To start your week!
Parents have learned:
1. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
2. A 3-year-old is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
3. If you spray hairspray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.
4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42-pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a superman cape. It is strong enough, however, to spread paint on all four walls of a large room.
5. When using the ceiling fan as a baseball bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
6. The glass in windows (even double pane) doesn’t stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.
7. When you hear the toilet flush and the words “Uh-oh,” it’s already too late.
8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
9. A six-year-old can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year-old man says they can only do it in the movies.
10. A magnifying glass can start a fire even on an overcast day.
11. Certain Legos will pass through the digestive tract of a six-year-old.
12. “Play-Doh” and “microwave” should never be used in the same sentence.
13. Super glue is forever.
14. No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can’t walk on water.
15. Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
16. A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq. foot house 4 inches deep.
17. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise in a moving car.
18. You probably do not want to know what that odor is.
19. Always look in the oven before you turn it on. Plastic toys do not like ovens.
20. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy. It will, however, make cats dizzy.
21. Cats spit up twice their body weight when dizzy.
The sheer trail of damage documented there is impressive. I’m going to guess it was parents of boys. 😉
*whistles past the interesting catastrophes of his own past*
#2 my son when about that age, inflicted with retail burnout, lay down on floor and wailed. Store clerk was laughing, laughing harder when I told her the store fire alarm was going off but nobody could hear it over my kid.
#13 (super glue) is fact. When working on a project on kitchen counter, I had a tube of the stuff get overturned and by the time I noticed, a wave was left. I am sometimes reminded that by my wife, who remembers things which haven’t even occurred yet.
I can see my son and daughter in law discovering the truth about #4.
Now I am really looking forward to fatherhood!
8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
Ha!
Ha!Ha!
Ha!Ha!Ha!
I choked on my morning Irish coffee. I can just see that happening!
13. Super glue is forever.
Jacksonville, FL. We had a co-worker, an annoying 20-something who was dumb. There are such people in this world, and Daffy Dill was one. If 200 watts is a bright bulb, Daffy was about a 40. I felt a little sorry for him until our resident genius refilled the toner on the laser printer and ruined my white shirt.
Naturally, the assistant management (owner’s younger brother) put him in computer support. Just the place for him. So, one fine day he’s screwing around with Superglue and managed to glue his fingers together. Once we stopped laughing, someone suggested the ER was the solution. The ER recommended surgery until the billing department examined Daffy’s health insurance. An older RN applied nail polish remover and the fingers came apart without surgery.
Me, I wear latex gloves.
We need an explaniation of #8.
Brake fluid and Chlorine tablets (or liquid) makes fire and Chlorine gas. Lots of Chlorine gas. Deadly amounts of Chlorine gas. Like, you know, Chlorine gas from WWI killing people. That Chlorine gas.
Don’t try it at home. Don’t try it in enclosed spaces. Just… Don’t.
Back in the days of glass peanut butter jars, the locals used to fish for mullet by making Chlorine bombs and tossing them into the canals amongst schools of mullet. (Mullet don’t eat regular bait, so they don’t bite on hooks.) That pretty much stopped when one local blew his hand pretty much off and gassed himself real good, like permanent lung-scarring good.
What’s next? Huffing high-concentration Ammonia gas? (Yet another realllly big ‘Don’t’)
For even more fun, try mixing brake fluid with granulized pool chlorine. Only do this outside away from anything you don’t want destroyed.
Most of us firefighters are expert pyros.
There is a lotion, often recommended by pediatricians, which has the consistency of Crisco. Can’t recall the name of it now.
Anyway, dish soap does a remarkable job of removing it from surfaces in the bathroom.
True story.
All- Thanks and yes, we (both parents and kids) survived…so far. Now going through this with grands!
This is a true story. One weekend morning, I woke up as normal and headed to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. A few moments later, coffee suitably brewed and sitting in my cup, I went to the fridge for the creamer. Opening the door I was astonished to see a completely empty refrigerator! What the H*ll! So, I headed for my kids room since there was only myself and the two kids who lived in the house and I was pretty sure I was innocent. Stepping into their room I see my 4 year old son happily pounding sewing needles into his bedpost with his Fischer-Price plastic hammer. After a suitably short interrogation I found out the following:
Sometime after I went to bed the previous evening, my son woke up and was bored and wanted a snack. So he went into the kitchen to see what he could find. Being the evil little genius that he was the idea came to him that he could have a snack anytime he wanted if he moved all the food into his room and hid it under his bed. So with his plan complete he put it into action. Starting with the fridge. He cleaned that out down the the last veggie, hot dog, and jug of milk. Then moved onto the pantry. While in the pantry he found several boxes of Jello. He tore into those and just shoveled the powder into his mouth. Now hopped up on a Jello sugar rush he began running through the house sprinkling the Jello powder like fairy dust through several rooms. When he ran out of Jello, he discovered my late wife’s sewing kit which had a box of at least 1000 sewing pins. Just the thing to work off all that energy, pounding pins into wood. But in trying to open the plastic snap case holding the pins, he pulled too hard and when the lid finally opened, pins went flying everywhere in the dining room. He picked up as many as he could to begin his construction project and left the rest on the carpeted floor.
After hearing this, I looked down and sure enough, there were glittering pins all over the place mixed in with pink and green Jello powder, and I was walking around bare foot. My son spent the rest of the day cleaning and putting back all the food. But I couldn’t really get mad at him. This was just so over the top, I was in awe of the little monster.
Some say the food from the fridge is still under the bed to this day.
*laughs* Never mind, I missed that sentence. How much of the food was savable and how much wasn’t?
All the food was salvaged. It hadn’t been out of the fridge too long.
Ray – remember the old Cosby (before he went off the rails) routine about smoke and fire and jello?
Almost as funny as Driving in San Francisco before it went off the rails…………….
It’s coming to YOUR town.
I am almost ashamed to mention how many of those we enjoyed in raising 2 boys and 1 girl, plus other events not listed involving sleds, bicycles and sharp tools. Yes, they all survived mostly intact.
Ray- Wow… THAT… sigh
Ag- Yep
Terra- Same here TWO daughters.
#20 – warning – spin cycle will kill critters in the tub, including small humans.
I hear ammonia based cleaners and chlorine based cleaners are a bad mix too.
Killjoy warnings aside, awesome chuckle worthy list.
#20: However, a small human can survive unharmed a brief time spinning in the dryer. I have no idea how our two year old son sneaked past his mother while she was transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer. Another time, he got away from her and climbed the ladder to “help” me fix a leak in the roof.
Just don’t mix cleaning products unless you’re a chemist and have fully considered the ingredient lists. There are at least three common substances in cleaning products that react with other common substances to become poisonous gases: chlorine (in bleach or other form), ammonia, and hydrochloric acid.