If I Tell You, It Won't Be A Secret

Marie tagged me with this Five Secret Things meme. I'm supposed to tell five secrets that I have not yet told on my blog.

Mmm...that could get dicey. I've told quite a few of my safer secrets here already. The whole concept of secrets makes me squirm sometimes because all I can think of when the topic comes up are the dark and scary ones.

It is no secret that I grew up very strangely. Unfortunately, it is also all too common, so already I know that some of you know exactly what I'm talking about.

But I still wanted to play, so I did some brainstorming on the subject, and I came up with five secrets that my two older sisters and I kept from my parents when we were very young (ranging from about 5 to 11 years old).

1. We were never allowed to do anything boisterous when my dad was around or he would get REALLY mad. So every single time my parents went out and left us alone together in the house we did things we would normally not be allowed to do, like playing hide and seek in the dark, in the basement (terrifying). And the other one I loved more was that we would drag our portable record player into my parent's bedroom and play "Lady Madonna" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. While it played, we ran around and around on the top of my parents' bed, and when the song got to the line "See how they run" we would all fall down laughing on the bed. We did it over and over and over again. And made sure the bed looked perfect when we were done.

2. Once my parents left my mom's brother Dale in charge of us. I think he was about fourteen years old, but I'm not sure. Dale was rough. He used to bounce me up and down on his knees so hard that I would get a nose bleed. He was chasing us all over the house and somehow ended up knocking down our Christmas tree. I know we broke some stuff, but we managed to get it all looking okay again before they got home.

3. They also left us with a teen-age babysitter named Judy. She lived up the street from us. Judy was terrified of butter. Yeah, I know. Butter. We used to put butter on the ends of our fingers and chase her (screaming) all through the house. Finally she would lock herself in the bathroom for the rest of the evening, and we put ourselves to bed.

4. One night, when it was just the three of us, and we were supposed to wash the dishes, my sister overflowed the sink and got water all over the floor my mom had waxed that day. When we cleaned up the water, we saw that the wax had come off too, so we had to drag out this waxing machine and try to re-wax the spot on the floor that was dull. My sister was just a skinny thing, and that waxer drove her all over the floor before I could get it unplugged.

5. Another night when my parents were out, the three of us had had our piano lessons and were supposed to practice. Cathy and I practiced, but Lynn (the middle one) hated practicing and made us promise to say that she had done it when she didn't. I don't know what Cathy said, but I pretended to be fast asleep when my parents came in and asked if Lynn had practiced. Next thing, I heard Lynn getting a spanking for lying about practicing. She had left her piano books at the bottom of the stairs, not up in my room where the piano was. A dead giveaway.