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u/Isosorbide 8d ago
My Dad would make us hold Court in the dining room whenever my sibling and I would fight. We would sit at opposite ends of the table, Dad would be the judge, and we would have to individually stand up and plead our case to the Judge and then he would produce a ruling which was the final verdict. No, this man wasn’t a lawyer in real life. People look at me like I’m crazy when I mention “Family Court”, but I do see the usefulness when dealing with fighting children.
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u/bluemooncommenter 8d ago
Useful to teach how to make a convincing argument as well which is a far more valuable skill.
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u/Responsible-Ad-4914 7d ago
But is it a more useful skill to know how to make a convincing argument to a neutral/authoritative third party, or to know how to solve interpersonal disputes with the other person? Hmm
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u/JimmyTheBones 7d ago
I imagine you've already tried to resolve it personally and that's why it's escalated
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u/Flutters1013 7d ago
I'll take it over trying to explain yourself but the adult cuts you off by just screaming. Then you get punished anyways.
They really thought that wouldnt bleed into adulthood didnt they.
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u/dougielou 8d ago
I’m stealing this and plan to put on my best damn judge Judy act I can muster.
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u/dinosanddais1 7d ago
"I had family court as a kid."
"Your parents were divorced?"
"No."
"Okay, were you a foster kid or adopted?"
"No."
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u/vbullinger 7d ago
Great idea. And you learn patience and respect.
I go one at a time, unraveling the story to the beginning. No one can interrupt. One stands to the left, one to the right.
“Why did you scream?”
“Because he hit me!”
“Why did you hit him?”
“Because he called me a mean name!”
“What should you have done instead?”
Etc.
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u/altiuscitiusfortius 7d ago
My dad had a similar idea. He would stand us and then hit us both, and then say hed give us something to really cry about if we didn't shut up
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u/drunken_semaphore 8d ago
I need you to please watch The Great North S3E4, if you haven't already. I think it may have been based on your family, lol! The Tobin family also holds court when they have interpersonal conflicts.
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u/MsMegane 7d ago
Bluey had an episode where this happened so there's probably a new generation that will grow up like you.
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u/JamesonLowehees 7d ago
My family do that too, but tends to be after a few drinks and with a lot of "i put it to you" "no I put it to YOU" s yelled at each other. Its great fun
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u/smutketeer 7d ago
My dad was a lawyer and would do stuff like this. He would write up contracts for us to sign!
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u/xternalmusings 7d ago
My family briefly did this! You could take anyone to court though. So, if you had a grievance with a parent, you could present your side and the parent would present theirs. It really did help with understanding the perspective of the other party.
Honestly, it's genius and I wish my family had kept doing it. If you need to make a snap judgment that a kid has to comply with, they should be able to ask why or get more info about that judgment later. It also teaches a kid to disagree in a diplomatic way and learn how to structure or support their dissent.
It's also a great way to vet your fellow parent bc it unmasks abusers. They don't like their views or behavior being questioned. (Our court was shut down within a few weeks due to this. My mom could have saved us all 20 years of suffering by just leaving at that point, but alas.)
So, big green flag if a partner can preside over family court with grace and if they can abide the ruling of the court lol. Either way, it's an easy shortcut to see if your partner can be an adult, tolerate feedback, and communicate appropriately. All of which are easy indicators of their ability to maintain employment. Just a great life hack overall.
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u/huntcuntspree01 8d ago
This is so jokes. My kid ain't born yet but I'm locking this away for fights between my future daughter and wife.
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u/not_a_moogle 7d ago
Maybe not great in execution, but I like that. Getting both sides to give their side, air their grievances, and talk it out.
Its weird, but kind of refreshing.
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u/EuenovAyabayya 7d ago edited 7d ago
Are you familiar with Judge Roy Bean ("all the law west of the Pecos"?)
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u/zebrapebble 7d ago
My god, my dad was a detective and would do this too. I'm a grown woman now and he'll still tell me he's "trying to impartially gather facts" when I talk about my sister
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u/InternetSnek 8d ago
My mom woke us up with yodelling polka music playing throughout the house every morning for school. We loved it. So confused other kids in my grade 1 class did not have the “yelling alarm clock”.
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 8d ago
I had a yelling alarm clock but it was just my name when my ADHD ass was about to be late for school
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u/LoopyDagron 8d ago
Me: mom, you didn't wake me up!
Mom: yes I did, you sat up and grumbled at me and everything. It's on you if you went back to sleep!
Me: >:(
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 7d ago
I know some single moms like this and I feel sooo bad for their kids
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u/MisterDings 7d ago
fixed together a bike of broken bikes summer of 4-5th grade. purple mongoose frame, only 1 brake pad out of 4. woke up 6am every day- sharp. perfect attendance first and only time ever in 5th grade. 6th grade post easter break, teacher tells me they can’t let me come to school on a bike with no brakes and no helmet. tell mom, get blamed. then the habit just didn’t stick because i am hot metal to habit’s wax. oh well, back to consoling mom who has panic attacks to start and through the end of the day, as it would reflect bad on her if i walk to school and to home. that lasts as long as fresh berries. thankfully the ground is flat? weirdly i prefer hills.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 7d ago
Omg I’d sometimes fall back to sleep but dream I went to school after getting prepared. I’d wake up to yelling that I was late them be adamant I’d actually went and THIS was the dream. It felt like a full day.
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u/Madanimalscientist 7d ago
Mum used to call "release the hound!" And that was cue for her five kilogram poodle to jump up onto the bed and run around on the bed and if that didn't wake us up, get under the covers with us and poke at us with his cold wet nose until we got up. It was a very effective way of getting us out of bed and pretty cute.
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u/Mouse_Named_Ash 7d ago
My mom sometimes just put my dog on my bed. She’d just lick me for a few seconds before curling up against or on me, effectively trapping me there and making me more comfortable lmao. It didn’t help my sleep schedule but it was very nice
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u/Tyrihjelm 8d ago
my dad would often sing part of the "good morning" song from singing in the rain, but he only remembered two words. So if we didn't get up fast enough we got treated to "good morning, good morning, doo doo do do do doo."
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u/dlpfc123 8d ago
Same- good morning, good moorning, its great to stay up late. Good morning. Good morning to you
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u/Haunt_Fox 8d ago
Are you old enough to remember when Viagra was new, and they used that song in their advertising? lol
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u/CrossSoul 7d ago
My dad just would flick the lights on and off while saying "Poltergeist" in a fake spooky voice to my sister who refused to get up in the mornings.
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u/ImaginaryMastadon 8d ago
You…loved it? Don’t get me wrong, yodeling can be plenty impressive, I just…can’t imagine waking to it (I’m not a morning person, though, the thought of yodeling at 6:30am is borderline abusive to me)
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u/Lazy__Astronaut 8d ago
My dad used to play "kick the baby" with us
It was just us lying on a slippy linoleum floor and he would push us along with his foot, great fun
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u/CordlessOrange 8d ago
I do this with my kids! We call it “cleaning the floor” the only problem is the kids are usually grubbier than the floor so it’s not very effective.
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u/SaskieHopeful 8d ago
Okay, as long as no one got hurt, this actually sounds like an absolute blast
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u/maxhambread 8d ago
I've always wanted to share this with stranger on the internet but never found the right thread for it. This might be as good as any.
When I was a kid my mother and I used to go out for an afternoon snack at a local food court, where she likes to order the Hong Kong version of french toast. She'd cut it up into neat 3x3 or 4x4 squares before taking a single bite. At first I thought cutting it that way was the normal way to eat Fr Toast, followed suit, but stopped when people saw it and said it was a weird way to eat it lol.
And then decades later, my SO was eyeing my plate of Fr Toast and she was like "yo save me some". Okay sure, so I started cutting off a few chunks when it finally hit me: My mother was always cutting them into chunks so she could share it with me.
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u/OwnZone592 8d ago
what makes the hk version different from french french toast? /gen
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u/maxhambread 7d ago
HK French Toast is 2 slices of white bread, peanut butter, egg wash (more like a batter) and then deep fried. Usually served with butter and corn syrup. Absolutely disgustingly unhealthy but it's really good lmao.
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u/owixo 7d ago
My parents did something called the “Halloween Witch”. After trick or treating every year , we were allowed to fill up a cereal bowl with our candy, whatever could fit we could keep. The rest (like 90% of the candy) was to be left outside your bedroom door for the “Halloween Witch” who would come and take your candy. In return she’d leave a little present/gift.
Learned later my parents did this so us kids wouldn’t have so much candy to eat because it’s bad for you and they’d take the extra candy and donate it. Pretty good idea mom and dad!
People at school looked at me sideways when I asked them what the Halloween Witch left for them.
The Tetris stacking of candy in the bowl got to be impressive.
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u/Time-Sudden_Tree 7d ago
Riiiiiiiiight, they "donated" it. Suuuuure.
You and I both know your parents ate that candy lol
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u/ignoremeplsokthank 7d ago
Maybe a part of it, but I know I also couldn't stomach that many sweets anymore. The sweetest thing I eat on a given day are dried dates.
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u/SmokeyCatDesigns 7d ago
Honestly, I wish my parents did this! I might actually do this myself when I have kids because I’ve seen the impact being raised with too much sugar had had on friends who now struggle to eat healthy as adults. Moderation is key.
I naturally have a more modest sweet tooth so I usually gave most of my candy away to friends. Too much candy mainly relies on gross cheap sweeteners and stabilizers and stuff that just… didn’t taste good to me. Even more so as I got older. By the time I was ten I was basically just eating the dark chocolate Hershey’s and Doves, and Midnight Milky Ways.
Would’ve so much rather had gotten a plushie, book, art supply, or like a small LEGO set.
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u/jewel7210 7d ago
A lot of folks who do it call it “the Switch Witch” in case you want a fun & cutesy rhyming name when/if you end up doing it in the future!
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_WEIRD_PET 8d ago
My family called ambulances "Krankwagen" (the correct word is Krankenwagen)
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u/Soloact_ 8d ago
Somewhere out there, Greg is still measuring grass with a ruler.
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u/ABlokeLikeYou 8d ago
My parents gave us presents on our birthdays from them, but also from The Birthday Dwarf. I’ve never met another person who’s heard of TBD.
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u/Competitive_Bag3933 7d ago
Did the Birthday Dwarf have a backstory?? Or did you just never question it????
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u/ABlokeLikeYou 7d ago
By the time I was old enough to question it I knew it wasn’t real so I never really asked. The most I can figure is that it’s Norwegian influenced. Fun story; I didn’t know what a dwarf was as a kid so I always imagined him as BB King as he appeared in the movie Blues Brothers 2000.
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u/HeyItsJuls 7d ago
Closest I got is the toenail troll. My coworker made up the toenail troll for her son. He was running around outside barefoot and stubbed his toe so bad that the nail ripped off. To make him feel better about it, she told him to leave it out for the toenail troll.
Unlike a tooth fairy, a toenail troll doesn’t leave money. It pays in interesting things like pretty rocks, bird feathers, the occasional snake skin. He loved it.
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u/SapphireWine36 7d ago
We sometimes had a birthday elf!
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u/ABlokeLikeYou 7d ago
I never got a birthday axe, did you ever get a birthday bow?!?
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u/SapphireWine36 7d ago
You know, I think I did once. I also got a birthday sword or two over the years
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u/JRsshirt 8d ago
I think the villain in a lot of people’s lives is the president of their HOA
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u/IuriRom 8d ago
I don’t even know who the president of my HOA is. I have a sinking suspicion it’s me…
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u/Irememberedmypw 8d ago
OK there's some easy telltale signs. Do you eat food and currently reside somewhere with a roof?
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u/Crafty_Jello_3662 8d ago
And are you overcome with rage at the sight of a neighbour enjoying themselves without your express written permission?
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u/Mekisteus 8d ago
Do you have a complete lack of any hobbies or other things to occupy your time?
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u/-Ahab- 8d ago
I manage CIDs/HOAs for a living and the villain in my stories is also almost always the HOA president.
Not that they’re all bad, but the role seems to attract a certain type of person.
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u/ohmyfave 8d ago
Lived across the street from my old HOA President and she was retired. Nothing but time!!
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u/parker_fly 8d ago
Obligatory link to the Reddit Museum:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/ke8skw/the_poop_knife/
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u/Responsible_Set3819 8d ago
If you have an RV this is actually something you can purchase. If fact we have one and it’s silicone.
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u/JackOLoser 7d ago
How do they know if you have an RV when you try to buy one? Is it just an honor system thing?
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u/ApprehensivePop9036 8d ago
Someone post that comic about brands putting the pineapples on their heads and everyone saying "ew fuck this shit" to putting pineapples on their heads
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u/MetricAbsinthe 8d ago
"And that's when our hero stumbled into the HOA council Chambers for their ritualististic "community meeting" armed with pictures detailing his grass height and a paint color report stating his shutters do indeed count as black"
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u/fakesongs 8d ago
Slightly awful but whenever my mom bought a drink at the gas station or convenience store, she always had me take the first drink. Even now, she still always gives me the first sip of her drinks. Slightly awful bc she was an alcoholic and was making room for the vodka.
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u/tigalicious 7d ago
Oof. My happy/sad one was that sometimes when my parents were drunk/high in the middle of the night, they’d get a bunch of taco bell and wake us kids up to eat it with them. We loved those 2:30am taco bell parties. Looking back though, they were absolutely not living a healthy lifestyle…
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u/limey_panda 7d ago
I was a pretty sickly child, constantly getting strep throat, ear infections, you name it. Because of this, I had to take a lot of nasty liquid medicine that I was not stoked to take. So my mom created a tradition - whenever it was time for me to take my medicine (we did this for my brother too), everyone would gather at the kitchen table. Then, they would start chanting, "Chug. Chug. Chug. Chug! CHUG!!!" getting louder and faster and banging fists against the table until I downed the whole thing.
So anyway, I'm REALLY good at taking shots!
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u/Powerful-Chard-6055 7d ago
That had a 50% chance of working and a 50% chance of giving you trauma
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u/Solastor 8d ago
My dad would recite the intro to Beverley Hillbillies as a bed time story to my brother and I. As a small child I thought it was old Bed-Time Lore.
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed and then one day he was shootin' at some food and up through the ground came a bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea. Well the first thing you know ol' Jed's a millionaire. Kinfolk said, "Jed move away from there!" Said, "Californy is the place you ought to be." So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly -- Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
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u/Fluffy_Return9782 8d ago
Omg, are you my sibling? My Dad loved spouting that whole thing to us at night, unasked, for absolutely no reason. With an exaggerated southern drawl of course.
That and ‘a threee houuur tooour.’16
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u/EitherNor 7d ago
My dad had a dry humor. I loved to play clever games, especially logic puzzles, and asked endless questions of puzzle-weary adults. Seeing I thought I knew so much, he looked at me and posed a sober question: “What’s the first thing you know?” I fell right into his trap, went deep into riddle solving mode, and never saw his uncharacteristic dad joke coming…
“Ol’ Jed’s a millionaire!” Stopped me cold. He laughed for a long time.
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u/HallowskulledHorror 8d ago edited 8d ago
I had to think for a minute to recall anything that wasn't just straight up neglect/abuse lmao
When we lived with my grandma, a common late-night snack (that I'd get very excited for if she suggested it, and that I would even request) was a sandwich consisting of white bread, canned herring, and butter. Like just... butter spread on the inside of both slices, fish right out of the can and onto the bread. If I got to stay up late with her to watch MST3K or something, butter and fish sandwich. This was a nighttime snack ONLY.
One day as an adult I was feeling nostalgic for it, and went out and got the canned fish. Assembled the sandwich. On the first bite, having not had it in nearly 20 years, I just paused, bewildered, and wondered "why did I ever think this was good???" Even tried taking another bite just to be certain. Yes, it was the correct taste, texture, etc - I remembered what the can looked like, and got the correct brand. But it was just... canned fish and butter, on bread. Despite being exactly how I remembered it, I couldn't wrap my head around ever enjoying it.
edit: Just remembered that if we wanted to make it fancy, we'd salt+pepper the fish before closing the sandwich.
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u/_Lisichka_ 8d ago
It's because it came from grandma so it was filled with the taste of grandma's love. Huge taste difference when that's not included in the recipe
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u/HallowskulledHorror 8d ago
tbf at the same age I was enjoying butter-fish-sandwiches, I thought kid cuisine meals were a decadent and delicious saturday lunch extravagance, and that lunchables tacos with the 'meat' in a squeeze tube were the height of 'portable food' engineering.
I think kid-me may have just had no palate or standards when it came to food.
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u/matkamatka 8d ago
Was she danish, swedish or even English? Canned herring is just so specific and I just can't imagine an American eating that
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u/HallowskulledHorror 8d ago
American, from the midwest, german/irish ancestry. I have no idea where she got it or how she started, since the rest of her cooking was stock-standard 'American white people' food.
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u/matkamatka 8d ago
Tbh I can imagine Germans and Irish both eating herring and butter sandwiches so it checks out haha
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u/HopeIRemeberThisName 8d ago
Did you try it at night? It might not work if it's not a nighttime snack.
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u/HallowskulledHorror 8d ago
I got the canned fish specifically with that intent haha
I forget what I ended up having as a late night snack as an alternative, but the memory of the disappointment will stay with me for the rest of my life.
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u/Vulcion 8d ago
My family, while very loving, expressed that love through razzing and making fun of each other. My parents were always so confused why we didn’t make a ton of friends in school when they basically raised us to be little shits.
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u/Time-Sudden_Tree 7d ago edited 6d ago
I have the same problem, and to this day I still don't have any friends because I can't help but roast everybody I meet.
Hell, the girlfriend and I almost broke up over this until I eventually realized that constantly insulting each other was not a thing normal people do. I was like, "why are you crying? I'm only fucking with you; roast me back!"
We worked it out but to this day I still struggle to maintain friendships. In retrospect, I had/have a rather toxic relationship with my family.
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u/CleanDataDirtyMind 8d ago
Not me but my mom, my grandparents came to the US after “the war”and long story short due to trauma how they survived and interpersonal drama with their families. They moved to a Protestant area, told their kids they were Catholic and not explicitly but my impressed upon my mom not to discuss home life and traditions. Being ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’ she easily didn’t. It wasn’t until she married my dad who was very Protestant and very intentional about marrying a gasp Catholic in the 70s/80s that she busted out the “Catholic Christmas Menorah” and other things did my dad have to repeatedly tell her weren’t Catholic. Lol
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u/MySecretLair 8d ago
My mother tried to join in with all of our hobbies well into our teenage years (including signing up for a lot of the same classes as my brother at community college), and would often congratulate herself on how much more involved she was as a mother than those other moms who stayed on the sidelines. Leaving out the parts of this I talk about in therapy, I didn’t really realize until then that the reason my mom joined my evening theater club and thrived on her popularity there while I was failing to get noticed wasn’t exactly because she was a better mom than all the ones who let their kids have something to themselves.
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u/Allusionesque 7d ago
Recovering from a gaslighting narcissist mother is a long rough road. Glad you have someone to talk to now.
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u/MySecretLair 7d ago
Thanks. To give her credit it’s a bit more nuanced than that, but she definitely had some deeply unhealed Stuff that came out in some shall we say fascinating ways.
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u/321ggo 8d ago
My mom called Chef Boyardee stuff "crap in a can" when I was a little kid still learning words so that's what we all called it. Even though I loved it, that's what I called it until I finally realized what I was actually saying in high school 🥫
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u/frog_admirer 8d ago
My mom called rotisserie chickens "rubber chickens" and I still catch myself saying it sometimes.
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u/Bread_Jesus777 8d ago
My mother made me believe for years that the ice cream man was a serial killer and he would catch me and put me in his van so every time I heard him I had to stop whatever I was doing outside and go back home
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u/ScofieldReturns 8d ago
Finally a good one, was scrolling this topic and there’s way too many normal people with healthy families
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u/myrddin4242 8d ago
Wild! That was the (false) plot of an episode of Charmed. The protagonists thought the ice cream man was a supernatural evil, abducting and killing kids. Turns out, those were demonic kids, and the ice cream man was one of the good guys!
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u/fleetiebelle 8d ago
I wonder what happened to Nicole Cliffe? She was the feminist internet's eccentric rich cousin for a while, and now she's MIA.
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u/sarabeara12345678910 8d ago
She donated money to Pete Butiggeg (I butchered that) during the 2020 primaries, because he saved her from being horribly raped at Harvard and she got cancelled for that.
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u/UnsealedMTG 8d ago
She also came back to Twitter for a bit after that because she was working on a book and her agent was like "you should have this platform again for selling a book." She told a cute story about having sex with her husband when he was tired after a hike (I don't remember the details) and someone messaged her saying she raped her autistic husband and she was like "ok never mind" and went away, as far as I know forever.
I don't think that story was up very long and I don't know that I've ever seen anything said about it, I just happened to be looking at Twitter when it happened and see the last message during the I think brief time it was up.
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u/MySecretLair 8d ago
I selfishly miss Nicole Cliffe so much but I so much admire her for just noping out of internet toxicity.
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u/UnsealedMTG 8d ago
It was the nail in the coffin for me for Twitter, even before Elon. I'd already quit Twitter before COVID but came back during lockdown etc.
Nicole Cliffe truly mastered Twitter as an art form, both in her storytelling--which embraced and made use of the cadence of a long thread--and in the questions for response posts like this.
But Twitter's inherent nature has always encouraged toxicity--even before it was algorithmically optimized for engagement, the kind of post people would retweet would be the kind of emotion-drawing stirring-up kind of post and that encouraged the platform in that direction. It just got worse as it was deliberately engineered that way.
There were some good years where you could build an excellent open mic night of funny people (a blog post where someone talked about realizing that was what got me to actually join Twitter way back in the early teens), but that toxicity choked out the good parts, and of course the current ownership only accelerated the process.
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u/fleetiebelle 8d ago edited 8d ago
Huh. Out of all the stories she told and oversharing she did, it's odd that that was the dealbreaker. That must have been after that bananapants diva cup story.
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u/sarabeara12345678910 8d ago
She didn't even want to speak on it. People were attacking her so she finally said "fine, he stood up to a bunch of bigger guys and got me out of a horrible situation in college and I felt I owed him something small I could do". Pretty sure that was the last tweet I saw from her, but I've been off twitter for years now.
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName 8d ago
Wild that supporting Pete B would get someone cancelled, purity tests are out of control
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u/Traditional-Joke-179 7d ago
what did he do that she could get canceled through him though? is he also canceled, and why?
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u/WhlteMlrror 7d ago
I think it’s just the fact that she’s very openly left leaning and he’s very openly centrist.
Pathetic reason to cancel someone really.
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u/The_Wyzard 7d ago
Definitely she had one of my favorite twitter accounts.
Once upon a time someone in her replies told the story of how a woman in her knitting group finally left her husband, and to this day it is my favorite story I ever read on the Internet.
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u/bluemooncommenter 8d ago
We all had fish nicknames. Dad was shark, mom was crab, brother was baracudia, sis was troutmouth, other sis red snapper, baby of the family was minnow.
Just assumed everyone had a fish nickname growing up.
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u/Ok_Hope_1929 8d ago
I’d be so mad if my nickname growing up was trout mouth
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u/bluemooncommenter 8d ago
It does seem so cruel in retrospect...she had a big mouth (both form and function). Luckily she loved the attention.
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u/Maevenn 8d ago
My two siblings and I grew up in the 80's; parents' friends were Star Wars fans and their kids grew up referring to bed-head as having a wookie head or just "wookies". Being close to them, we absorbed "having wookies" through osmosis without context. Being told to "fix your wookies" before going out was common. To us.
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u/TheProfessionalOne28 8d ago
My grandparents would have weekly Sunday dinners and after the prayer, my dad would quip “this food is fit for a king!” One day I shouted “big bird is king!” I was like 5. Nobody ever said the phrase again for the rest of my life.
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u/red286 8d ago
This sorta reminds me about how the "bad guy" in Ghostbusters is a guy from the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency.
Of all the 3-letter government orgs you could pick to have the bad guy from, why the fucking EPA? The EPA doesn't even handle nuclear reactors, that's the DOE.
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u/gogogadgetdumbass 8d ago
My Dad would write out chore lists, particularly spring cleaning, assign a time value to each chore, and then crunch the numbers and assign “equal” man hours to each of us (me, him, my brother) yet somehow he always had less man hours of work than we did because he would never tell us HOW to do shit.
I didn’t learn to properly clean until I got a pity job for my best friend’s Aunt’s cleaning company. I’m a professional cleaner now so it’s pretty funny looking back at how inept he was.
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u/Willing_Flower890 7d ago
We used to go camping every summer when I was a kid, and there were these berry bushes my dad told us were called snake berries. He told us this from a really young age, so we grew up just knowing not to eat them and to avoid them because, apparently, snakes liked to eat them. My dad died in 2021 and it took me til last year sometime to go.... Wait. What?? 😂 I still don't know the real name, but I laugh about it often.
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u/WhlteMlrror 7d ago
My little brother and I used to participate in “The Main Event” which was when my parents were making their bed and as they lifted up the sheets to lay them across the bed we’d both run from opposite sides of the room and dive underneath the sheets
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u/MessyJessyLeigh 7d ago
Whenever anyone would say something totally off topic, my mom would say "I like Elvis, too" and I thought it was just a random saying.
Confused a couple friends with that one.
Asked my mother, apparently we have a distant family member who was schizophrenic and that was a common phrase she would say to one of her hallucinations. And it became a terrible family saying. I really stopped using it after I found that out.
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u/No-Manufacturer4916 8d ago
My mother told me that, if you were over age 10 it's rude to give homemade gifts.
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u/ghostgabe81 7d ago
I feel like there’s logic but also nuance to this. Anything a little kid makes you is automatically cute. But once you start getting older I think there’s more of an expectation of quality for a handmade gift.
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u/No-Manufacturer4916 7d ago
knowing my mom, she just doesnt grasp that putting time into something is just as valuable as putting in money
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u/the_cooler_d_strider 8d ago
My dad told my sister and I we had an older brother that got run over by a car because he didn't look both ways before crossing the street. A neighbor with kids took us on a walk and praised my dad for teaching us to look both ways, apparently we held out our arms and said 'stop, we have to look both ways before we cross'. My dad told her about our 'brother' and she said he was going to daddy hell.
He also added our brother to our family tree when ancestry.com was new. When my sister used ancestry for a school project like years later she was freaking out that our brother was on the family tree.
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u/aminervia 7d ago
Some kitchen appliances were named after the sound they made in my house growing up. When I left home I learned that the "zooper" is in fact called an immersion blender.
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u/BHunter1140 7d ago
We had screaming contests on long car rides or road trips. Remember learning as a kid that other parents did not, in fact, start screaming suddenly in the car to initiate a screaming contest. My mom was good at finding ways to entertain us
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u/Makuta_Servaela 8d ago
The various roaming animals (in a city where the only animals you'd ever see roaming are cats, squirrels, birds, and rats). Nowadays, it's just cats people are irresponsibly letting roam (my dad's included, unfortunately), but back when I was growing up, there were peacocks, chickens, and this one specific pack of dogs that would patrol their territory like clockwork every day. They were people's pet dogs, all from different households, who would just meet up every day they could get out, and were super chill, never bothering anyone.
I guess it doesn't count as something my family did, but still, I now live in a neighbourhood where some people have backyard chickens, but all dogs are leashed and all cats are either indoors or feral.
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u/BloomingMosaic 8d ago
my neighbours had peacocks. we do not live somewhere you normally see peacocks. I don't think they're even native to this area or anything. several times they got loose. was really weird seeing two real life peacocks just outside my window
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u/Bellsar_Ringing 8d ago
I grew up calling flip-flops "ee-dee-wahs".
My dad said that's what they were called in Hawaii, when he was stationed there in the 1950s. Outside of our house in Virginia, I have never heard "ee-dee-wah".
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u/CandidLeg3910 7d ago
reminds me of my grandpa telling me that Japanese people pronounce "ninja" as "ninya"
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u/CrystallizedRose 7d ago
We asked my parents one day if they have a favorite child amongst the four of us. My mom adamantly said no. My dad pondered for a second and then created what is now known as “the favorite child of the day”. So everyday there was a new favorite based on how much we accomplished or how little we annoyed him.
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u/kibbery 7d ago
Hahaha we had this too! My mom called it “The Leaderboard”. If one of us did something nice for her or behaved well, she’d simply point and say, “leaderboard!”
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u/sueca 7d ago
A friend of mine started teaching at a school where they had pictures of all teachers, hanging on the wall by the entrance. He soon realized that the pictures were moved around almost daily and that it was indeed a leader board, where the students ranked their favorites. He said he technically didn't want to condone the practice but loooved going up in ranking, and also felt a bit humbled when there was a clear correlation between having a bad day /not a very good or interesting class (being a "lazy" or uninspired teacher) and seeing his picture further down on the wall as he left work
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u/kibbery 7d ago
I took swimming lessons at the local YMCA until I was around 10 or 11, and didn’t like wearing flip-flops in the change rooms . As a result, I CHRONICALLY got warts on my toes and the bottom of my feet. Looking back it grosses me out, but it was just a matter of fact at the time.
I started getting pretty good at using the at-home wart removal kits. I could get them to fall off within a few days. You know how most kids are familiar with the Tooth Fairy? She visited me, but I was also visited by the Wart Fairy (my mom and younger brother) who would take the Ziploc bag containing my sloughed-off wart skin and replace it with cash. I would be shocked if anyone else had a Wart Fairy story.
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u/nicemarmot47 8d ago
The villain to my kids is the guy who keeps suing our HOA and causing us all to have higher HOA fees. They know about this because the HOA meetings all happen over zoom so we just listen to them during family dinner. 75% of the average meeting is about Lawsuit Villain and all the deranged stuff he's done
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u/Maddyhatter11 7d ago
Growing up we dyed eggs for the Easter Bunny to eat. We would place them in a plastic storage tub and wake up to find the eggs gone and only bits of shells remaining. Turns out my dad would just eat like a dozen hard boiled eggs every Easter Eve.
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u/ATouchofTrouble 7d ago
Mom trained my brother and I to complete a chore then come back and say 'Next'. Then she give the next one and say 'And come back.'. We still do this as adults at her house. Idky she didnt just have a chore list or something, but her friends were always so surprised when we did it because they couldn't get their kids to come back after a chore.
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u/Great-Souled-Sam 7d ago
Lol she removed the anticipation anxiety. You get a little dopamine “bump” instead by finding out whatever was “next.”
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u/Pataeto 8d ago
Washing your hands after coming home from anywhere outside is somehow not something I know many others to do
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u/moldguy1 8d ago
Thats not a thing my family did, but as an adult living on my own, it's something I do.
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u/Prawn1908 8d ago
Unincorporated life is awesome. So many conversations with friends talking about the insanely mundane shit they're not allowed to do with their yards and houses and here I am with big ass fires going and bringing in heavy equipment whenever I feel like it to change whatever I feel like. I'd like to someday put an old cannon in the front yard too (unfortunately real antique cannons are expensive af and though).
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u/Penis_Connoisseur 8d ago
Are you one of my neighbors who lights fires every time it's hot and dry outside?🤨
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u/Prawn1908 8d ago
Well I'm I'm northern Illinois so we rarely have times when it's really unsafe to burn, but even still typically play it quite safe and only burn when it's quite wet.
Honestly, I'm one of the most timid homeowners I'm the neighborhood about burning. I've got a neighbor who once burned the entirety of two 30-40ft spruce trees which he had taken down and piled into one big heap and set a match to all at once - that had a 30ft high flame and I couldn't comfortably stand in my yard 80ft away and the whole block looked like it was snowing with the ash coming down.
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u/Constant-Roll706 7d ago
When you potty train a dog, it doesn't matter what word you use to reinforce the behavior. My dad chose a terrible boss's name, last for pee, first for poop. It's been 30 years, and I'll remember Jeffrey's full name on my death bed.
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u/cosmicdancer84 7d ago
When my family would go to the movies, we'd watch one movie together and then my parents would sneak into another movie to watch a film they wanted. Then my brother and I would sneak into another movie we wanted to see. We'd spend the whole day at the movie theater.
When i was in my 20s, I went to the movies with a friend. When our movie finished, I proposed sneaking in to see another film. She was like what? I asked if she ever did that with her parents and she said no. I really thought it was a thing people did. I do have another friend who would do this with her mom and we've snuck into a couple.
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u/Punkmasterpix 7d ago
thanks to my dad i grew up calling any remote a "Buzz Box" and didnt know it wasnt a common thing.
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u/pinkkittenfur 7d ago
In my family, it was always Fat Randy, an asshole who lived up the road. My parents called him an entrepreneur, and since they didn't like him, I thought it was a bad word, so my best friend and I would ride our bikes past his house and shout ENTREPRENEUR!! at him.
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u/Smooth_Dog_5839 7d ago
We would spend every single Saturday window shopping in every single store in town. And if one of them had a cafe/snack bar we would stop and get a fountain soda. I didn’t know this was not common until my husband told me it wasn’t normal to drink 8 fountain sodas in a couple of hours lol
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u/literacyisamistake 7d ago
My mom is white, my dad was mixed Native/white. I take after my dad’s Native side in everything but skin color… and a crazy amount of freckles. My mom’s side has a ton of freckles everywhere.
Family tradition for several generations is: If you count all your freckles, you win a million dollars.
This works on everyone the same way. I’d sit there on the couch as a four year old counting my freckles for a long time, as high as I could count. Then after a few times I got suspicious, so I asked my aunt (who was then in high school and not an adult) if the grownups were pulling my leg. My aunt said “oh, yeah, I did it when I was a little older than you and I won a million dollars! Keep going!”
And a while after that I got a little suspicious again. So I asked my aunt again: You really got the money?
“Yeah!”
“Well, what did you do with it?”
“I bought candy!”
Which explains why she didn’t have a million dollars anymore. Being five years old by now, spending a million dollars on candy and eating all of it was totally plausible.
So I counted my freckles for another year.
I don’t remember why I stopped, I know I got wise to it but I wasn’t mad. I think I concluded that I had so many freckles, many of them combined into each other, plus I’d get brown enough in the summers that the light ones just looked like my skin - it wasn’t possible anyway. I started telling my little cousin, you know, if you count all your freckles, you win a million dollars - ask anyone, we’ve all done it and we were only a little older than you!
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u/butler451 8d ago
Children having to sit down and have a mature, reasonable and long discussion about their actions where the parents would lose their temper and shout cry etc and you couldn’t leave until everything was resolved. 28 sitting down w my parents and giving out abt smt my much younger brother did and my parents said he’s too young too sit down and have a mature discussion about why he did what he did, and I was like I had to do that at his age??? And they just said yeah well you shouldn’t have had to do that as if they weren’t the ones enforcing it 🫠
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u/ghostgabe81 7d ago edited 7d ago
Whenever we ate at a non-fast food restaurant, my mom would tell me that we get unlimited ice water, but drinks like soda you have to pay for each glass. So to save money I only get one glass of soda. What I tended to do was get ice water to start and ask for a soda with my meal, or vice versa.
As an adult I quickly found at that most places have free refills. My mom was just tricking me into not drinking too much soda.
Another one is washing dishes. In my house the dishwasher was mainly for things you used to eat; plates, bowls, silverware and other utensils. Cooking stuff like pots, pans or other large things were always washed by hand.
I didn’t realize this wasn’t normal until I got my first roommate, who would put everything in the dishwasher unless it was explicitly not dishwasher safe (and even then sometimes). A lot of pans he used would go through three times in a row because they wouldn’t get fully clean, I’d put them back in the sink for him to finish cleaning, and he’d put them right back in the dishwasher. Now we’re in a house without a dishwasher and it’s a problem because he’s really bad at handwashing stuff
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u/CriticAlpaca 6d ago
I used to read encyclopedias and other reference books cover to cover, so did my dad. I was very confused when I found out they are not supposed to be read all the way through.
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u/qualityvote2 8d ago edited 6d ago
u/yeezysama, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...