Fun Monday

Karisma is our Fun Monday host this week. The assignment is:

"I want you to take a trip down memory lane, and keep right on going, right back to your childhood. And I want to hear "THAT STORY". You remember the one? Yes, you do! The one your parents, siblings, extended family or friends, would never let you forget, live down or get over!"

I have decided to share three stories from my childhood. I can't share pictures because I do not have a scanner yet. I am hoping that that will be alleviated this Christmas. ****That was a hint Randy***All of these are pretty well known in my family. Surprisingly enough (or not) two of them involve food and two involve sticking things where they don't belong...but alas, only one involves sticking food where it does not belong. I'll start with that one.

1) When I was two I started trying to stick things up my nose. To hear my Mom tell it, nothing smaller than a quarter was safe around me. Pennies, candy, rice...I tried to put them all up my nose. Fortunately, my Mom was always there to rescue the object in just the nick of time. And then came the day that my Dad was watching me.

He brought my high chair into the living room so that he could watch a little football while I ate. He was very pleased with himself. I was eating everything on my plate. He was amused that my Mom considered it such a hassle to feed me dinner. Why, there was nothing to this at all. He watched football, I ate. It doesn't get any easier than that.

Just as the game was ending, my Mom came home. She took me out of the highchair to give me a kiss only to discover that I had a nose full of butter beans. I am sure that she chewed my Dad up one side and down the other. To hear him tell it, you would have thought that I had shoved dynamite up my nose.

She got all of the beans out that she could, but we all ended up sitting in the ER for hours that night so that the doctor could get out the last two. Apparently I had shoved them so far in that even the professionals were amazed. The doctor had never seen a child shove something so far up their nasal cavity.

How impressive is that?

2) When I was three years old I spent the night with my Aunt Gail and Uncle Marvin. They were childless at that point and very excited to get their hands on me. For dinner that night my Aunt made steak for them and figured that I would be fine eating macaroni and cheese. She was unaware of my carnivore tendencies.

According to the legend, I ended up sitting in Uncle Marvin's lap and eating his ENTIRE 14 ounce Ribeye AND his baked potato. He talks about this EVERY SINGLE TIME that I see him.

What can I say? I love steak. And he was the idiot that let a three year old eat his steak. I would never let that happen. Like I said, I love steak.

3) This is the only one of my three stories that I actually remember. I must have been around six when this happened.

My Dad was a boilermaker, a welder who specialized in building nuclear boilers. Because of that he always had ear plugs laying around the house. Most of them looked like this, but they were connected by a blue plastic string.

These ear plugs fascinated me. I was amazed that you could put these little soft rubbery things into your ears and block out all the sounds in the world. I would fondle the ear plugs constantly. If my Mama saw me playing with them she would warn, "You better not put those in your ears! Those are for your Dad's work."
Well, what can I say? I an not too good at following commands. I am a rebel. The day came that I could stand the temptation no longer. I slipped a pair of the earplugs into my pocket and smuggled them into my bedroom.
Once in there, I put the ear plugs in. What!! What was this? I could still hear. I could hear my Mom talking, I could hear my Dad's football game (Are you sensing a theme here?), I could hear my little sister laughing in the next room. This couldn't be right, I had to be doing something wrong. I tried to shove the ear plugs deeper. I could still hear.
It was at this point that my genius kicked in. I decided that the problem was sizing. The big dad sized ear plugs were obviously too big for my kid size ears. I cut the end section of the earplug off. Creating the perfect child size earplugs. I told you that i was a genius.I then put them into my ears. I could still hear. So what did I do? I got a pencil and used the eraser end to shove the plugs deeper into my ears. I could still hear. So I shoved deeper and deeper. Until at last, I heard no more. Ten seconds later, my head exploded in pain.
To make a long story short(er), we ended up in the ER AGAIN. Where once again my prowess for shoving things deeper than anyone else in the world was marvelled over. I still remember the pain of having those ear plugs in my head. It was awful. Just hideous. I believe that that was the end of my shoving days.