Fun/Stupid things as a kid that you Won't let your kids do (Page 2)

Holy Crap I think we led parallel childhoods.

Car Surfing

Construction Sites (got a few rides home from the police)

Snow Forts

Misquito insecticide trucks

A favorite among me and my friends was jumping off roofs into peoples pools.  The further away the pool the better it was. 

This eventually progresses into jumping off of bridges.  We started jumping off small bridges over the river.  We wound up jumping off the Gandy and Howard Franklin bridges to freak out the motorists.   

My brother and I trying to push each other OVER the swingset bar. We found out that Dad never bothered to anchor the swings.

Rock fights. Just throwing rocks at each other. Stupid. Fun but stupid.

Spinning the merry-go-round fast enough to eject your friends across the playground. A lot of trips to the hospital resulted from this game.

Many other things that all resulted in "I don't know" as an answer to "what is the hell where you guys thinking?" as someone was laying on the ground awaiting the arival of the ambulance...again. Good times, good times.

The merry-go-around from above reminded me of this.  Does anyone ever remember a contraption like this:  There's a huge park near Mich State's campus in E. Lansing that had this odd merry-go-around, it was either four or six sided, everyone sat on a bench facing the middle holding onto a bar that would move toward and away from you (think rowing motion).  Someone would have to get it spinning by pushing it, but then you could increase the speed by everyone rowing together, not sure how it worked, but if you had a big enough group going, you could get that thing going crazy-fast.  I remember being thrown off a time or two pretty hard.

Now that I think about it, that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen these days.

My 1st and 2nd sons were at grandma and grandpa's lakefront home last summer and decided to do a little rock skipping, and, well, number 2 son now has a crown.  I bet it wasn't fun at that moment of impact until after the crown was put on.

My addition:
Our family got to live at and manage a resort.   Every summer one family would always come up and their teenage kid would bring Black Cat firecrackers and M-80s.  There was the usual challenge of seeing how long one could hold a Black Cat firecracker after lighting it and then throwing it before it would explode, and the "let's catch a fish and put a lit firecracker in it's mouth and throw it back" fun.  Unrelated event - some years later, the kid died in a motorcycle accident.

MUL98 - 2008-04-10 2:01 PM

1stTimeTri - 2008-04-10 1:29 PM Our family got to live at and manage a resort.   Every summer one family would always come up and their teenage kid would bring Black Cat firecrackers and M-80s.  There was the usual challenge of seeing how long one could hold a Black Cat firecracker after lighting it and then throwing it before it would explode, and the "let's catch a fish and put a lit firecracker in it's mouth and throw it back" fun.  Unrelated event - some years later, the kid died in a motorcycle accident.

 

This quote is really excellent if you imagine it being read in the "Jack Handey" voice from the old SNL skits!

  Now that you think about it!

Crawl up the storm drain tube from the brook, about 200 feet, and into the drain itself in the street.  Yell up through the grating at people walking by.  "Help...get me out of here!"

Not exactly when I was a kid (more like 21), we used to unscrew the peep hole thingie in my buddie's appartment, light a bottle rocket, stick it in the hole and let it go zooming around his living room.

Hide behind a fence, and when a car was coming down the street, we'd roll a ball out in front of it.  The old "kid possibly chasing a ball" trick.  Later, we'd go out and measure the length of the car skid marks.

Found a 22 caliber rim-fire cartridge and hit it with a hammer to make it go off.

Amazing that I'm still alive today. 

We used to squash change on the rail road tracks. We used to stand RIGHT NEXT to the tracks as the train went zooooming by. Like a matter of 2-3 feet from the train. The wind from it would almost knock you over.

Then we would run onto the tracks and search for our flattened change. It was huge, flat and hot! I used to come home with a pocket full of flattened pennies and dimes... But once I flattened a quarter, and it was as big as a pancake. No joke.

My ((future)) children will not be allowed near the rail road tracks.

Yep, followed by spitting fire a la KISS.

Skateboard slalom down really steep hills w/ flattened beer cans for cones (hit one and the skateboard stops) w/o helmets of course.

My mom had a beetle convertible -- she'd put the top down and we'd sit on it (I was 4) while she drove around town.  She got pulled over for that one.

Going way too fast on anything with an engine.  My kids may never have driver's licenses

Oh yeah, we would pull the spikes out of the tracks....

We call that game Mumbly Peg; err umm we USED to

"When camping, a pickup truck would drive up and down the campsite roads with a big mosquito fogger in the bed spewing out clouds of insecticide and all the kids would run behind it and the fog for what seemed like hours. To this day I like the smell of insecticides."

Another fan of the mosquito truck!  I lived at the beach and it came around once a week.  We would grab our bikes and ride behind it.  I kept a blood-level of DDT druing the summer and never had a problem with bugs bothering me.  Even now, my DH gets bitten within an inch of his life and they pretty much leave me alone.  Horrah for the mosquito truck!

Pattie

I lived in the boonies.....we would go out onto the back roads late at night in the winter and drive around with our lights turned off. Sometimes we would do it backwards.  We'd also drive up to the ski area in our town at night and spin brodies, almost tipping the car over many times.  We'd keep the windows down and see how much snow we could get into the car.  Once we brought my friend's 5-year-old brother with us!

My dad lived in N. Idaho on Lake Pend Orielle, which would freeze solid in the winter.  My sister and I would put on our ice skates and skate through the fresh snow on top of the ice for hours.  No idea if there were ever any not-so-frozen spots--luckily we never encountered one.  We'd also sled down a super steep hill and land on the ice.

Nobody locked their cars in those days (80s) in my small town, so we'd put people's cars into neutral and roll them into the middle of the street and leave them there.  All over town. God, I was annoying.

Hopefully my kids never do the amount of underage drinking that I did.  I think my mom was pretty naiive so she didn't suspect the level of trouble I was getting into, especially since I had good grades and was a star athlete.  Luckily I survived many incidents of poor judgment.  My boys will have to try a lot harder to pull one over on me.  I guess that is the positive outcome of a devious childhood!

Yikes, there are too many things...

- Full contact cycling. We would ride down the street body checking each other until somebody, or both of us fell.

- Racing through the streets on our bikes, cutting every corner, never stopping at stop signs, never being concerned about cars.

No helmets, obviously.