Metatalktail Hour: In which the kids freak us out

April 9, 2022 6:58 AM

Inspired by this Twitter thread, tell us the freakiest thing a child ever said to you. Or that you (or a family member), as a child, ever said to someone. It doesn't have to be "eery" (as in the thread), just something weirdly unexpected and surprising.

Or tell us about your day, your thoughts, your news, the dream you had last Tuesday ... but just ixnay on the oliticspay, please!

posted by taz (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 6:58 AM (45 comments total)

I was sitting in the courtyard of the Cafe Pergolesi in Santa Cruz enjoying my cafe latte in the sunshine when a child of seven years or so approached me happily with a white, square cardboard box with a lid and brightly queried me:

"Do you know what's in this box?"
"No!" I said, and smiled, expecting him to reveal a tiny captured creature.

He opened the box, I looked, and there was no object, so I looked back at him with some confusion.

He slammed the lid on, giggled and said: "There's darkness in this box!"

I've thought of this little genius so many times over the years.
posted by effluvia at 7:55 AM on April 9, 2022 [22 favorites]

Okay here's a weird one. A couple of years ago I bought an automated cat feeder, and this model allowed you to record a little cat call to let the cat know it's feeding time, so I recorded a little message. "Good kitty. Goood kitty." I set it up in the basement and it worked great.

Last year my son turned 18 and moved down to the basement so he could have more room and privacy. He's got an LDR boyfriend who lives in New Hampshire and he visited him for a week over New Years. Then his boyfriend came here and stayed a week last month with him down in his room. He's a great guy and we really like him.

So the cat feeder broke and I got a new one and set it up and took it down to my son's room in the basement. I plugged it and and told him it's all set up and ready to go. "Does it still call the cat at feeding time?" he asked. Yeah, I replied. I think I recorded something like, "Here kitty, good morning."

"Can you rerecord it and have it say, 'Good kitty. Goood kitty.' again?"

Why?

"Because it's become an inside joke with Norman and me. Whenever there's a lull in the conversation, or an awkward moment, one of us will say, Good kitty, Goood kitty in your voice and we'll both crack up."
posted by Stanczyk at 8:02 AM on April 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

This is my favorite story about my middle kid, now an adult, who has always been bright and quirky.

We were visiting my family right after my father had received a terminal cancer diagnosis; it had been an emotionally draining day and we were trying to get three kids settled for bed in a hotel room. Mr sencha was getting the youngest settled; I was attempting (and failing) to calm down middle kid, then nine, and getting exasperated.

Me: Kid, why are you acting like this?
Kid: Bad behavior!
Me: Where is this bad behavior coming from?
Kid: Me!
Me: No, I mean what is causing this bad behavior?
Kid: (pause) The id?
Me: ... the what now
Kid: Or is it the I.D.? I don't know how it's pronounced.
Me: ...

I still don't know where he learned Freudian theory from.
posted by sencha at 8:03 AM on April 9, 2022 [36 favorites]

My charming, sweet 2 year old will relatively often say things that sound like a serial killer.

Last year:

Me: where are you going?
E: to get my knife
Me: your...knife?
E: My bone knife. To take your bones.

By way of context, she recently had a hairline fracture and an x ray and was doing a lot of pretend scanning and doctor play. Still unsettling!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 8:22 AM on April 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

My son was two years old or so, when I found him playing around the window of our 12th story apartment. There was nothing really dangerous about it, but I still felt it necessary to matter-of-factly explain to him that our bodies are frail, we need to be careful, and if he fell out of a window at that height it would likely lead to fatal injury.

I was trying to couch my language a little bit, but then he asked me directly if he would die. And I said, "probably, yes".

And then he said, "why do we go away when we die?"

And that statement shook me like few I've heard in my life. I didn't know how to respond, so I told him I loved him and hugged him, and he told me he loved me and he hugged me back.
posted by Alex404 at 8:26 AM on April 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

When I was in my early 20s, I worked in a box office at a regional theatre. For security reasons, we had vertical bars on the windows.

One morning a group of grade-schoolers came through the lobby on a field trip. A few of them remarked about the bars.

One kid then authoritatively explained, “Those people are in business jail!”
posted by armeowda at 8:28 AM on April 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

I'm just going to cut and paste this from a Facebook post I made a few years ago. I've made a few slight edits. I still think about this interaction about once a week.

"This is a thing that actually happened to me yesterday as I was about to pull into my driveway. My daughter was in the back seat so I have a witness that this actually happened.

Two little kids, a boy (about five) and a girl (about three) were walking alone down the street. No grown-ups in sight. Red flag #1.

They were carrying a dog leash with no dog attached.

They signaled for me, an adult in a car, to stop. Red flag #2.

As I rolled down the window they approached my car. Red flag #3.

They started talking to me, in that rapid, broken, almost-unintelligible way little kids do.

Little girl: "Um... did... did you see my dog?"

Little boy: "HAVE YOU SEEN OUR DOG?"

Keep in mind I had never seen these kids before, nor did I have any idea what their dog looked like.

Me: "Um... no... I have not seen any dogs. What does it look like?"

Little girl: "It's a [some kind of] terrier!"

Me: "No, I'm sorry, but I'll keep an eye out for it."

At this point the little boy starts looking under my car. My car is still running.

Little Boy: "Can I check on your tires in case you ran him over?"

Me: "I didn't run over any dogs. I promise. I think I would know if I did."

At this point the little boy gets a mean look on his face, points to me and says:
"YOU BETTER NOT HAVE. If I find out you did I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN!"

They then walk away at which point I turn to my daughter in the back seat and ask her what the hell just happened.

That is the end of my story."

I don't know if they every found their dog. I assume they did as the neighborhood did not get set on fire.
posted by bondcliff at 8:49 AM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

About a year ago, when I was in the bleakest, darkest period of my life, my sister called me and told me that my 3 year old niece had woken up in the middle of the night, saying over and over again, “[Merricat] is at the black door! [Merricat] is at the black door!” And I was. Luckily, I didn’t go through.

Only a day or so after their new nanny started working for them, also had a dream that the nanny had made her eat dog food. I never trusted the nanny after that, and it turned out I was right not to—she ended up having some serious issues with honesty, etc. So yeah, I’m pretty sure I have a psychic niece, though she did have one dream where Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins was sitting on the exercise ball in her bedroom, and as far as i know that one hasn’t come true yet.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 9:06 AM on April 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

When our son was about one and half, I flipped over an empty wastebasket so he could drum on it. He proceeded to drum away, then stopped, said "yay!" and gave us a bow, hand over his waist and everything. We have no idea where he learned that.
posted by fings at 9:19 AM on April 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

When my daughter was four or so, she asked me, "Would you destroy the universe to save me?" That was a tough one to answer.

When my son was three, we were talking about how nice it would be to have a big basement like my brother's family. My husband said, "Maybe someday we'll have a house with a basement," and my son remarked, "Someday we will all die."
posted by Redstart at 9:28 AM on April 9, 2022 [14 favorites]

“When my daughter was four or so, she asked me, 'Would you destroy the universe to save me?'”

That, right there, is the beginning of a very upsetting work of speculative fiction.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:19 AM on April 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

I often dress up for Halloween and hand out candy to kids at a friend's house. One year I wore one of those big animal heads and a jumpsuit. I didn't really have a plan per se but it was a good looking costume, Daylight Savings Sloth. Most kids liked it, some kids thought it was a little spooky. One kid just stayed on the sidewalk and yelled "HIM GOT PEOPLE HANDS" which has become a bit of a slogan among some of my friends lately.

One time my little sister, as a little kid, was walking along the rail along the top of the stairs and fell down into the stairwell, nasty fall. She was howling. My dad (kind of uncharacteristically) went to gather her up, make sure she was okay. Once she calmed down and was, amazingly, unharmed, she looked at my dad and her first words after she stopped screaming were "I lost the skill!" which became a beloved family phrase.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:35 AM on April 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

My sister, at the age of three, talking to my aunt (my mother's sister), in a cheery voice and clear as a bell:
"Dad says you look just like a hippo!"
My aunt certainly freaked out. Not the same as being freaked out, but close enough?
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:45 AM on April 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

My son, just hours after he was born, was on my lap, facing me. Cradled in my arms. He was so calm, I said "you're such a good boy!" And he repeated back to me, very clearly, "good boy".
posted by cda at 11:07 AM on April 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

Just recently we went to a play with a 7 year old. In the play, the characters talk about and react to some killings that happened offstage, in the past. 7 year old was confused, wanted to know why we don't see the killings onstage if they're so important. "It's not fair that they won't show us that!"
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:45 AM on April 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

I took a seminar on William Blake from a professor I dearly loved, and his wife often attended the class with their three year old son in tow.

About mid semester, during a lull in a conversation about nothing I could see a causal relationship with, the son announced, calmly and very clearly: "when I grow up, I’m going to kill daddy and marry mommy!"

At which we all laughed. The prof was by no means a Freudian, either. He was a radical Christian seminary dropout.
posted by jamjam at 1:53 PM on April 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

well, one time i was doing dishes and my 3 year old daughter, who was still not communicating a lot, opened the front door and said, "cat, bird"

"oh, ok, cat. bird" - i went back to the dishes and then said, "cat - bird??" - i turned around and saw our cat had a robin in its mouth - i ran over and tried to pick up the cat but she let go of the bird and he tried to fly out the window above the dishes - i tried to go over there and while i was considering what to do the cat jumped up like furry lightning and grabbed the robin again, so i grabbed her and carried her out and made her let go of the bird, who got the hell out of dodge

my daughter was laughing her head off at all this

i told the cat that if she wanted to keep her birds not to bring them into the house - (she understood me because she never did it again) - then i told my daughter not to let the cat in if she had a bird in her mouth
posted by pyramid termite at 3:36 PM on April 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Pyramid termite: As an toddler, I was for some reason given the duty of naming the new cat, so I declared him to be Bijee. I told my very first anecdote to my parents: regarding the cat's exciting encounter with the local wildlife. Earlier that day while my grandmother babysat me, a bird had a near miss which my grandmother intervened in to save the birb. I summarized, “Bijee eaten birdie, Gramma birdie fence.”

While this is not something I was involved with personally, when author Ramsey Campbell's daughter Timsin was four or so, she said something that creeped out her father out enough that he subsequently published it under her name while she was still a preschooler:

“When I'm dead, I'll be hungry.”

posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:39 PM on April 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

My aunt was visiting the salon. My cousin Z, age 2, came to his dad back at home and said, "Mommy hurt! Mommy crying." Dad assured him that his mom was okay and would be back soon. Z repeated with more insistence, "No! Mommy hurt! Mommy crying!" Shortly thereafter, the phone rang. The salon was calling to say my aunt had thrown her back out and could my uncle come get her?
posted by jocelmeow at 4:31 PM on April 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

When my youngest was three he told me "if you eat beans every day you'll never die". I asked him how he knew that and he said "the ground told me". He's 46, eats a lot of beans, and is very healthy.
posted by mareli at 4:33 PM on April 9, 2022 [12 favorites]

Well, as we've all heard many times, they're good for your heart...
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:03 PM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

The ground telling your son that he should eat beans every day because you’ll never die if you do is quite striking from a Pythagorean point of view since they abhorred beans out of a belief that they were the first stop for souls of the dead in their journey of reincarnation.

It's kind of hard to understand how Pythagoreans could have come up with such an eccentric belief, but I thought I had a clue when I read that beans are unusual in that they have a hollow stem which extends down into the ground like a straw, which when combined with the way beans in a pod can look like little fetuses at the end of umbilical cords, and the custom of burying the dead, might be enough for a doctrine of signatures based conviction.

I thought the hollow stem could be a pipeline for nitrogen fixing bacteria in the root nodules to make their way into the beans so they would be available the next generation, and that this explained all the lectins in beans, because the ability of lectins to bind carbohydrates such as those found in the glycocalyx of bacteria would allow the beans to control those nitrogen fixing bacteria and keep them from multiplying until the plant got ready for that in the roots.

It turned out later that legumes in general do indeed sequester root nodule bacteria in their seeds, but beans also happen to to be #2 behind meats on the list of foods that can give you botulism when improperly canned, and the botulism bacterium is a member of the genus Clostridium, which are also soil dwelling bacteria with the ability to fix nitrogen.

Which goes to show that the ground may not always have your best interests at heart when it tells you to do something.
posted by jamjam at 6:10 PM on April 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

One of my co-workers brought their 4 year old to work before halloween. I asked him what he was going to be for halloween and he said, "A skeleton." I asked him if his mother had made his costume and he said, "No costume, I'm wearing my skeleton UNDER MY SKIN!"
posted by a humble nudibranch at 6:11 PM on April 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

“I took a seminar on William Blake from a professor I dearly loved, and his wife often attended the class with their three year old son in tow.”

I mean, I'm fascinated by Blake and I'm a bit envious of the little boy, but also unsettled.

I've been carrying around in the back pocket of my brain the outline of an urban fantasy book I would title The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I just needed to mention that because it's not often Blake pops up in conversation and I'm so enamored of my unwritten novel which will, of course, remain forever unwritten because I suck.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:21 PM on April 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Little e was an unheimlich little dear, in the best way. Two anecdotes that Mr. eirias likes to tell from when she was two or so:

- One time, Mr. e asked her, "Where's Mama?" To which she responded, complete with emphatic downward pointing, "In the GWOUND. Mama in the GWOUND."
- Another time she looked at us with purpose and determination and demanded, apropos of nothing, "Turn the sun off." When we declined to do so she became very cross.

I also have some other strong memories of that determination. I remember a time when she can't have been much very much more than a year old -- I think that standing and words were both relatively new -- and it was getting late, and she was standing near the couch, and it's like I saw something click in her mind, and she realized: If I say words, I can MAKE the grownups DO THINGS. Things for ME. And she turned and looked at me with this laser gaze and said, simply: "DINNER." There was nothing to do but obey.

What else? She had funny ideas about existence -- we would talk to her about "when you grow up," and she would respond by talking to us about "when you grow down." Like she thought that we would become babies in her care. Not so far off, maybe. She also had very fluid boundaries on natural kinds: she thought that the cat was going to grow up to be a hosta. Hasn't happened yet.

But other times, other times I just wonder how someone so old arrived in a package so small. At two and a half she was convinced she wanted to play the piano -- that is, I took her along to a friend's piano studio recital because I needed to be there and I didn't have a sitter, and unexpectedly, after every child's performance Little e stood up in the pew and yelled, "CAN I DO THAT?" We started her in that piano studio at the earliest possible moment, when she turned four, and she really took to it, not in some kind of prodigy way, but we're six years in now and it's the pursuit that's given her the most consistent joy, the place she goes when she's sad or mad or when she wants to show off for visiting friends. Then at some point when she was five or six she informed us that she didn't like the pop music we played at home, and her favorite music was Bach. It is a mystery where this opinion came from -- it was neither in her piano repertoire nor in our rotation at home -- but playing a Bach harpsichord CD in the background indeed helped her focus through a year of virtual school. How did she know these things about herself, having so little experience with the world? I'm a scientist, of course I don't believe in the supernatural, but I have to say, living with my kid occasionally makes me shake my head in wonder.
posted by eirias at 8:37 PM on April 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

Marriage: Heaven and Hell (FTFY)

~~~~~

So I'm in Chicago, living in the city, dead between Rush and Michigan on Walton. I was 26 years old. (1981. Jesus H. Christ) It's a great story how I got to live downtown, paying just to park my pickup, but that's not this.

~~~~~

I was running a 3 story remodel on Clark, maybe 1/3 of the way from downtown to Wrigley Field. It was solid enough to rebuild, there'd been a fire on the second story, some of the windows had burned out but the brick was plenty solid, needed sandblasting and tuck pointing, a new roof, the whole of the interior was trashed and/or burned, those first few weeks working there I came home black as a chimney sweep.

Larry and I showed up a bit early, we're sitting on this big honkin' construction site dumpster, sucking down some coffee, a cigarette or two. This kid was walking between the dumpster and my pickup. I told him to get the fuck away from my truck; you don't fuck with a mans truck or his tools, either, and had I not told him Larry would have.

He's maybe 9, or 11, who knows who cares. He looked me dead in the eye and told me to go fuck myself. He had these eyes like what some visionary would have, eyes maybe a cross of a visionary and an eagle, they were blazing, really strong, carrying enough anger for that whole neighborhood, plus two or three other neighborhoods, also.

Larry and I looked at one another, we're laughing about this kid full of piss and vinegar as he was, and the fact that we were laughing -- not at him but rather laughing at how this kid is, and who he is -- he totally teed off on me, Larry too. One hell of a vocabulary, to boot. This kid was the best.

I don't doubt at all that if I'd jumped down off that dumpster that kid would have been ready to play. You should have seen his eyes. What a great kid. I hope life hasn't taken the jam he carried that day, I hope he's running a construction outfit or a Mafia family or god alone knows what; he was street-tough, don't think he's spent any time splitting an atom, but really, who knows.

I know if I saw Larry today we'd talk about this kid. Admirable in upwards of 47 ways.

A great human being.
posted by dancestoblue at 9:11 PM on April 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

So I had just come from college orientation. I note that I grew up in the Bay Area and was moving to the region that my aunt/uncle/cousins live in. I had just acquired some kind of bug bite that literally swelled up in a several inches wide bulge and felt like it had a fever. My cousin, in her early teens or so, tells me that is a spider bite, a spider laid eggs in me, and one day they are going to hatch out of my arm.

I....was fairly sure this may be some sort of BS, but this was my first time with this kind of bite reaction and I was new to the area, so I asked my aunt. Who immediately screamed my cousin's name like she was soooooo in trouble...

I still dont know what bug around here causes that, but I eventually stopped having hot tumor bites. Never had any spider babies either.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:35 PM on April 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

... yet.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:26 AM on April 10, 2022 [14 favorites]

One of the heroes of Swedish culture and education is, of course, Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940). Like Goethe’s house in Weimar or Wagner’s house at Lake Lucerne, Selma’s family home in Värmland is open to the public and one of those spots one has to have visited. So my then-wife and then-little kids are sitting in the adjacent café recovering from the guided tour, when my daughter, five at the time, says:, “It’s so nice of Selma Lagerlöf that she fixed some ice cream for us!”
posted by Namlit at 10:26 AM on April 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Two Oceans aquarium has an enormous predator tank, and sometimes you can see divers in with the sharks, either feeding them or cleaning the tank. The sharks are quite big. Ragged tooth sharks, if I remember correctly.

I once saw a diver in there, cleaning the glass from the inside. There was a little girl watching. Very small, in a frilly dress with fairy wings. She really was very cute, and seemed fascinated by the diver.
He was captivated with her, waving at her.
He couldn't hear that she was saying hopefully "Look mommy, the shark is going to BITE the man!"

Apparently when I was very little, my father put a record on. I was playing by myself. My brother saw me laugh at something, and when he asked me what I was laughing at, I said "Mozart made a little joke".
I kind of wish I could remember.
posted by Zumbador at 10:44 AM on April 10, 2022 [16 favorites]

Oh, man, I love that! Mozart was totally making a little joke, whatever it was, and I wish I had the perception of little Zumbador!
posted by taz (staff) at 11:58 AM on April 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

At the dinner table my pre-teen daughter, a bright out-doorsy child with no trace of goth or macabre tendencies, sighed and said: "I love death." And with a happy little smile returned to her meal.
:/
I have no idea how long I sat and stared at her, searching for words... until I remembered she'd started reading Pratchett.
posted by evilmomlady at 4:52 PM on April 10, 2022 [13 favorites]

Years ago my spouse and I were babysitting a friend's kids. We were all discussing our movie choice for the evening, and wondered whether one option would be too scary for the 7-year-old. She leaned in close to my spouse and whispered intently: "I. love. scary."
posted by doift at 8:23 PM on April 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

The quantity of past-lives inferences in the twitter thread forces me to pause and remind myself that for most people there is a huge difference between a belief and a deeply held belief and that the former can often mean something more like, "this is a fun thing to think about."

My mother loves such stories. She claimed for a while to be the reincarnation of a relative based on the fact they shared a few pretty common traits. Notable among them was loving horses. (A young girl who loves horses clearly requires an explanation.) She was convinced my early childhood fear of elevators was because a relative I'd never met had died from natural causes in an elevator. No matter how much I insisted that I was afraid of elevators because sitting in a closed box built by unknown strangers hanging from a wire hundreds of feet in the air *is* objectively terrifying - unless you've read up on safety regulations and failure statistics - she refused to believe it wasn't because I was receiving communication from a spirit. I've never had the courage to ask how she reconciles that belief with her seemingly incompatible Christian beliefs, but she reconciles lots of other surprising (and almost entirely good) novel ideas with her faith.

Every so often a very young kid really surprises me by jumping ahead of a science outreach talk. There was one where I was introducing the idea of thermal radiation to a random crowd at a museum event and said something like, "why does an electric stove element glow red but the pot of water you put on it doesn't ever glow red?" The youngest kid in the room said something close to "but you can feel that both things are hot if you put out your hand toward them." The third next slide was about pit vipers.

In unrelated news, I just got back from a spontaneous weekend vacation, centered on a hike through beautiful rocky mountains (not Rocky Mountains) and kayaking. We were the only boat on a crystal-clear, few-km diameter lake full of tinkling, floating ice and birds who seemed surprised to see us. That taking two days off counts as a vacation in my household is probably a sign of poor time-management, but it was great fun. Hitting the water before the tourists and mosquitos do is something I'm going to keep in mind next year.
posted by eotvos at 8:39 PM on April 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

My brother came home from school one day when we were 11 and 13. He walked right into the kitchen and said to our mom, "Sorry. I know. I am going to my room." Then he turned and punched me in the face. As I was crying and mom was screaming at him to get to his room, he turned and said, "I knew you would say that. I can read minds."

Fast forward 5 years. We are at a HS graduation party at one of his friend's house. As we walked by the pool I said, "Sorry. Yes, I am an asshole" and pushed him in the pool. He gets his head above water and is screaming at me that "You are a fucking asshole!" I said, right before I ran to leave, "I can read minds." And, "I have been waiting 5 years for that." He knew exactly what I was talking about.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:33 AM on April 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

When my daughter (rabbitbookworm here) was toddler/preschool, she would preface some of her observations with the clause "When I was older..." We chalked it up to a language learning process from hearing adults say "When I was younger..." But once, we were at a museum with some indigenous peoples displays and she would point out artifacts and say "When I was older, I used that stick to make music." "When I was older, I wore those beads on my shoes." "When I was older, I made food in that basket." And she was 100% right about how each item was used.

When my son was toddler/preschool, his dad and I left him with more or less responsible adults while we went away for the weekend. When we returned home he told us that he had a dream that we were flying through fireworks. And, indeed, we had flown over the Oakland Coliseum during a fireworks event.

And springing off eotvos' comment about youngsters at science talks, I was maybe eight years old at a science assembly at school. The presenter had two cylinders and asked the kids if the cylinders were identical, what would be the same about them. Kids were answering same height, same weight, same diameter. When he called on me, I said "They will cast the same shadow." The presenter came over and shook my hand and said that he had been to a hundred schools and no one had ever given that answer. I think about that every time I see a Paul Hollywood handshake on the Great British Bake-off.
posted by rekrap at 11:47 AM on April 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

When she was 2-ish or 3-ish years old, I asked my daughter if she could remember what it was like being in her mommy’s tummy. She said “Yeah. Red! And noisy!”
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:50 PM on April 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

I was digging a trench in my yard, I'd gotten it about 18 inches deep and wide, maybe 4 feet long, and my little girl, after watching me for a while, remarked (accurately) "I'd fit in there."
posted by fingersandtoes at 7:03 PM on April 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

Tiny baby anachronism toddling around after finding out about the tooth fairy:

*Bops dad with a stick*
Whispers "I've got your teeth"
*Walks away*

And the moment they were very young and helping me in the kitchen as I cooked dinner. We discussed that the chicken we ate was indeed the same thing as chicken the animal. After a long pause, I fully expected this to signal vegetarian leanings. Instead I got the full eye contact and "Can we eat Aunty's chickens?" I then had to explain that no, we can't, and please don't suggest that to their aunty.

The time a mummified gecko fell in my hair and they carefully gathered up the corpse and insisted on taking it to preschool. "look mum, you can see intestines!"

(Said child in their first year of high school explained aquamation to their English class after someone asked what they were reading - Caitlin Doughty's Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs)
posted by geek anachronism at 6:32 PM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Not really freaky but I have a personal/impersonal relationship with my sister and had her kids' phone numbers to text them.

I had texted with them both, but in a message a few years later I texted my nephew telling him that his latest music video was really great and he is so talented and I was proud of him. My nephew's response was "Who might this be?"
posted by bendy at 11:06 PM on April 12, 2022

and one day they are going to hatch out of my arm

Ask me anything about scabies.
posted by bendy at 11:16 PM on April 12, 2022

Absolutely not!

Now I find it funny I told this story and on another thread, this explains it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:09 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

The time a mummified gecko fell in my hair and they carefully gathered up the corpse and insisted on taking it to preschool.

Ha, I took a similar gecko to school for Show & Tell once. The teacher was horrified and appalled, which surprised me, because my parents had been so matter-of-factly interested in it (I'd taken it in at my mother's suggestion, in fact).
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:32 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

ManyLeggedCreatures ain't afraid of no mummified gecko
posted by taz (staff) at 9:58 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Years ago I worked at a nursery school in a wealthy area, in the 3 year olds room. At snack time, they were each given those tiny plastic cups with juice, and a couple of animal crackers (or similar). This tiny cherub named Carey stood up at the head of the table, lifted her cup, and saluted her classmates "CHEERS"! And all of them responded by lifting their cups as well.

"CHEERS!!!"
posted by annieb at 3:19 PM on April 19, 2022 [6 favorites]