Top Ten Tuesday - Silly Me!

I'm stealing half of today's post from another post from the past.  I know lame, huh?  But this morning's breakfast conversation led me to a great top 10 post, and the old post fit right in.  So here it is.  Today's top 10 list is...

Top 10 Silliest Things I Thought as a Child

1. I love/loved the smell of matches and candles burning.  One Christmas, in an effort to get a good whiff of a candle, I took a deep breath in and accidentally sniffed it out.  I momentarily froze because I thought that what I had just done could be considered smoking.
   
   
2. Because of a good intentioned but badly executed educational movie on AIDS my elementary school had all of us watch back in the '80s,  I used to think that I could get AIDS by not wearing a band-aid on an open wound.  Subsequently, anytime I was bleeding, I always had to have a band-aid.
   
   
3. Half of my childhood was spent in Utah.  At the time, there wasn't that much ethnic diversity.  The only exposure to African-Americans I had was the Cosby Show.  One day, I asked my parents why Bill Cosby painted his fingernails white.
   
   
4. One day, I asked my dad to blow up a balloon for me.  I guess he was busy at the time, so my mom offered.  I told her that I wanted dad to do it because when boys blow up balloons, they float in the air.  My mom laughed and said that nobody could do that.  That was helium.  I blame that thought on Winnie the Pooh.  I swear there was a scene in one of those movies where Christopher Robin blew up a balloon, tied a string to it, and it floated.
   
   
5. Speaking of Christopher Robin, I thought he was a she for a while.  I think it was because in my mind, Robin is was a girl's name, and even though Christopher was a boy's name, adding Robin to the end of it made it a girl's name.  He also wore some pretty gender neutral clothing.  AND what boy plays with that many stuffed animals?
   
   
6. Because the word for "no" in Spanish is "no," I thought "no" in all languages was no.  I actually thought that for a long time.
   
   
7. When we moved to North Carolina, our toilets were "low flow."  Meaning, they had less water in the bowls.  After living in our brand-new house for a few days, I asked my parents when we'd be getting more water in our toilets.  You see, I had no concept of "low flow," and since our house was just built, I thought that somehow affected the water in the toilets.
   
   
8. As a child, I thought that boys were not full grown until they were as tall as my dad.  My dad is 6'5"...  Most boys don't get that tall.
    
9.  I thought that when my parents went to do temple work, they literally went to the temple and did office work at desks, filling out forms.  (To learn more about LDS Temples, click here)
   
   
10. Since being married to my husband (who grew up in the military), I've learned a lot of things about life in the military.  This morning, we were talking about how there are so many military specific vocabulary terms that non-military people have no clue about. 
    
    One such vocabulary term for me was MRE.  Mind you, I had an idea of what an MRE was.  Desert Storm was a big deal when I was in 1st grade, and I was a pretty observational child.  I had heard that the US government was going to drop food supplies--or MREs--for the troops in Iraq.  So I knew that an MRE was some sort of Army food.   But what I didn't know was what it looked like, so I concocted a grenade-like packaging for the MREs.
    
    Hey, it made sense in my head!  The only other thing I had ever heard of being "dropped" was a bomb, and a grenade is sort of like a bomb...  Sort of.  And it fit the toughness requirement for being dropped from an airplane, AND it was aerodynamic (Derek informed me that when things are falling to the ground, they don't need to be aerodynamic.  I cam back with a witty, "Well, if they're aerodynamic, then they'll fall straighter and hit their targets better!" One point for me, right?).
    
    The really funny part of this childhood thought is since I haven't really thought about MREs since Desert Storm, I never had an opportunity to correct my misconception.  Until a couple of weeks ago when Derek and I rearranged my parents' food storage, some of which was MREs.  But to my credit, as soon as I saw what MREs really looked like, I thought, "well, duh!  Of course that's what they look like!"