body parts: general

When I was about 8 or 9 my dad had told me to hit his shin with my fist to feel how hard it was, then he would tell me that he had a metal bar put in his leg. When I would ask how or why he had a metal bar in his leg he would just laugh. Thinking he didn't want to talk about it I would just drop the subject. I wondered about that metal bar for quite a while. Now I know it was just his shin bone!

I begged my mother to let me pierce my ears when I was 5, and after a while, she agreed. As the day got closer, I heard that they'd be using an 'earring gun' to do the piercing. She found me crying, because I thought that it was a handgun loaded with an earring, and what if they missed my ear and got my face?

When I was a kid I was amused that you could move your knee cap so I would do it constantly. So one dad my dad decided to tell me that if I kept doing it that my knee cap would fall off. So I wouldn't even touch my knee cap after that until my dad finally told me it wasn't true when I was 11.

Due to a lack of respect for my mother when I was much younger, my grandmother told me, that when I stick out my tongue to my mother at exactly 12.00 pm/am, I would freeze forever with that face (while my tongue is out)..I was so scared, I have never done it again..

I used to belive that when your foot "falls asleep" it was salt running over your foot. When my mom told me my foot fell asleep i started shaking it to wake it up. When my brother was around i would say "shhhhhhhh my foot is sleeping".

When I was younger, I thought the veins on my wrists were from marker and that some random person came up to me and drew my veins on with purple and turquoise marker. I figured the reason the marker never came off when I bathed was the marker was permanent.

My mom would always ask me if dinner 'hit the spot' so I always imagined my stomach as a big ball, similar to the bottom of a thermometer, empty or full of red liquid. I knew what my stomach really was, and how it looked, I was just a weird kid.

When I first heard someone make reference to the stereotypically feminine complaint of "oh, I can't do that, I'd break a nail", I imagined that the person saying that was concerned about the nail completely breaking off down the middle. Having at one point trimmed off my own nail a bit too close to the flesh, this sounded like an excruciatingly painful thing to happen and I couldn't understand why the complaint was treated with such derision.

When I was very small, I absolutely believed that my brain was run by a bunch of very small men who lived inside (probably Oompa-Loompa-inspired). Each little man was in charge of a different thing; some of them ran my arms and legs, and others aimed my eyes, and so on. My memory was actually a very large set of little drawers (I had been very impressed by the card catalog at the library), and one special little man knew where everything was. So when I wanted to remember something, he went and got it out of the drawer for me.

When I was elementary school age, I used to believe women had a horizontal, loaf-of-bread-shaped portrusion across their chests. Imagine my surprise. Obviously, I was bottle-fed as a baby.

I used to believe that broken limbs were contageous - like if I were to touch someone with a broken leg, my leg would break. I avoided people with casts on until I was about 7 or 8 and realized how silly that was. I've still never broken a bone, however...

When, in classroom, teachers told us the diference between right and left, I though their right/left was the opposite of us kids. They were standing in front of us, so their right would be our left, lol, and that confused me. It made sense, because I also had heard adults had more teeth, so I thought that when we became adults, our right and left switched magically.

I hardly ever used to clean my teeth as a young child (a habit I've not exactly grown out of) so when one of my milk teeth fell out, my Mum would tell me to put it under my pillow and the tooth fairy would come and exchange it for something.

Now, my Mum obviously knew I didn't clean my teeth very much, because every time I did this, instead of there being a nice shiny 50p underneath my pillow in the morning, there was usually a really old, rusty, old penny that could never have been used anywhere.

I'm surprised it didn't make me clean my teeth more!

As a child, I asked my older sister about the little bumps (saliva glands) on the inside of my cheeks, about half way back.

She said that they were growths that had to be cut out, and grabbed some scissors to perform the operation.

I sincerely believed she would carry through with it, but wouldn't tell my parents because I thought they would make me go to the doctor.

I used to believe that if cutting your arm through or any other part of the body, the limps would be made out of different kind of saussages, like salami,etc. I then thought, hey would it not be practical, you never needed to be hungry, for you would have your food always next to you.

I use to think that everyone in the world could pull their teeth out and then put them back but me, my grandma could, my great grandma could and so could my uncle. I tried and tried to get mine out too, but (thank God) neveer succeeded. I was so relieved when I finally learned about dentures.