getting older

I used to believe that you slowly acquired an English accent when you got old.

Of course, my grandmother, great aunt and great uncle came to the US from England in the early 1900's, but nobody had told me this when I was five or so.

Ormewood

When I was little, I thought that if a child had a period of growing quickly, it was called a "growth sperm." Well, one of my friends came over to my house to play, and my mom mentioned to my friend that she has grown a lot since the last time she had seen her. So I blurted out, "YEAH, YOU'VE HAD A GROWTH SPERM!!!". Obviously, I later learned that it's called a growth SPURT, not sperm.

whoops

My brother is just barely two years older than me. When I was around four, I got very fed up with him boasting about his age, so told him that I would catch up to him one day. So I prayed for tornado's to come on his birthday. Somehow I thought that would prevent him from turning another year older... as if it were the celebration part that makes a person turn another age. If that were the case... I think people would have stopped celebrating their birthday's long ago.
And ironically... the tornado's always came on mine.

Megan Spilker

I used to think that "gentlemens clubs" were where guys went to dress fancy with top hats and tuxes and they were there to have dinner parties.

Catherine

When I was little, I was told that people become shorter when they are old. My goal was to live to be 300 years old so I could fit into my doll house and go down water pipes like waterslides.

Anon

I thought "born of a woman" meant that you were a little girl when you were born. So in Sunday School, I thought Jesus was a girl when he was born. I asked me grandfather and my dad if they were "born of a woman" and of course they told me yes. I lived in fear of turning into a boy.

amanda

When I was little I didn't know what the word teenager meant. I heard it a lot on tv or when my sister's friends came over. I never once thought to ask anyone what it meant, so I came up with my own definition. According to me at age 5 a teenager was an evil person who broke into your house at night to steal your toys. How I ever got this idea, I don't know. I found out what it really meant when I was about 6 and I was watching a tv show with my sister. It was about this group of teenagers and stuff that they did...so whenever they said the word teenager I would think to myself, if the people who make this tv show know that teenagers exist, why do they let them be on tv? I mean, back then I thought stealing toys was the worst thing you could do. When I asked my sister why this was so, she couldn't stop laughing. She still makes fun of me now. On my 13th birthday, she came up to me and sed "you're a teenager now, go steal someone's toys" i hate her.

five-year old dictionary

When I was a kid I was adamant that I was not going to grow up. My parents thought it had to do with seeing the movie Peter Pan, but little did they know it was because I thought grown-ups HAD to listen to elevator music and always be serious.

Donna C.

I used to think when you grew up you'd get to a certain age and then get to choose whether to be a boy or a girl. And I was always gonna be a boy (I'm a girl) because is seemed more fun!! Thankfully I grew out of that one :S

Anon

I used to believe that when you grew up, everything would change really fast. I assumed when I became a teenager I would love putting on make-up and talking on the phone, and I would throw all my beloved toys away... I also thought that when you became an adult you would hate everything you ate as a kid (my mom hates cotton candy and marshmallows... her father hates jello!) and start to like all sorts of nasty foods. You'd become nothing like your childhood self and get boring.

I'm so glad I was wrong!

Still buying stuffed animals

I thought that enchiladas were an inch long (inch-aladas). Before I had a good grasp on what an inch was, I thought this meant that an inch was fairly big, the size of an enchilada. I kept assuming that an inch was big, bigger and bigger until I was set straight after declaring that a car was an inch long.

Aretia

As a child I thought that when I would grow taller, I'd look down at my feet and be scared because it was much higher up than when I was a child.

Genny

When my husband was about 4 years old he asked his great grandma "you were around at the time of dinosaurs,what was it like?" The whole family fell off their chairs laughing!

AMY

I thought "Alzheimers" was actually pronounced "Old timers" so I went around telling everyone my grandma didn't remember anything because she had old timers disease.

Julie

When I was a child, I met my Nana, my grandmother's mother. She was 86 at the time, and reasonably frail. As I grew up, she became frailer, and suffered the sort of hunched-shoulder back often seen in very elderly people, so she lost height.

I remember reasoning to myself that people grew bigger, and then as they got older they grew smaller again. I believed that for quite a while. If the process continued, I thought she would become as small as I was eventually.

Karen H

I used to think grown-ups could see what kids were thinking because kids' foreheads acted like mini tv screens, which showed whatever the kid was thinking. This was confirmed when my mom was excited about me getting my bangs cut off. I thought the adults just all knew never speak about this ability, and I made sure to think nice thoughts when adults were around. I couldn't wait to grow up.

Lati B.

When I was younger I used to Believe that adults were always adults, and that other kids were always their age.
in other words: I used to believe that everyone was born their age.

Anon

My mom told me that when I grew up I'd have a different family (meaning a family of my own) and I used to get really upset thinking that she meant that when I got older I was going to be given to a different set of parents and different family.

stephanie

As a kid, I noticed that kids were flexible and adults were stiff in their movements; adults also seemed to be really interested in exercise. So I assumed that as you got older, you had to be careful to exercise & keep moving so you didn't stiffen up and die.
With this state of affairs in effect, it always bothered me how if people broke their bones, the doctors immobilized the broken part so it could heal. So I wondered why doctors thought this was a good idea, given that the part of their bodies that got broken got older faster from being intentionally stiffened by a cast.
I figured that having a part of your body that had gotten broken getting older faster was better than having it fall off entirely, because broken things were thrown away in the garbage. I thought once a limb had been broken, it would rot in a race with getting gangrene if you did not get a cast on it. (This also explained the bad smell inside of a cast as a race between aging and rotting.) This also explained to me how people who had been in an accident were somewhat broken for the rest of their lives.
All of these ideas made me very careful to not break a bone when I was a child, and to be very sympathetic & compassionate to people who had broken a bone.

Now Stiffening

I used to believe that there was no way adults could have friends, that it was just a kid thing. I still sort of believe this, even though I'm 17 and most of my friends are legal adults.

Anon