Que sera, sera.

At least he isn’t eating earth. When she was a baby, my sister used to do that despite the best efforts of my mother, brother and me to stop here. The motive for my brother and me was fear of worming powder which at the time was available either as a revolting syrup or blood-red “hundreds and thousands”. A couple of times my mother tried making iced fairy cakes and covering them in the worm treatment, but my brother and I soon wised up to that scam.

There was something about geophagia in New Scientist this week.

Try this one on: when I was little (as in maybe two or three), we had a refrigerator magnet made out of rubber that was in the shape of an ice cream cone. Seeing what–to my stupid little kid’s eyes–was a delicious ice cream cone just sitting there on the side of the fridge, I pulled up a stool, climbed atop it, removed the “ice cream” from the fridge, and took a nice big bite. Needless to say, the taste wasn’t exactly appetizing, so I spit out the “ice cream” and put the magnet back on the fridge, hoping no one would notice the huge bite mark in the rubber (which even my sister remembers seeing).

I drank Lemon Joy when I was 2-3 (back when it still had the big cartoon lemon on it.)

I’m just lucky my parents kept me away from the pink cotton-candy-esque insulation.

I ate White Out as a child, and now I work for the Department Of Corrections.

When I was 15, I volunteered at a day camp and found the youngest kid sitting by his lonesome eating paste with a tongue depressor. I asked him if he liked it and he said it was good. I got myself a quart and gave it a try. He was right. It was good, tasted like mash potatoes. I had a lunch of paste that day.

And painful bowels four hours later.

Doesn’t eating white-out make you one of them brown Reconquista folks who want to kick ‘murricans out of our Manifest Destinied Anglo-Saxon homeland?

Channeling Garcia Marquez, are we, blowback?

More Bwaahahaha: Armando of Daily Kos outed.

My sister is said to have been discovered one day (as a child, of course) sitting on the floor near the kitchen cabinet and just about down glug down some Jubilee floor wax. Legend has it that she thought it was Cherries Jubilee. Gosh, I never thought of it before, but that presaged the famous SNL commercial, “It’s a dessert topping!” “No, it’s a floor wax!”

Oh, God…Canadian-Germans.. twice the nice, half the requisite guilt, three times La blonde

…und ich sage das aus Erkenntnis der Sache, ‘sti

My parents once bought wine cooler (top quality stuff, by the way) in two-litre bottles. Looked just like grapefruit soda to my little eyes, and was so inexplicably delicious that I was able to drink probably three big glasses right in a row without getting that Coke sugar-coated mouth fuzziness. Then my mom came in and spazed out and I was sent to bed with an aspirin. They switched to wine in boxes after that, which my youngest sister mixed with Sprite.

My older son didn’t get into stuff. My younger son gets into everything; he ate a bit of Icy-Hot muscle rub. Maybe that’s why he now likes to dip his chips in hot salsa, even though he’s only two-years-old.

Back in the seventies I ate 3 pair of Farah Fawcett Jeans before someone told me she hadn’t actually wore them.

I am famous in my family for, at the age of two, having been discovered in the garage, hands in the dog’s dish, smiling up at my father and proclaiming that the Gravy Train was “Good, daddy!”

mmmmm, Xylene.

(o.t. do you REALLY live in germany?)

When I was a wee lad, I thought a bar of Irish Spring smelled so yummy that I took a hearty, confident bite. That was the day I learned that things that smell good don’t necessarily taste good.

I once ate the stucco coating on the basement walls. And some sand. I think I’m OK, at least by Canadian standards, eh?

Imagine finding you baby cousin playing in the cat litter box. I was about 14 and freaked. His mother was not to pleased either.

I used to looooove Puppy Chow…

J/K. Actually, I almost killed my mom when I was four because I thought you could clean the bathroom floor by spraying soap all over it and then covering that up with talcum powder. Ooh, mommy, careful, don’t slip — the floor is cleeeean.

Oh, and btw RE: the Armando thing: That is severely fucked up.

I once chewed through on of those old-school glass thermometers with the mercury inside.

That was a fun night in the emergency room.

I used to eat rocks from the playground gravel for money or on dares.

My little pea brain actually was convinced that because birds and animals did it, it would also be good for my digestion.

Oh and re: Armando, the NRO proved themselves to be the petty assholes I always figured them to be.

The best approach would be to patiently explain to the child that Liquid Paper is for sniffing, not for eating.

I had a friend — still is my friend — who’d eat earthworms and bite the heads off bees for a dollar on the playground. Once we got him to eat a whole raw crayfish, but this was when we were older lol.

I dont ever remember eating stuff I shouldnt have. But I did have an orange cat that I wanted to be black. So (this was on a farm) I dropped him into a barrel of oil. Poor cat almost died and would have if my grandmother hadn’t fretted over him for days. Of course I was sick with grief about it once I realized the awfulness of what I’d done so.. I guess the moral of the story is to teach little Seb what is appropriate dye and what is not.

Later I grew up to captain the Exxon Valdez..

I don’t remember this (18 months old), but my mother told me that when we moved into a rather primitive cabin on Martha’s Vineyard so my father could participate in (then) secret testing of radar beacons, I found interesting snacks that hadn’t been available back home. A lot of flies had died in that cabin, and I sought them out with dedication. Mmmm. Flies.

I remember that my youngest sister later found something on the floor at my grandmother’s house that looked like a tiny M&M. She ate it. It was an asafoetida pill. I don’t remember any further incidents where she experimented with eating non-food items. You could try adding a pinch of asafoetida to a bottle of Liquid Paper to discourage your son from ingesting it.

retro-shiite

Are you referring to the “man in Aracataca who had the facility for deworming cows – for healing their infections – by standing in front of the beasts”. If you are, that sounds far better than Pripsen.

when i was two, my favorite snack was dry cat food. my parents tried to keep me away from it, of course, but sometimes i was too sneaky for them, and i would come inside the house and proudly announce, “mommy! lat-lo!”

my dad tried to get me to stop by telling me that cat food was made out of horses, but that just made me sad. and hungry for more cat food.

According to my mother, my younger brother once ate a lightbulb, or at least the glass part of one. I don’t think she even took him to a doctor for it.

Actually, the prettiest baby evar! Is my new grandcat Cocoa-Puff. I bet Seb’s kid can’t run across the room and leap up and climb his leg like Cocoa can.

Chocolate milk, yum!
Peanut Butter, yum!
Italian Dressing, yum!

All together in a glass, ick.

When I was about 5, I accidentally brushed my teeth with Brylcreem (it was the same color as Colgate).

May your spawn continue to be effective in his quest to immunize himself against all the chemical agents in your household!
I was always too paranoid to eat weird stuff– my mother would pull the “By Jesus you’ll regret [it] if you do [it] again!” card and my dad would smack me upside the head for stupidity; quite effective in retrospect, I must say.

(o.t. do you REALLY live in germany?)

Ja, wirklich. 😉

At about age 3, I ate an entire bottle of One-a-Day multiple vitamins, under the misapprehension that it was a bottle of red M & Ms. The ER doctor told my mum to buy another bottle, take it, and buy roller skates to keep up with me. I don’t know that this advice was medically sound, but my mother and I are both still alive…

Also, my brothers and I differ to this day as to which is the better-tasting brand of dog biscuit. They swore by the ones that came with several flavors in one box, but I knew that regular Milk Bones were really the best. The Giant Poodle (the actual dog said biscuits were bought for) had no preference in taste tests.

A fellow after-school program director had a child in her program who drank an ice pack “because he was thirsty.”
The kicker? Poison control KNEW THE KID’S NAME!