2022, Family, Games, home, Kids, Media, sports, TV, Uncategorized

You Didn’t Want THAT To Happen!

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Often times in my play therapy room, a toy is inadvertently broken. The child almost always feels horrible, and my stock response is “You didn’t want THAT to happen”, and there is no scolding and we move on.

Saturday, our three year old grandson and a female friend the same age were pretend sword fighting in the family room of our son’s house. Our grandson likes to pretend he is Darth Vader. (He has never seen a Star Wars movie, but knows about Vader.) His friend inadvertently wacked the large screen TV with the wooden block she was using as a sword, and the whole screen shattered. That girl packs a good punch. I am glad she wacked the TV and not our grandson. Our grandson announced at Christmas that he was going to marry her.

Son and DIL were having friends over for a Super Bowl party yesterday so a new TV was hurriedly purchased. I think that any future sword fighting will take place outside. We don’t want THAT to happen again.

What do you remember breaking as a child? Did you ever have any serious accidents? Have you ever participated in fencing or the martial arts?

62 thoughts on “You Didn’t Want THAT To Happen!”

  1. I cried every time I broke a dish or glass, It was a trauma every time, so there isn’t one that stands out.

    No martial arts or fencing in small town Iowa when I was growing up, just the endless humiliation of being bad at “ballsports” which were ubiquitous

    Kind of wild the s&h ended up being a serious athlete (fencing and running). Not a ballsport enthusiast either though.

    Side note: for the Wordle/Nerdle amongst us, I was just introduced to Worldle. Also fun and works yet another piece of brain.

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    3. Did anyone solve the Google doodle today? I haven’t had much time to look at it, since I was working today, but apparently there’s a little puzzle to reunite the hamster sweethearts.

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  2. Someone gave me an angel figurine for Christmas one year. I was pretty young. It was a porcelain angel on a music box that turned and played a Beethoven tune when wound. I was so proud of it. I took it to school for show and tell after Christmas break. I set it on the floor next to my desk and you can guess what happened next. I was inconsolable.

    My brothers and I used to play tag or hide and seek after dark when growing up at the lake. We played a bit rough sometimes and the game would dissolve into a wrestling match which included the family dog. One time we were chasing each other around the yard and my brother Eric ran headlong into a tree, breaking the tree right off and shattering his glasses. He wasn’t hurt but neither the tree nor his glasses survived. My other brother, the goofy one, made up a song about it which did survive.

    There have been lots of accidents, some with injuries, but I’m grateful to say that I have survived so far with only the scars and no permanent damage. Fencing would not be a wise choice for me.

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      1. Yes. The tragedy occurred on Friday the 13th, so the song goes, “Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th, Friday the thi-irteenth! Oo Ooh!” There was more about broken glasses but I don’t remember any of it except the refrain.

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  3. Speaking of accidents, I just read Ben’s account from Saturday. Ben, I hope you heal right up and that the PT goes well! A friend of mine had rotator cuff surgery several years ago due to accumulated on-the-job injuries–he had been an advocate for the homeless and used to do things like climb fences to bring blankets and socks to guys who were camping by the railroad tracks (before that he’d been an orderly in a locked ward, and got thrown into walls a few times by patients. He’s not a very big guy). The surgery definitely helped, and I’m sure you’ll do even better. Good luck!

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  4. We still had some 78 records when I was 4 or 5, and one got left out on the couch, which I accidentally sat on and broke it in half. I loved these old records, and wish I could remember which – I guess since I don’t recall, it wasn’t a huge deal.

    At a friend’s birthday party, they passed around the gifts as they were opened. One was a china ballerina figurine, and the net part of the tutu was so delicate I thought it was made of some kind of unbreakable mesh, which I pinched to see, and it broke off in my fingers. Sigh.

    The only serious accident was the broken arm in 5th grade when some kid ran into me on the playground. I do t’ai chi, which is the slow form of an ancient martial art – sometimes the teacher demonstrates the fast version of what we’re doing, and often demonstrates how we’re supposed to be attempting a block or a kick.

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    1. If you ever did remember which song it was, Vintage Music Company on 38th St. in Minneapolis sells old 78s. It’s pretty close to where I live, I could even check to see if they had it!

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      1. I’ve been there. I used to have a collection of 78s, mostly WWI and 20s vintage and I have a fondness for recordings from that era. But now individual records are pricy enough that putting together a collection like the one I once had would be an expensive undertaking.

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  5. Rise and Shine,

    I am very, very clumsy, a lifelong condition, so I break lots of stuff or miss a detail somewhere and make a mess. It is SO frustrating. Some of this is also just lack of communication on the part of family, as in, “You should have known!” How would I know if no one told me. This did cause a serious accident when I was 6 or 7 years old. I was expected to be best buddies with a cousin about my age, so I stayed over night there and participated in a game of softball, her older brothers’ beloved sport. I had to go to the bathroom so I peeled off the game and ran for the outhouse. Between me and the potty there was a small piece of equipment on the ground that I could not see in the dusk, because I was quite nearsighted, but no one had noticed this. I ran into it with a spike going into my right leg. It really hurt and bled a lot. Sometime when I was in the third grade Mom told me to read a bill board. I told her that I did not know there were words on signs, only pictures. She took me to the eye doctor where I was prescribed eyeglasses which revealed a world I did not know was there. This included Burma Shave signs along Highway 75 between LeMars and Pipestone which I read aloud with delight.

    Weirdly, with my right hip falling apart, I am getting a lot of referred pain right in the place where the spike hit my leg. It is such a strange sensation.

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    1. I can relate to all of what you wrote here, Jacque. The clumsiness, the nearsightedness, the teacher discovering my inability to see the chalkboard, the new world once you get the eyeglasses. I also fell (was pushed) on the end of a dock that had a metal edge. I felt the edge of the metal hit me just below the right knee as I fell into the lake. I pulled myself out and got back on the dock with the other kids, rubbing the place that the metal edge hit – until my fingers went into the deep wound that was there. Suddenly everybody was screaming and there was a LOT of blood. I got really frightened and ran all the way home which was the wrong thing to do because it caused the blood to pump faster. When I got home I watched my Mom turn green and call Dad before she sat down. Dad put pressure on my leg and took me to the ER. My Mom was sick the whole time. I was cut down to the bone about two inches below my knee. The wound was about an inch deep and three inches long. It gaped so that the bone was visible. It had to be stitched in layers and I was given lots of local anesthetic and something to make me sleepy. I think there were around 60 stitches when it was all done and it took the remainder of the summer to heal. And I couldn’t swim for the rest of the summer. I still have nerve damage there and it feels really weird when it is touched.

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  6. Good morning! I don’t Think I remember breaking any one specific thing. I’ve broken a lot of things over the years, Sometimes while trying to fix something. And I’m at the point where, If it’s important, I don’t want someone else to do it, if there’s a chance I’m gonna break it, I want to be my fault.

    I always thought fencing looked cool too,But never had a chance to do it.

    The worst car accident I had was In December 2019 When a guy T-boned me. But even that was pretty fortunate as I wasn’t hurt, and the car, being only two years old had about 20,000 miles on it, and it Was leaking oil and the dealer would not stand behind it. Insurance totaled it out and I got a better car.

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    1. Oh, I remember being at a friends house and their 3 or 4 yr old daughter had one of those bathtub toys; It was a wind up frog you’d put in the tub and it would swim around. But there was something broken already and the feet would spin 100 MPH and while it made a big splash, it didn’t swim anymore. And she handled it to me and I don’t remember details but I know I broke it good. And the look on her face was just heartbreaking. She was on the verge of tears and mom and dad weren’t mad at me, it was already broken, but still; I didn’t help matters.

      And once at my Aunt Judy’s, it was some holiday and she was serving dinner and the bottom of the plate said “unbreakable” so I dropped it on the floor. And it broke. I never thought Judy liked me after that, but we got to be pretty good friends as I was older.

      I remember being in 4H and over at a neighbors house playing croquet and I got mad and smacked the mallet on the ground and broke the handle. The dad was “disappointed” in me. That hurt. I still see them around; they still live in the same house. I should ask if he remembers that.

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      1. I think manufacturers are less likely now to put a label on something that says it’s unbreakable, because SOMEBODY is going to test it. Melamine is now called “break resistant”. And watches are usually called “water resistant” rather than waterproof.

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  7. I think the angriest my dad ever got at me was when I was about 6 and I left my bicycle on the driveway right behind his car. He drove over it, of course, since it was lying flat in the ground and he didn’t see it. He thought at first he had run me over, too, which explained his anger.

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  8. While I’m sure I broke lots of stuff as a child, two early memories stand out because of the consequences.

    The first incident happened right before Christmas when I was five years old. Mom had put up our fresh Christmas tree, and wanted me to help her decorate it. During the process of hanging the colored glass balls on the tree, I accidentally pressed too hard and a finger went through the fragile ornament and left a gaping hole in it. I remember being afraid that mom would see it, because I knew she’d be upset with me, so I just hung it on the tree as inconspicuously as I could. Of course, when mom put the candles on the tree, she spotted the broken ornament, and got a spanking. I remember this because she claimed that she was beating me, not because I had broken the ornament, but because I hadn’t told her about it. It showed I was sneaky, she said.

    A few months later I was taking a shower in our newly renovated bathroom. In addition to the regular shower, we had what my sister and I referred to as a telephone shower, a hand-held shower head on a flexible metal hose. I remember trying to bend the hose more than it apparently was capable of, and the metal covering fell apart. I reported the accident to mom with a great deal of trepidation because I knew she’d be upset, and sure enough, I got another beating. This time for being too rough on things.

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      1. There was an author, I think it was Alice Miller, who gave some advice to people who have been treated less than fairly in childhood. She said the proper way to approach the injustice was not with blame, but with mourning. From what I know of you, PJ, this is a good summary of your approach to life.

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      2. That is exactly right, Linda. If I admitted to having done something, I’d get a beating for having done it, and if I denied it, the beating would be for lying about it. I was well into adulthood before I understood that the beatings had little to do with my behavior and everything to do with how angry or frustrated my mother was at the moment, for whatever reason.

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  9. When I was about two years old, I was swinging my legs at the breakfast table and caught my foot in the cord to the coffee pot. Coffee pot spilled onto my leg and because I was wearing those footy pajamas, I lost some skin and ended up in the hospital. I do have a slight scar on my ankle. Needless to say at the age of two I have no memory of this at all. When I was in my 20s, the story was getting told to someone and my mom, in a small voice at the end said “and the coffee pot broke too.” She said it as if she was afraid I would feel responsible for a broken coffee pot. It got to be kind of a family joke for a few years; at the end of some story, one or the other of us would say “and the coffee pot broke too.” Nothing else I’ve ever broken over the years has stuck in my memory like that.

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  10. I have always been physically well coordinated and consequently enjoyed all kinds of physical activity from childhood on. I loved PE and sports of all kinds, and was reasonably good at it. It was all pretty pedestrian stuff, though, nothing exotic that required expensive and specialized equipment. Skis and skates were hand-me-downs and strapped onto boots that weren’t designed or suited for the purpose. But everybody was pretty much in the same boat, so we just had fun.

    In high school I got into swimming and diving. I quit diving after an injury from hitting my head on a three meter springboard while I was in Basel. The injury wasn’t that serious, but scalp wounds bleed a lot, and it scared me. I quit before I got really hurt. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good idea to be practicing dives without a coach around to spot mistakes I was making, but at eighteen I felt pretty invincible.

    I had never played tennis until wasband taught me at age 22. Prior to that, I though of tennis as a rich person’s sport. No one I knew played it.

    By the time I got to college, at 26, I saw the PE requirements, that so many detested, as an opportunity to try things I had never done before. I took fencing, archery and tennis, and joined the respective teams so I could spend more time practicing. It was great fun, I enjoyed it, and was quite competitive. In retrospect, I should have probably pursued PE as a career choice, but at the time I bought into the prevailing notion among my English major friends that “jocks” were stupid; “academics was where it was at.” I sometimes wonder what my life would have looked like had I followed that path instead of the one I did.

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        2. I don’t have an answer for what the justification might have been, Bill, but I know it was a requirement at S.I.U. at the time (1968-72). Students were also required to attend a certain number of freshman convocations, some of which were pretty interesting. I recall one of them being a speech given by Ralph Nader.

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        4. That begs the question: Who decides what has intrinsic value? I wouldn’t want to be on the team that argues against physical education having some.

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        6. At the rate we’re going at the moment, pretty soon basic education in the US will be based on prevailing public opinion. Science and historical facts be damned.

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        6. Because that was a priority for the government at the time, and they offered colleges money for requiring physical education classes.

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  11. I experienced PE with disdain. The PE teachers and I disliked each other, the teachers being invariably unreflective bullies and the activities interesting me not at all. I was strong enough, able to climb a rope to the ceiling of the gym using only my hands, and I often walked for miles, but I had little interest in competitive sports, then or now. I would have happily traded PE for a study hall.

    My daughters, on the other hand, were both sporty. One swam both in high school and in college and the other, besides being a competitive Highland dancer, was a gymnast through high school. I put in my hours sitting on bleachers, supporting them personally.

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  12. I must have broken some dishes along the way, but I don’t remember that. I remember having a little tiny dog figurine, a boxer I think, and I managed to break one of his back legs. My mother glued it. No big tragedy, but you could always see where the break was. I also remember having a doll that came with makeup. The makeup was removeable, at least on that doll. But I put some eyeliner on a different doll, a Penny Brite, and it didn’t come off. It was not applied neatly, either. Felt bad about that.

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    1. That reminds me that when I was very young, there was a television show on Saturday mornings, when my parents were still asleep. It was called Winky Dink and the viewers were supposed to apply this plastic film over the television screen and then they were encouraged to draw with crayons, or crayon-like markers on the screen to assist the Winky Dink character when he got in a tight spot. The things we were asked to draw would be, for example, a ladder.

      I didn’t always remember to apply the film and drew directly on the TV screen.

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  13. I had an interesting experience with today’s Nerdle. In my first guess I had the equation mark in the right place and the answer to the problem correct. There was also one correct number, in the wrong place, to the left of the equation mark. So all I needed to figure out was the remaining numbers and what mathematical function to use to get to the answer. It was oddly satisfying to have guessed the answer to a problem I had yet to figure out.
    nerdlegame 26 3/6

    ⬛⬛🟪⬛⬛🟩🟩🟩
    🟪🟪🟪⬛⬛🟩🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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    2. I got lucky with the correct operation in the right place and the equals sign in the right place, plus the last number of the answer. As I’ve said before, knowing where the equal sign belongs can tell you a lot.
      Nerdle: three
      Wordle: three

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  14. I broke everything in sight as a child my grandmother asked my mom to stop bringing me over because her house was full of trinkets and doodads which I was fascinated by and broke regularly upon my visits which were not all that frequent
    When we were kids like infants my mom purchased sterling silver baby cups with our initials on them my brother and sisters were perfect and my mom had to have mine pounded out because the bottom was so dented in from using it as a hammer and a pounding tool but it kind of inferred what the brain inside the owner was up to
    My mom had a coffee table and matching end tables that had glass top surfaces to keep the wood from being scratched because it was a soft mahogany that lasted almost until I was two and had broken all three of the glass tops

    my brother the quiet introspective one was the sword fighter not me a but I do remember when my youngest daughter was born I left the hospital after she was born to take my son to his fencing lessons we only did that a couple times but I had two kids in martial arts and one of them went on to advanced belts and the other one hung in there with us until we let her drop out

    Did I ever have any serious accidents?… Yes by the time I was in second grade I had about 100 stitches and they were all in my head
    I was proud that I never broken any bones in that stayed true until I was about 50 then I broke my foot collarbone and started snapping ribs

    I played hard and on a scale of 1 to 10 always pushed it to an 11 I’m still guilty of that but I got a doctor to give me a hand to stop breaking bones with a couple infusions a year and daily calcium

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