Things I'm sorry for!

I'm still surprised my little sister speaks to me, but it could be worse. At least I didn't completely make her doubt her every word like my step-brothers apparently did to my step-sister.

"I'll trade you this great big nickel for that little bitty dime."

One day we were playing Scrabble and my sister spelled the word FECES. Everyone started laughing!

"What?! It's a word!"

Oh yes, it's a word. Once we stopped laughing, we told her we were laughing because of what it meant.

"Oh, I thought it meant the bottom of your foot!"

Apparently her brothers had taught her many interesting definitions. Can you imagine not knowing which words you learned from your big brothers?!

Almost makes what I did pale in comparison. Right?!

Things like playing hide and seek with my little sister and not looking for her.

Chasing her with butcher knives (which she was afraid of because she assumed all the surgeries she'd had as a young child were done with butcher knives. After all that's how they portray them in cartoons!

My little sister would do anything for money. My step-sister and I would pay her a quarter to eat things - like a chip covered with everything we could find on the table at the restaurant (salt, sugar, pepper, hot sauce, mustard...) or to shove an entire piece of birthday cake in her mouth (actually I think that was our cousins' idea).

Most of the stuff I did as a kid was not malicious though. Like the time when we were moving yet again (we lived in 9 different states and countries before I was 5 years old), I removed all the little pink stickers off the crates of our stuff and used them to decorate my tricycle. I was only 3 and had no idea that every single crate would have to be unpacked and relabeled. (This is not a picture of my sister and I, but they look like a lot like we did!)

Or the time I got my Mommy and her friend she'd taken to the bank to open her first bank account, kicked out of the bank forever as suspected bank robbers.

I was only a year old and had discovered that the marble floors were slippery. I ran and slid on my tummy... right under the bars and into the safety deposit vault. Armed guards had to open the vault and escort me out of the vault. I was happy as a clam, playing with the knobs on the boxes.

They returned me to my mommy. She held me until I started fussing so much the people in line around her insisted she let me down.

You guessed it... right back under the bars. My mom was accused of training me to do this to get the bank to let their guard down (no pun intended), and use that as an opportunity to rob the bank. My mom tried to explain that a head small enough to go under the bars was too small to be trained, but they still escorted us and her friend out of the bank under armed guard told to never return.

Mom still threatens to write a book about my childhood.