As a kid, I was even more stupid than I am now. I would often pretend to be brave and act without thinking leading to me getting hurt, embarrassed or in trouble. There is no better place to show this than my old daycare, Treehouse. I remember so many things from my 8 years there (pre k-6th grade) that I could write a million stories on stupid things I did there. Below is three of those stories so please, enjoy my stupidity.

Just A Couple More Band Aids

“Let’s go play kickball at the court”. Yes that is incredibly stupid (the court was made of rock), but we had been doing it for weeks and nobody had ever gotten hurt so we determined it was perfectly safe. Every time we had outside time we would go out and play kickball on the rectangle of rocks that the school called a basketball court, using the four hoops that surrounded it as bases. We heard the teachers’ cries of “One of you guys is going to seriously get hurt” but we weren’t old enough to understand you probably shouldn’t run full speed on loose gravel towards a pole with someone throwing a ball at you. Plus, I had never had any major injuries. I wasn’t worried at all when I stepped up to the “plate”. I was ready to kick an impressive home run of about 50 feet. I watched as the ball rolled up to me, kicking up pebbles along the way. I wound up and booted that thing almost to the other side of the court. I ran towards first...uh….pole like my life depended on it, which in my mind it did because my ego couldn’t take getting thrown out. What happened next almost seemed statistically impossible. As I was running, someone on their team threw the ball at me but missed low. As the ball rolled near me I stepped right on top of it and went flying. It would have been so fun if there was a mattress to land on. I tried to break my fall with my hand but when I landed I skid. I had to go like 7 feet, my body sliding across cement like it was a slip n slide. At first I felt fine and had a moment of yeah, I’m the toughest guy here. Then I looked at my hand and all the pain came flooding in. There was a giant hole of blood right where my palm and wrist were supposed to be. This wasn’t just a cut. Many layers of skin were somewhere on the court and all that remained of my hand was a mix of pink and red with rocks scattered deep into my flesh. I cried like I was trying to end a drought. My friends gave their very supportive remarks of, “Are you ok?” and “Dude you’re bleeding.” The teachers were a little more helpful as they brought me inside to fix me up. Once I got under control from crying out the equivalent of the Pacific Ocean, they brought me to the sink and proceeded to turn it on all the way and forcefully hold my hand under it.  I thought I had already gone through the worst pain of my life just five minutes ago and now I was feeling this. “Just stay still”.  I tried but I was confident this was about as close as you could get to someone shooting you so it wasn’t easy to “stay still”. The next step put into action by the highly qualified doctors was to, i’m not joking, fill up my hand with band aids. Yep, they were like, “OK let's just patch up this crater in his hand with these band aids I found in this drawer.” They just grabbed a whole bunch of them and stacked them on top of each other as if that would rebuild my hand.  I spent the rest of that day sitting away from everyone else, crying in pain and awaiting the horror I knew would come from my mom ripping all the bandages.

The Ghost

We were all gathered in the corner during electronic time when the idea of the ghost first appeared. One of the older kids had taken a video in the room and when we played it back we noticed two mysterious green dots floating in the background. Obviously they were ghost eyes, the oldest said, “Guys, these are definitely ghost eyes.” We all trusted him and his wisdom that came with his age. He spent a while telling us stories of the ghost that lived in our school and how green eyes were a dead giveaway. Videos and pictures that followed the first one only added onto the proof with weird movements in the back of the room and quiet noises. Our next step was to try and catch it. I was starting to get worried this was going to far. I mean, I believed in the ghost but definitely did not want to mess with it. “But where does it live?”, questioned someone in our group. “It can’t be in our room since there’s too many people, it has to be somewhere else.” After a long discussion we determined that there was really only one place that this ghost could’ve came from. The dark hallway. After school the lights in a long hallway that led to the computers would turn off, creating a pitch black path nobody dared to enter except for one time when the oldest one went down there to do something he never told us about. But with nobody wanting to be the one that chickened out, everyone (including me) immediately chimed in with “I’m not scared, let’s go capture it.” Now my heart was really racing. I didn’t want to get eaten by the green eyed ghost. Fortunately for me, we were able to keep finding excuses to postpone our trip. Weeks later we finally had our chance. Keeping a very slow pace, we tiptoed down the hallway with our heads on a swivel. Anticipation and fear causing me my footsteps to get shakier by the step. Suddenly I heard a blood curdling shriek and all the color in my face drained out. Everyone freaked out. “What’s going on, what did you see?” a chorus of voices rang. Then a shaky voice from someone in our group spoke up and whispered “Look in this room, there’s...words written on the board.” My curiosity getting the best of me, I pressed my face against the glass and had a look. Very clearly written on the board was, “I am here, yes I’m real”. Once our brains got the chance to process the words we all sprinted back to the main classroom, ditching our plan to catch the ghost. I collapsed down into the room to catch my breath, surprised that I was still alive. That was it. For the rest of my time in Treehouse, that was a story that remained in out memories and was sometimes discussed until it eventually disappeared from my memory. Then many years later when I was much older,  this story just popped into my head. I thought about how those words could’ve gotten onto the whiteboard and how as I grew up that older kid turned out to be a jerk. That’s I finally realized who the ghost was.

It Was an Accident

Me and the rest of the boys at Treehouse that day were all gathered at a corner of the school, refilling our water guns. “Come on, hurry up!” shouted a very impatient soldier. It was a hot summer day and we were in the middle of an even more heated water gun fight with the girls at the daycare. This wasn't just a game. Almost everyone had guns or water balloons that we used as bombs. Most of the girls were on top of the stairs of the big slide and we needed to take that as our own fort. This is why we were all filling up our guns at out crappy little corner base. We were about to ambush them. One of the boys counted us down. “Ok, you guys ready? 3...2...1… GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” At once we sprinted to the big playset, shrieking our battle cries at the top of our lungs. Before I made it to the stairs I was met by a girl pointing her gun directly at my face. Not being assertive enough to ask for a gun earlier, I was only armed with a bucket full of water. Since in this war, you didn’t die if you were hit, I decided it would be fine just to take some hits, dump water on them and then continue to run to the stairs where a few other boys were in some battles of their own. I was in the process of telling myself how brave I was in my head when I suddenly felt a sting of water in my eyes. Like all “wars” done at an elementary school daycare, there was rules. One of the first rules was no shooting in the eyes. I don’t know how fast the blink of a human eye is supposed to be, but I know it wasn’t fast enough. Waves of water flew into my eyes creating a burning sensation like someone had lit me on fire. “AHHHHH, STOP IT, STOP IT, YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!” I shouted with a mix of rage and fear. I knew this wasn’t an accident. The girl absolutely hated me. I hated her too. I didn’t really have a reason for it other than I don’t like whoever doesn’t like me but regardless, this was a rivalry. Maybe she was mad from that one time she accidently cracked her head open and I was too stunned to get help. She was purposely trying to hurt me for revenge. Adrenaline and rage built up inside me until I turned into a crazy person. I already act without thinking on the regular, now under the influence of pure hatred, there was no doubt I was going to do something stupid. I lifted my bucket (which was no empty after I dropped it from trying to shield my eyes) and poured all my rage into throwing it right at her face. She fell to the ground with a large gash on her face and I stood over her, now fire burning in my eyes from rage and not from the water. I looked at her blood with satisfaction and thought to myself…. “Ha, how do you like it you little.. Oh crap” What did I just do?. Before I could gather all my thoughts the teachers were already grabbing me and bringing me inside for punishment, which was really just a long lecture. In my head it was an accident. I was taken over by my version of Mr. Hyde and made a mistake. The only problem was the teachers didn’t seem to accept my, “It was an accident” excuse as I fidgeted in my chair and fidgeted with my hands.