I used to believe that marigolds would spit at you if you walked by them because my mother told me that they were in her garden to keep away bugs. You had to take a walkway through her garden in order to get to our driveway and every summer I would run as fast as I could past the marigolds and jump into the car or into the house. My mother didn't find out why until I was 18 years old. :)

Emily Anne

My grandfather and I planted a tree. It was only a few inches high, and he told me that if I were to jump over it every day, that I would always be able to jump over it. The important part was to NEVER miss a day, or the whole cause would be lost. Not only did I believe- but I actually jump over it every day for several months!

Anon

Someone once told me that mother nature was the Earth. I jumbled this up somehow and got to thinking that mother nature was kind of like santa claus, only she would watch you when you were out in nature and would punish you if you damaged anything. I was terrified to go running in gym class, but would never explain to my teacher why i HAD to run on the mulch.

The worst story, however, was in the woods on a class field trip. I tripped and snapped a branch off of a tree. I was badly scraped up, but wouldn't stop screaming about how "mother's going to kill me now"

britishbroccoli

I used to believe flowers were alive and had feelings. So when I was about 3 or 4 I would sit in the garden and talk to the periwinkles. I would just chat with them to make them think I was their friend and when they were lulled into a false sense of security I would eat them

winke

My Grandmother had an ornamental chilli plant, with lots of small brightly coloured chillies on it. I was convinced that it was a jelly bean tree and thought she was lying to me because she didn't want me to eat them all. Suffice to say I learnt the hard way.

H.B.

I used to think insects would walk along tree branches and *poof* become a leaf. I misunderstood buds for bugs.

Lisa

I used to think that the ocean was salty because of the boston tea party, and that the tea never got washed out and spread to the entire ocean.

Apparently I thought that the ocean was freshwater before this.

I guess it never occured to me why tea would make water salty instead of tea-like.

Fulgore

when i was a kid, my dad told me that there was two kinds of ice, tame ice and wild ice. The tame ice was the icecubes in the freezer, and the wild ice was the ice forming on lakes etc in the winter.

Auto

When I was four years old my family went to a lake for a vacation. I was not allowed in the lake except for the roped-off kiddie area, but I wanted it deeper, so I spent two weeks getting sandpails of water from the other side of the dock and pouring it into the wading area. I must have been pretty dense because it never did dawn on me that I wasn't getting anywhere.

Texas granny

When I was about six i had a pen pal in Colorado. I thought that because they didn't live in a shoreline state they had never seen water before so I would go down the street to the beach and put some water in bags and mail the water to them, attemting to explain what it was.

Danielle