I used to believe

When I was a little girl, I used to believe that my dolls had the power to come to life. This was not a good thing, because I also believed that if I didn't take care of them properly, or if I showed any favoritism between them, they might kill me and my family in revenge.

So I took very, very good care of all my dolls, treating each of them exactly equally. No baby had better care from its mother than my dolls had from me. Which of course made all the adults in my world convinced that I was just the perfect little mother and that I needed more dolls.

More dolls.

Some nights it was a little hard to sleep.

I was reminded of that little piece of my childhood after reading through some of the posts on i used to believe a wonderful site about all sorts of weird and funny childhood memories. Believe me, I am not the only child who was afraid of my toys. Which is a rather comforting thought.

Some wonderful samples:

• The kid who believed that a wake was held to "wake up" the dead person and didn't understand why everyone was so quiet at Grandpa's wake. Maybe Grandpa was a light sleeper?
• The kid who thought Shakespeare was a bathtub vampire who would come up through the drain and kill you if you closed your eyes while taking a bath.
• The kid who believed that the inside of the banana was poisonous, but the peel was the antidote, so you had to eat the whole thing to survive.
• The kid who, when he was told he could grow up to be anything he wanted to be, decided he wanted to grow up to be the color orange.

I also believed what a friend told me - that the purplish seeds that came from a grass-like plant that grew around our neighborhood were vampire eggs and that if I went into her family's barn the vampires would get me. I was terrified of overgrown grass all the rest of that summer.

I wonder what odd things my children are already believing?