Kids are weird. I don’t care how precious and perfect your children are, or whether you’re staring at a newborn baby right now and thinking, nope, not my kid, it’s just the truth.

They’re humans, after all, and humans are weird as heck, right?

These 15 people are thinking back over their childhoods and realizing they did some stuff that, even though they felt like it was normal at the time, were actually really stinking weird.

15. This is terrifying to me as a parent.

I used to have “science experiments” in the bathroom sink. Meaning, I’d go the bathroom and lock the door. Once in I’d make sure the sink drain was shut and then proceed to add every cleaner/ chemical/ shampoo etc under the sink to the sink in hopes of a reaction.

Never got one, but it also never stopped me from trying. In hindsight I probably could have killed myself if I had mixed the wrong stuff. I obviously didn’t.

14. The poor bean sprout industry.

When I was in fourth grade (so around 9 or 10) at a private school, we used pinto beans as counters during math. Well, one day someone realized if you put a bean in water, it would sprout, and it became incredibly fashionable to keep a couple living bean sprouts hidden in your desk at all times.

This turned into a whole industry. Sneaking to the cabinet in the back and stealing the beans was risky, so people took on those roles. The beans were old, so getting them to actually sprout was valuable. Others would sneak the sprouts in and out of class to get sun.

A boy’s grandparents had bought him a science experiment kit that came with hundreds of these little plastic vials that stood up on their own. They were the perfect size for keeping a sprouted pinto bean, so he started trading them. Another two kids had water bottles with a straw that fit neatly into the vials and made it easy to water the sprouts. They turned it into a service.

One pretty talented group of girls started making houses out of paper and cardboard for the sprouts to “live” in. This allowed bean “families” to become a thing. Another girl realized that the houses meant there was a market for bean sprout furniture. Kids starting pulling textbooks out of their desks and stashing them around the classroom to make space for larger and larger houses.

The houses were a turning point, because they ran anywhere from $5 to $10, which was the first time anyone had charged real money for something instead of bartering. In addition, demand for sprouts went through the roof, since you could fit 4 or 5 in a house. The kid who had been successfully sprouting the beans is under immense pressure to produce, and we’ve crossed a threshold so people are willing to pay real money now.

Into this high-pressure situation walks my classmate Julia. Julia brings a tiny bottle of purple liquid one day and tells bean-sprouter kid that it’s the diluted slime of an extremely rare snail from the forests up north that she collected herself while camping with her family. It’s such a strong fertilizer, even diluted, that one drop in each vial will guarantee that a bean will sprout; in addition, a drop to each already-sprouted bean will ensure a nice, green plant. There’s enough for around 50 sprouts in there, but it’s going to cost him $20 for the whole bottle.

Well, if you’re selling the sprouts at $1 each, $20 is a steal. So the kid comes back the next day with the cash, Julia gives him the fertilizer, and he puts a drop in each vial just before we leave to go home.

The next day, all his bean sprouts are dead, and he’s pissed. Turns out the fertilizer was just Julia’s mom’s perfume, and it killed all the plants. Well, bean-sprouter kid is not the kind of person to take this laying down, so he goes to the teacher to tell her that he got conned.

And the whole thing unravels. The teacher is upset that her students have been devoting hours of in-class time to beans. Parents are upset that money they thought was for snacks or field trips was for beans. The principal has to announce to the whole school that growing plants in your desk is now banned, which just confuses everyone else. And my class is angry at poor bean-sprouting kid for snitching and ruining everything. All their hard work is now in the trash.

The bean sprout industry never recovered.

13. There are no words.

I used to eat tissues as a kid. My mum found out one day and yelled at me to stop, (as any sane parent would do) so I started eating them in secret. Sneaking away with a tissue box to another room to eat a tissue or two.

Until one day when I was about 5 years old I had to go to the hospital. I had no idea what was going on all I knew was that I had trouble breathing through my nose. Before my operation I was in the hospital and I overheard one of the nurses say that they just needed to remove the excess tissue in my nose. Naturally I thought that the tissues I had eaten had started getting clogged up in my nose and I never ate a tissue again. I made the realisation at 14 that it was muscle tissue in my nose and not the actual tissues I was eating.

12. They are, and I’m not sure this is totally weird.

Ate rose petals. My grandfather told me they are edible.

I still eat one when I go visit his grave.

11. Lock up your coffee, people.

When I was around 4-5 years old I remember I used to sneak downstairs very early in the morning and search for any cups with that ½” of cold sweet sugary coffee in, and drink them before anyone got up.

Guess I may have been the youngest caffeine addict in Britain.

10. Everyone wants to be special.

Purple was my favorite color but I didn’t like the word so I called it murdalop.

9. This is creative and weird.

I used to waste a shit ton of water by turning on the shower and lay on the floor next to it with a towel over my body and fall asleep with a tiny bit of water splashing on my face.

I used to imagine i was in a cave and it was raining outside for some reason. ah good times

8. Kids can be such twerps.

Found out that the air had germs in it and tried not to breathe too much.

I remember Asking the teacher “if we clap… Are we killing germs” knowing full well what would happen.

A class full of 9 year olds clapping like morons to kill the evil germs.

7. The first of many, I’m sure.

Not me, but my partner used to keep Kiwis (the fruits) as pets. He would name them and take care of them…until his mom took them to blend into a smoothie.

That was a rude awakening for him.

6. Dodged a bullet, there.

I used to host imaginary science shows where I would get questions from viewers that I had to answer. I don’t remember a lot of the questions from my fake audience, but I remember trying to explain that glass actually could let air through, and that was the explanation to how we didn’t suffocate when all the doors and windows were shut.

Young me did not know a whole lot about ventilation.

Edit: I also remembered something else now, my mom worked as a nurse, and she sometimes let me take syringes home with me, both with and without needles(don’t really know how I feel about that nowadays, tho). I sometimes took a bit of everything from our bathroom (shower gels, shampoo, whatever fluid I could get my hands on basically), and I filled a mixture of the shit and put into a syringe. I then sneaked around the apartment and chose my victim: a poor plant of some kind. I injected a small dose of the magical elixir into the poor plant.

Super happy this didn’t develop some sort of mental disorder for me later.

5. This is very impressive reasoning.

I (a girl) used to sit back to front on the toilet to pee.

My reasoning was that that way it sounded like my dad peeing and then the monsters wouldn’t try to grab me.

Childhood anxiety is wild!

4. I really need more information here.

I use to eat ants, I didn’t even like the taste, and I kept doing it

3. This is oddly charming.

There were spiders and mice in my room which totally freaked me out.

So every night before I went to sleep I’d whisper a report of what the weather was outside to encourage them to go outside rather than stay inside and bite me in my sleep.

2. It’s the second part that really ventures into the “weird” territory.

I used to steal things from my sister when she was mean to me, and then hide them by sewing them into her stuffed animals…

She found out a few months ago and was really freaked out

1. Ahhh, a classic “weird kid” story.

In grade 1 we would sit in a group on the floor in front of the teacher while she read us stories.

I would sit at the back of the group against the wall and pull my pants halfway down my bum.

I liked feeling the cool ground/wall against my bare butt.

I am laughing so hard, y’all. Kids gotta be kids.

Tell us in the comments the weirdest thing your kid does? We’re dying to hear more!