at home: around the house

When I was very young, my older sister told me that you had to sleep on the same pillow every night or your head would fall off. She even said that once, her pillow accidently got switched with another pillow, and she had to get surgery to reattach her head!

one time when i was little i tryed sticking my finger in the outlet. my mom stoped me at once and said that little mice would bite my fingers off if i stuck my figer in any outlet agen...from then on i stayed away from them and put mouse traps by them.

when i was young, i had a foam rubber pillow (my preference, everybody else in the family had feathers). the pillow had internal voids and ribs (sort of like egg packaging), and i thought that this was the body of a huge, dead spider. for some unknown reason, this did not terrify me!

In electric blankets you can feel places where there are connetions in the wires (I don't really know what purpose they serve). Anyway, I was convinced these were penises and that I was sleeping with three of them every night. I never found it that disturbing, just odd that they'd put penises in electric blankets.

When I was younger I would always try go out and play in the street. One day Mother locked the door and I panicked because I was trapped inside. When my mother came she explain how she locked because dhe wants me to be safe. Well, I must have missed a few pronouns in that speech because I thought it was the door watching out for me. After that I started sleeping on the floor because it must be painful for that soft little thing to hold my weight, I would make small talk with corners since they must be pretty lonely, and of course I would always say "Thank you, Have a nice day" every time the door allowed my to go outside.

When I first started helping mom in the kitchen, at about age five, we were making some sort of a batter one day and she let me do the stirring. I wanted to appear smart and not ask any questions so I kept stirring the batter only one way because I was certain that if I went backwards it would turn back into flour, sugar, egg, etc.

When I was about 4 and a half, my mum used to clean this lady's house. The laundry was in the garage, behind a closed door. Again, I was never allowed beyond that door. I was merely told there were cars in there and it was too dangerous for me to enter. I was convinced there was a freeway with cars and the like wizzing by at phenominal speeds, just waiting to run over a little girl like me!

I would help my mom with cooking when I was little, and I thought when you put things in the bowl, you were really creating a little world. The ingredients represented weather, so for example, when you put eggs in, it was sunny. Flour was snow, water was obviosly rain, sugar was an ice storm, and chocolate was a mudslide. I always felt horrible for mixing it all up and making them have a tornado! Then when you baked it, the mini world had its apocalypse and was no more. :(

I used to believe that if you touched the breaker box in your house, you would disintegrate into a big pile of ashes. My parents had told me never to touch it & that was what would happen. When I was 24, my husband's grandpa came over and was for whatever reason was about to open our breaker box. I started freaking out & told him not to touch it. He looked at me like I was crazy & asked why. I relayed to him what my parents had told me when I was young and he and my husband started laughing at me. (The breaker box had been in my room when I was a kid and since I had never had any dealings with one when I was older, still didn't know any different.)

When I was about 4 we had an older refridgerator that made a funny squeaking sound when the motor ran. My mom told me it was the mice on the exercise wheel that made the fridge run. I believed her for years.

I was always told never to lie, so when playing hide and seek and being asked where I was, thought it only poilte to call out "Im under the table!".
Clearly, the rules were never fully explained to me.

My dad once belived, ~1937 or so, that there was an operator for electricity just as there was an operator for the telephone. So, ne day he decided to play a trick on the electricity-operator by screwing a coin into a lamp socket. Not only did it blow a fuse, but he got a bit of a shock too. Turns out the operator had a trick for him too.

I used to believe that the electrical socket in the basement could be used like a lock, and using a key you could open a secret passage. Needless to say that was one of my near death experiences.

My grandmother always lost her purse and her keys,so she would say "Oh those darn elves took my keys!" So whenever I lost something I would cry because I thought elves were stealing my stuff.

I used to believe my attic was a black hole because my mother would alway tell me to be careful around it, and my siblings house told stories about things getting stuck up there. When I was little I used to run really fast alongt the edge of the hallway so i woudnt get sucked up!

I used to believe that the if I watched the microwave as it was working that it would explode. Hence I would run out of the kitchen immediately upon hitting "start".