that finger, which is not as impressive as my brother’s door-accident finger, the last joint of which goes off at thirty degrees to where it should be.
I not only endangered myself, I set a precedent: Apparently, at about age 2, I managed to find my way into my Dad’s car, and either started it, or took off the parking brake and let it roll down the driveway, across the street, and into a tree. a number of years later, the little boy next door (also 2ish at the time, did get his family van started (I heard the engine from my bed!), and went across the street…into the same tree. Or at least, the brick wall that had been built around its base at some point.
Like Pam’s brother, I climbed in a dryer when I was four. Unlike Pam’s brother, I had my cousin handy to close the door and turn it on. I probably wasn’t in there very long but I can remember that it was comfortably warm and somewhat cozy but the fluffer bar smacked me in the back of the head every time the dryer revolved. We were caught just as I was loading my cousin in for his turn.
When I was ten, a group of us kids were playing tag at my uncle’s farm. We made the safety zones be the two (mild) electric fences that circled the cattle at each end of the property. Yes, it hurt a little but the sound of other people getting zapped and yelping was funny enough that we were all willing to get a minor shock ourselves to hear it.
The incident I should have gotten seriously hurt during (but didn’t) was when I fell off the back of a vert ramp onto the concrete. I landed flat on my back and wasn’t wearing any kind of protective equipment. I was dazed but my aunt (who witnessed it) nearly had a heart attack because she thought I was dead. My ex-boyfriend fell off a vert ramp at the same age and did permanent damage to his neck so I got off lucky.
Oh yeah, I got sand in my eye and then rubbed it when I was 3 or so, requiring a big old eye patch bandaid for a while. I slipped on some ice racing a friend to the house for a shack, knocked my head on the front door and required a bunch of stitches. Was 5 then. At 15 I got some new in line skates that were much slicker then the old pair — probably should have gotten stitches for that one, and I’ll have a big purple scar on my knee for the rest of forever.
Speakin gof old slides, my uncles lost a finger to one in the ’50s. I guess the bent under edges were sharp, and he curled his hands around it and slid down…
My brother, though, as mentioned above, oh man. He once crashed his bike into a fire hydrant, must have been 7 or so, and needed over 100 stitches in various places. He also once jumped off a shed and landed on a nail, while playing hide and seek. He choked on a coin at 2 or 3. A lot of my mom’s friends were nurses, so there was often one on hand when these things happened. He wet the bed for years and years, so my parents would wake him up for a late night bathroom break sometimes. One time my dad dropped my brother while carrying him to the bathroom; my brother got a bunch of stitches over his eye where it met the corner of the bathroom counter. He badly sprained his ankle playing volleyball in college a couple years ago. I could go on and on…
Oh! He angered a bees’ nest in a rail road tie while we were going for a walk with a couple friends. We all got bee stings. This was in high school. Unable to come up with a better idea, we stopped off at a pub down the block, where a friend of mine worked, and got some to put on the stings. I was stung on the thumb and the back of the neck.
Also, we kids caused my mom to break two or three toes.
I decided to shave my legs “like mommy” when I was 4 or so and in the bath (mom had stepped away). Bloody blood blood bleedin’.
Not long after that, I grabbed the just-extinguished end of a 4th-of-July sparker. Twice.
I don’t have any toddler stories, but I have stories all through childhood of my brother and I getting in “rock wars,” jumping off barns, riding bikes off the steepest cliffs we could find, etc.
I’m surprised I’m still alive.
In addition to my piece above about my own electrocution, my Dad had a story from his youth … admittedly, he was a freshman college student, so it’s hardly toddler-ville, but still.
He and a bunch of friends were coming back on a bus from skiing the weekend away. Needless to say, being undergraduate students in New Zealand, they were drinking, heavily (it always amuses us that it’s the Irish that have the rep for drinking heavily in the Commonwealth, when we actually consume WAY more).
So, long distance travelling along a straight road at night, combine large amounts of drinking, eventually the guys needed to pee. So, they got the bus driver to stop in the middle of nowhere and all the guys got out of the bus (the women stayed on board) and lined up against a fence and started peeing, all displaying their prowess at peeing as high and far as possible onto the fence.
It was an electric fence.
Apparently the girls could hear the screams back on the bus.
One of my earliest memories is an evening when my brother and sister and I were getting baths. I must have been five or so. While Mom was washing my brother, my sister and I were running naked around…the kerosene heater. I managed to fall across it and get myself stuck on top. According to my mom, between that and a couple hernias around the same time, there was a strech of time when I used to get very nervous whenever we drove past the hospital.
One a funnier note, I don’t remember this one but everybody else in the family does. My brother and sister and I used to get into our sleeping bags head first at the top of the stairs and slide down. One night my brother got in with a sucker slid down the stairs and emerged from the sleeping bag with the stick end of the sucker stuck in his head. Apparently, he still had a bit of a soft spot. He pulled it out, and was basicly unharmed. So of course I had to chime in with, “YOUR BRAINS ARE LEAKING OUT.” Which sent him crying to mom and unwilling under any circumstances to move his hand away from his forehead.
I do not remember this, but my dad like to tell this story. when I was about 18 months, I decided I wanted the cookies mom had put in a high cabinet. I moved a chair to climb in the counter, but still couldn’t reach the cookies. I got my little stool & climbed back up on to the counter with it. Dad found me on a stool on the counter eating a cookie.
I do remember slicing off a finder tip with a razor blade I’d found.
Nothing dramatic for me. I did try “parachuting” off the roof a couple of times.
My niece was in a loft, and was frustrated by the toddler safety gate at the top of the stairs. She managed to get over the railing and was dangling by her ankle when they found her.
My nephew left our house during a party and took off down the street on a riding toy. He made it about 3 blocks before they found him.
In the not-so-dangerous but still hilarious category, my brother used to run down the carpeted hall in his walker, then lift his feet when he hit the linoleum in the kitchen. He would fly across the room and smash into the cabinets.
Steven Crane @ 3: Apparently they used to do that back in the Good Olde Days, when they had fires in open fireplaces going pretty much all the time. They called it “branding [the kid] against the fire”.
Mine are all so prosaic. When I was ~18 months old, I spilled hot chocolate on myself. I still had the scar years later, but I either don’t have it now or can’t find it anymore.
I was only slightly older when I fell into the neighbor’s pool. This was brought to my mother’s attention by a nearby child, who apparently said, and I quote, “Excuse me, the baby’s at the bottom of the pool.” Which, you know, I’m glad the child remembered his/her manners.
And, not *self*-endangerment, but a narrow scrape: when I was 5 or 6, my family was in San Francisco for a Chinese New Year parade. I felt something land in my lap, and pulled it out, amazed at this free gift from the cosmos: a pretty little paper-wrapped cylinder with a fuse at one end! (Fuse not lit, thank Ghod.) Wow! I turned to show my mom, who–most unfairly, I thought–grabbed it and pitched that fucker as far away as she could. It never did explode, as I recall. Must have just been a dud firework.
Sometimes I’m amazed I made it to adulthood.
I ate a few of my Mom’s amphetemines (prescribed for weight loss of course) when I was really little and my parents didn’t realize until I was up in the middle of the night swinging and singing my little heart out in the back yard. (yes, it was in the 60s)
I made a slide out of an old broken picnic table and my Mom had to dig the splinters out of my butt. That was just plain embarrassing.
I stepped on a metal rake, not just with one foot, but stepped on, backed off and stepped on with the other foot. Lots and lots of blood and a trip to the emergency room.
Colorado Dave, the point is that you can prevent a lot of nasty accidents with proper safety design … but you can’t prevent all of them. Maybe with individual recess rubber rooms, but I think kids will still find a way. That doesn’t mean that sensible measures of protection shouldn’t be taken, just as precautions and proper design should be available to workers.
I have no nostalgia for the old days of play equipment. I saw a girl in 5th grade fall off one of those jungle gyms and break both arms and her face. I saw another classmate break a leg through the skin in a similar mishap with steel bars and concrete.
A few stitches is simple compared to that horror.
When my mom was a tiny child, *her* mom broke my mom’s nose with a fruitcake.
Well, I love to say it that way.
My poor Grandma was reaching up on the shelf for something else…
Can you imagine seeing that 5-pound Christmas tin coming down at you? “Pretty!”
Can you imagine clowning your toddler so hard with something so lame? How do you even live that down?
One serious head injury resulted from a head-first dive from a toddler slide onto a radiator. I still have the scar. The next resulted when I tried to wash the bathroom counted with soap and water, while standing on it. I was doing quite well until my mother saw me doing it and reacted. She surprised me, and head first on to the tile I went. I vaguely recall blood in my urine after one of those, though I can’t recall which. Both were under age 4. I was 8 or 9 when my trapeze made of closet pole broke, landing me flat on my back from about seven feet in the air, but that resulted in no injuries.
Oh, and I still have a burn scar from an electric skillet, and a big fishhook scar on one finger where a folding chair folded on me, and a jagged rip on another finger from where a classmate’s ring ripped into me at recess. (I can still tell each of those apart from the later scars from adult stupidity.)
I’ve only broken a bone once in my life. I was two or three years old, and was sitting on a bed, looking through a picture book. I fumbled the book and dropped it on the floor, and reached to get it. However, being small and clumsy, I landed badly and fractured my collar-bone.
I take a perverse pride in the fact that I managed to injure myself reading.
Oh, I had forgotten this one. My sister and my mother have identical scars, that they both got in the exact same way, on the exact same piece of furniture.
Toddler unsteady on feet meets corner of antique mahogany coffee table, gets stitches through her eyebrow (making it a noticable scar since there’s a gap in the eyebrow for the scar)
The really funny bit? The table is still around, and there’s bets on which of the next generation (which have just started crawling) will be doing the same thing…
We used to have a small metal slide with a jagged broken corner at its bottom end in our backyard. My brother had just gone down it slicing open the bottom of his foot. I of course teased him for being clumsy saying you just had to avoid that part of the slide. Which I immediately demonstrated by going down it and slicing open my foot on the other side.
“My little brother fell off a tricycle when he was 2 or 3, and stopped himself from falling by a hand to the (then burning away, as it was winter) wood stove. Ouch. His whole palm was burned.”
I think I was around 8 years old, and was running in the house, tripped and caught my fall with the wood burning stove. The whole palm of my right hand was burned, and I’m right-handed.
At:
Age 3: rode tricycle down the porch steps. Learned meaning of word “Endo”. As I have continued to ride human-powered conveyances ever since, Endo and I are still acquaintances.
Age 4: Learned that when jumping rope, is BAD idea to pull HARD when the rope tangles your feet. Basically I tripped myself, broke my fall (onto linoleum-on-top-of-concrete floor) with my face.
Age 11: playing with diassembled electric clock. Found that the motor was very easy to stop, so I figured that touching the bare wires together would make a teensy spark, like previous experiments with batteries. So I was looking closely at it as I shorted out 110V. Blew a fuse and was looking at the world through funny blotches for a while.
Age 14: Visiting friends who had a pet burro. Paco was a wonderful animal, but there were times when he didn’t hold any truck with this notion of ‘being ridden’. I’m on him, he’s clopping about at a good burro speed when he suddenly stops dead and lowers his head.
Why Hello! Mr. Endo! I end up flat on my back, wind knocked out of me, the world going all yellowish Kodachrome, still holding the reins with a burro staring into my eyes and laughing.
My favorite summation of all of this is the line from Christopher Tiitus’ show “Betcha won’t do THAT again!”
Needless to say, being undergraduate students in New Zealand, they were drinking, heavily (it always amuses us that it’s the Irish that have the rep for drinking heavily in the Commonwealth, when we actually consume WAY more).
Only if by “way more”, you mean “70% as much”. Wrong again, Sarah.
There was a lady at one of the gas stations down the road from my house who would sell me fireworks. When I was 12, and my brother was ten. Man, that was fun. I hope we didn’t get her fired.
My best stories don’t involve any serious injury and they aren’t quite toddler stories either. But the gross-out factor is too good to pass up. Once, when I was five and my brother three, we found a dead mouse. We somehow got the idea that we could nurse it back to health, put it in an old, unused rabbit hutch in the yard, brought it food, lovingly pet it and stroked it, etc. for about a week before my mom found it and learned what we had been up to. I don’t know how many times she made us wash our hands.
Later in elementary school, we lived in Houston, and the streets would flood frequently when the storm sewers backed up. And of course, if the street flooded, we could be found swimming in the streets. Yes, swimming in the backed up sewer water.
You want to back that up with a link there Piator? Because historically I do remember that we did have the highest per capital beer consumption. Maybe things have changed *shrug*
You know what? Fuck off. Seriously. Don’t email me again. Don’t contact me.
And, to think I used to defend you here and elsewhere. Apparently, yes, I was wrong.
I am missing the tip of my left index finger from a childhood accident. My sister was riding my bike in gravel, so it wasn’t moving, and I wanted her to get off. So I grabbed the chain with my left thumb and forefinger.
“Only if by “way more”, you mean “70% as much”.”
You want to back that up with a link there Piator?
Easily done.
i took off down the very busy street that we lived on riding my big wheel when i was 3 or 4. i apparently had decided that i had practiced riding on sidewalks enough and was ready to ride in the street like a grown up. my father is an alcoholic with minimal common sense, he and i decide to play tug with a jump rope, me pretending im a dog. i was 5 or 6. he tugged so hard he pulled out one of my teeth.
besides that tho it was mostly normal scrapes and bruises like all kids get playing outside.
my biggest childhood idiotic quirk was my habit of trying to eat carpet lint as a toddler. my fiance really liked eating sand and rocks. were a good match.
I wasn’t a toddler, but at around six I lived in Big Spring, TX. At that time I truly believe it was the vermin capital of the world. I was NOT ALLOWED to play with Mom’s jewelry, but sometimes found it irresistible. I sneaked into her room, opened up her jewelry box, and was happily trying on rings and bracelets when suddenly my second toe was on fire. For years I thought the scorpion had punished me for disobedience, and Mom didn’t correct that notion.
My sister and I did the jumping off the roof with umbrella thing, too, with no success.
Once during a summer motor vacation my sister, then about four, and I, then about eight, were running around the motel room. As always, playing turned into fighting and my sister ended up in the bathroom with me throwing myself against the door with all my might.
It worked. The door flew open, right against my sister’s braced foot. It took her big toenail with it.
Before taking her to the ER my parents (among other things) ordered me to lock the hotel room door. I locked both the doorknob and the deadbolt and for good measure put the chain on. Then I cried myself to sleep. My parents returned some time later. They hollered for a while at the door. I slept on. They rang the phone two feet from my head. No response. Finally they had the manager break or saw through the chain (I don’t remember which) in order to get in.
My son was pretty much always very safety conscious. He’s never really been badly hurt because he’s downright paranoid.
Just a couple of Augusts ago I had a girl.
Her nickname is “Low Safety Awareness.”
She insisted on sliding down the big kids’ slide at around 14 mos.
When at a large park, I decided to see how far she would walk away from me before getting nervous. I never found out. She was several hundred feet away when I broke and ran after her.
Since she was about 18 mos we have done without kitchen chairs after one incident. She pushed a chair across the dining area, into the kitchen, and up to the stove. Apparently she then got a frying pan from the cupboard, climbed the chair, got on the counter, and put the pan on the stove. She had piled three potatoes, an onion, and a tomato into the pan, liberally applied salt, and was trying to get the olive oil open when I saw her. She had turned the burner to the left of the pan on. It was between “med” and “med hi.”
Without the chairs, she improvised. She stood on the broiler drawer handle and grabbed the oven door handle to climb onto the counter. The over door opened and she landed flat on her back. She did this three times before giving up.
She refuses to use a baby swing and screams and struggles when we try to put her into one. Instead she sits on the big swing and murmurs, “Whee,” as I hover over her.
We go swimming at the Y. She walks slowly down the steps into the pool, holding my hand. Water to her knees, her waist, her shoulders. She keeps going and goes straight under until I pull her out. She does this again and again.
Adulthood? I’m hoping she sees TWO. I’m hoping I don’t stroke out before then.
Oh, and let’s not forget about a week ago when she happily handed me half a saliva-coated cricket.
I was 18 months old when I discovered that the tail of our dog made a good handle to pull on. The dog bit me lightly in the elbow. I wouldn’t even know about this if my father hadn’t told me years later that he was totally horrified by my mother’s reaction to my howling: “See, if you pull the dog’s tail, you get what you deserve.”
I also managed to escape from the flat and climb down the stairs until I was stopped by the house door one evening when I was home alone and had something really urgent to tell my absent parents.
Three years later, I tried to smash the window with a heavy book when my parents had locked me in a hotel room to stop me from wandering around. I had some vague plan to escape from the fourth floor room using knotted bedsheets.
The window didn’t break, though.
The other time I climbed out of a (ground floor, this time) window because I couldn’t find the key, I was caught outside by a thunderstorm because the window was too high to get back in.
And I once steered my dad’s car down the main street to the gas station, standing on the driver’s seat. My dad was behind the car, pushing, because we had run out of gas a few hundred metres early.
Pretty tame, really. I didn’t start the fun stuff until I was in school.
These stories are great. I’ve got plenty of my own, this made me think of when I was working in a preschool, and we were hypervigilant about the kids’ safety (as people should be when dealing with other people’s kids), but still there were occasional bumps and bruises and some of the parents would freak out. Except for one dad who I’ll never forget. One day when he came to pick up his son, he had obtained a bump on his forehead. When I explained how it happened, he made a kind of “kicking the tires” motion at his son and said “Aw, these things are built to last.” It was very refreshing.
Oh…when I was a toddler my mom enjoyed taking me to the zoo…a lot. There was a farm animal/petting zoo area, one of the things you could do there was buy a cupful of grain and feed the goats.
But I was not content to simply feed the goats. I climbed between the rungs of the fence and went into the goat pen to play with the goats. Some of which had rather nice-sized horns, and had no qualms about ramming their heads into various things.
And my mom never stopped me.
When I was about 4, my mother, grandparents, and I were in upstate New York closing my great-grandfather’s house after he died, and drove back to Detroit with my aunt and cousin. As I understand it, my grandmother was driving one of those big ’70s station wagons, and I was sleeping in my mother’s lap (unconstrained, of course). My grandmother hit something, had a tire blow, and lost control. We went off the road and rolled over a couple of times, ending up upside-down.
I continued to sleep.
My cousin got out, and took off screaming toward the highway (fortunately, one of the onlookers caught her).
I continued to sleep.
The ambulance arrives, and the EMTs think I’m in shock, not believing my mother when she said I was sleeping.
Snoresville.
We are loaded into the ambulance, and go lights-and-sirens all the way to the hospital (mostly on my account, as no one else was particularly hurt).
ZZZZZZZ
I finally woke up at the hospital, my only injury being a superficial scratch on my leg from mid-calf to mid-thigh (not so long on a 4 year old). I’m told that I was rather annoyed that I missed the ambulance ride.
For actual SELF-endangerment, my grandparent’s house had a front yard ideally suited for baseball - the doormat was home, the end of the sidewalk second base, a depression where a tree had previously been for third base, and a big old red oak perfectly placed to be first base. I got it into my head somehow to play ‘blind-man’s baseball’, and tried to reach 1st on a ground ball, running headlong into the tree at full speed, eyes closed/covered(I don’t remember which). Acouple of stitches and a butterfly bandage on my eyebrow. I decided NOT to try that particular game again.
I had a bunkbed in the same time period, and would every so often roll out of the top bunk (under the protective bar, I was and am quite thin) and fall to the floor while sleeping. I was never hurt on these. In fact, I never woke up. My mother would hear the crash, come in, pick me up, and put me back. (I think the first couple of times she woke me up, but after that, and the car wreck, she just realized that I was a very deep sleeper.)
The time I was climbing into the bed and went over backwards with the ladder - that time I got hurt. I cut open the exact same spot I had in the baseball game.
I am told that as a crusier…
I crawled in to a swimming pool and sank to the bottom while almost no-one was looking. I was saved by a wheelchair bound handicapped man who saw it happened, then dragged himself up the stairs and into the pool to save me.
I was older than toddler, but the first time I lit a match, I dropped it in dry grass. Fortunately, someone had the presence of mind to stomp on it.
I then proceeded to a childhood of setting things on fire, although my mother insisted I do so in the fireplace or on the patio in an aluminum pie pan.
I also went sledding on ice once (our street was VERY steep) and convinced my mom it was “safer” than snow because I could “steer better” (OMG it was SO MUCH FUN).
I feel out of bed so often I had cushions next to it.
My parents tell me that at age 4, I came out of my room late at night and told them “my room is on fire.” I had been using a candle of some type I guess, and had set my curtains on fire. My baby sister was in a crib in the same room at the time.
I don’t recall a moment of actual *danger*, but I was a very precociously independent child. For example, I absolutely forbade my mother to walk with me on my way to kindergarten. She followed me at a distance to make sure I crossed several major intersections safely, and lamented that I wasn’t like the other children clinging to their mommies and daddies (and, thus, making the mommies and daddies useful entities).
My grandparents lived near Disneyland, too, so as a small child we made regular trips. Now, most children are kinda frightened (or at least shy) near the costumed characters. Not me. I loved the damn things. As soon as I saw one, I would be off like an uncontrollable hyperactive rocket with a contrail of freaked-out adults. Most trips were ended not with my being tired, but by the exhaustion of my entourage.
When I was about 3, I caught sight of something shiny and ran away from my dad in the mall. He saw me go, and followed at about 100 ft off. He meant to give me a bit of a scare about being alone and lost, but…. when he finally caught up to me after I walked from end to end the fascinating and exciting wonderland on all three floors, he, in his attempt to teach me a lesson, asked “Now, [Falyne], what would you have done if I *hadn’t* been following you to make sure you were safe?”
Me, completely unperturbed: “I would’ve called a cab to get home.”
Yeeeeeeeeeeeah, as if a.) there were cabs in North County San Diego or b.) any would’ve given a ride to a 3 year old. I’d learned from TV, though, that there were things called cabs that you call if you want a ride somewhere, and I’d been taught my home address. And I was perfectly confident in my ability to take care of myself without a parent, thankyewverymuch.
Gave my parents bloody nightmares.
My dad: I’ve just pumped up your bike tyres. Don’t go too fast.
Me: [goes too fast, flies over handlebars, lands on elbow] AAAARGH
My dad: [plunges my elbow into hot water and antiseptic] Er…
Me: SCREAM
Neighbour: [panting, having run round from next door and srpinted up our stairs] What the hell are you doing to that child?
Still have the elbow scar. Thanks, dad.
Oh! I remembered another one- when I was under 5 years old (maybe under 3 but I can’t remember now) my parents had taken me to a YMCA for swimming. I loved the flotation devices on my arms so much I decided to put them on my legs, apparently. They turned around to see my little legs dangling above the water while I floated upside down and think I was under for a minute or so before they saw/got to me.
RVman, your story reminded me that I was the same way as a child. A very heavy sleeper, and I also rolled off the top bunk once and kept right on sleeping.
And of course there was the time my top bunk fell through and landed on my sister (I don’t remember, but we were most likely doing something to cause this to happen). She was fine, but the babysitter probably about had a heart attack.
My mom has a story about her and her brothers walking around on a log raft (for those of you not from the Great Northwest or other logging territories, that’s a bunch of logs floating in a group, but not lashed together–they can shift and roll freely). They were warned about 8 million times not to mess around down there, so of course they did. Sure enough, one fell in when the logs shifted, and the gap immediately closed above him (he’s lucky his skull didn’t get crushed, actually). Several minutes of floundering and shoving on giant douglas fir logs to find him, hold them apart, haul him up while the logs are rolling and drifting, followed by a long slow walk home in order to dry out everyone’s clothes and drill through his head: Do NOT tell Mom what happened.
Guess what was the first thing he said when he got in the door?