You know, this wasn't that dangerous, but when I was 8 I had a bubble gum eraser. I had it with me at school and I sniffed it a lot. One day I Just. Could.Not.Resist and I Took a Big Bite. Bleeeeacch!

But I remember how hard I tried to control my impulse, and how I just HAD to bite it.

Also, I threw out my papa-san chair pad yesterday because it was so full of pee (cat pee, not mine). I hadn't really realized how much this cat peed "outside the box" until then.

I read words like "lawn dart" and right away am earwormed with Denis Leary's routine about kids being tougher in the '70s(?)

Love this game! (Not the throwing them at people part...)

When you're 6, throwing them at people is the most fun thing that comes to mind.

Up her own nose. Oops!

So her mother stuffed peas up her own nose? Fashion statement then, definitely.

I took our lawn darts to college, and we played fierce tournaments on the grass in front of the dorm. We were the honors dorm, so if anyone walked by and mocked us for our geeky ways, we'd whip a lawn dart at them.

I had to make my kids keep their scented erasers at school. They trigger my ocular migraines.

I (accidentally) bit a crayon once. Crayola. Midnight Blue. Yeeeech. I was eating a pretzel and my mother told me to put away the crayons, and I took a bite of the wrong thing.

It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a philosophy book though.

Gudanov, to paraphrase the Zen and the Art of Motorcycles guy, the Subaru you're workin on is yourself....

When I was a wee thing, I once blew up a overhanging lightbulb by spraying it with a squirt-gun. Luckily this was in the basement, where it was easy to dustpan the shards. Didn't know it would do that.

And one day we were driving along (this was back before seatbelts were unheard of and children's car seats not even dreamed of) and I managed to open the door. I was dragged for several feet - clinging to the door handle - before my mother got the car stopped.

My great-grandfather never made me wear a seatbelt in his car (despite my parents repeatedly asking him to) and had this little wooden booster seat for to sit on so I could see over the dash. One day when I was about 4 I tried to get into the car and couldn't get the door open, so I climbed in his side. We got up to about 30mph and my door flew open and fell out of the car on to the road. I still remember rolling and looking up to see the breaklights on my grandfather's car as he slammed on the breaks. I ended up with a huge knot on my forehead from hitting the asphalt and assorted scrapes and bruises, but thankfully no serious injuries.

Our own Nutty both stuffed a peanut up her nose (at 3, on a dare from a neighbor boy) and got a Fisher Price Little Person wedged in her open mouth so that she could not remove it herself and was stuck crying with her jaw wide open (probably also 3 or 4). This latter continues to be hilarious to me.

Remarkably, our brother, who used to come home bloody on a regular basis, never pulled any of this kind of creative/curiosity antic that I can recall. No stories about me, either, but I was an uncommonly rational and obedient child.

I had a physical anthropolgy professor tell a story about the time she was sorting infant skull bones and eating corn chips and accidentally put the wrong hand in her mouth...

As a child, my dad ... burnt down a nearby cornfield, made his own nitroglycerin(?) which he'd climb on top of a ladder to drip tiny drops onto toy cars so they'd explode(*) and at one point generated so much chlorine gas in the basement, it bleached out all the laundry hanging to dry.

(* he probably could have blown up the house had the full container been spilled. Chemistry kits in the 50s were much more exciting than now!)