animals: creepy crawlies

I used to think fireflies were actually stars falling down from the sky. Used to amazed at the sight of trees brightly lit by the wonderful "stars" not knowing they were actually some kind of insects communicating with each other.

Whenever there was a spider, I would scream for my mother to come and kill it. Sometimes she would squish them and other times she would flush them down the toliet. That's what bugged me. Now I have this fear of having a spider crawl up the toliet and get me. I'd always try to get "my business" done as fast as possible.

When my sister was little, she didn't know what granddaddy longlegs were called, so when she saw one in the tub, she ran off screaming, "There's a chicken leg in the bathtub!" She called them that for years.

I used to believe that ladybugs and fireflies ate salami, so everytime I caught one I would put it in a jar with a slice of pepperoni. The bugs weren't too happy, neither was my mom who found the jar later on under my bed. Bug abuser!!!

Where I grew up, we mad massive amounts of yellow jackets in the summer. Every year, around June, my parents would say "The yellow jackets are out!" and I used to believe that yellow jackets were a gang of people who wore jackets that were yellow.

When I was little my older brothers were really into reptiles (snakes and lizards, mostly). For some reason I got the idea that lizards were baby snakes, and when they grew up their legs fell off and they became snakes, kind of like frogs. I believed that untilI was about 12 years old (I'm now 15).

I never dared to smack a mosquito dead because I believe that if i smack a mosquito with my hands, the sting will poke thru my skin and it will suck my blood anyway.

I used to believe…

you know the saying "good night, don't let the bed bugs bite" ? well, i thought that every bed had bed bugs, and for some reason, (i have no idea why) i thought that if i laid on the very edge of my bed, the one closest to the wall, that the bed bugs would not get me.

When I was younger I found a tic on the back of my leg. Well I knew that tics were blood suckers and I also knew that Vampires were blood suckers. I sreamed at my cousin to pick the tic off but she wouldnt. So I ran screaming through the house that the tic was going to drain my blood and I was going to die. My grandma picked it off and all was well once I learned the truth.

I believed that as a child you should always sleep with your pets. My mother only let me have pet worms, slugs or snails. I let them out of the jar to sleep with me every night...but sometimes I rolled over them. I would wake up in the morning thinking that they had crawled back home.

When i was younger my sister told me that when you cut worms in half they would be become 2 seperate worms. so when ever the trick came up where you could cut the person in half (you know with the wooden box?) i just figured they were 2 people. which was aslo my explanation to 'midgets'

When I was little, my evil older sister told me a story about a lady that fell asleep with two earwigs in her ears and they ate her brain. Her husband came in to wake her up in the morning and she opened her mouth and thousands of baby earwigs crawled out.
I've paid thousands of dollars to several therapists to get this image out of my head...and to attemp to dissolve the hatred toward my evil sister that haunts the memories of my childhood.

When I was as little, my friend and I used to collect dead butterflies from her greenhouse and put the dust from the wings on our arms and jump off the top of the steps, thinking we could fly.

my family used to ask "what makes a spiderweb?" "a spider", I'd reply. "and what makes a cobweb?" "a cob". I never understood why this was so funny, and it hurt my feelings

When I was small, I thought there were 3 types of plug. The electrical kind, the ones in the sink or bath, and the slimy kind that crawl along the ground. My family found this amusing and perpetuated my belief - never referring to them with their proper name "slug".
I can still remember how mortified I was when I discovered the truth at an embarassingly mature age, having made an idiot of myself in front of my schoolfriends!

When I was little (before starting kindergarten) my entire family convinced me that masquitoes wore sox. My mother said that the mother would knit the socks with its needle nose and even killed a masquitoe to show me its striped "sox" (which she said came from my godmothers striped sweater. I found out that this was all a lie right before entring school because my mother didn't want me convincing other children that this was true. To this day my family picks on me for believing them, and I'm married and have a child of my own!!